Vaslav Nijinsky

Um, and it might be that the unknown, it becomes a starting point of a new movement that is yet to see.

You know, when Nijinsky did...

Nijinsky, you know-

Yeah

... late, late, uh, 19th century.

Yeah, I love Nijinsky.

Nijinsky, when he did faun, faun, L'après-midi d'un faune-

Mm

Can you imagine what the ballet dancers were doing on stage? Yeah.

Can you imagine the choreography of Nijinsky when he choreographed it? Dancers are dancing around.

So it would be great to watch.

It was originally ballet music.

But Brian Ferry was a huge Cole Porter fan.

And what he did there, he juxtaposed kind of cultural icons from the 30s and 40s, like Nijinsky and Mona Lisa and Lolita, and dances like the Fandango in the beginning.

And it would be more comparable to like a song by Cole Porter, like...

Well, Did You Ever or Anything Gold, which kind of lists songs.

Hofmannsthal wanted him to occupy his imagination and to let the vision of one of the grandest episodes of antique tragedy, namely the subject of Orestes and the Furies, inspire you to write a symphonic poem which might be a synthesis of your symphonies and your two tragic operas.

And the poet adjured him to think of Orestes as represented by Nijinsky, the greatest mimic genius on the stage today.

But apparently Strauss had had his fill of the Elektra tragedy at this stage and had no stomach for more of this sort of thing, whether symphonic or operatic.

So he remained unmoved by Hofmannsthal's urgings, yet the Russian ballet gave him a new idea.