Everybody loves “Raymonda”
At least the superb dancing and the glorious score. The story, not so much. But who cares?
Sasha De Sola and Joseph Caley in Tamara Rojo's Raymonda // © Lindsay Thomas
World-class dancing, one of the great ballet scores, and a seriously flawed story. That’s what you get at the San Francisco Ballet’s reimagining of legendary choreographer Marius Petipa and composer Alexander Glazunov’s rarely-performed 1898 classic Raymonda. Fortunately, the dancing and music are so sublime that they far transcend the narrative’s shortcomings.
The original Raymonda features one of those ridiculous, two-dimensional stories that abound in ballet and opera, mediums that can survive lame librettos. (The 1898 libretto was written by Countess Lidiya Pashkova, described by Wikipedia as an “author and columnist.” Beware of librettos written by columnists!) The eponymous heroine is a young French countess who is engaged to a dashing Crusader knight, Jean de Brienne. As she and her friends are merrily celebrating her name day, the countess’s aunt chides them for their frivolity and warns them that the legendary guardian spirit of the castle, a mysterious White Lady, will be angry with them. They laugh this off, and Raymonda is overjoyed to learn that her fiance will be arriving the next day. Suddenly an uninvited Saracen knight, the formulaically dark, brooding and sexy Abderakhman, arrives with his entourage and asks to take shelter at the castle for the night. This Orientalist wet dream immediately falls in love with Raymonda. After everyone parties until the wee hours, Raymonda falls asleep and dreams that the White Lady is summoning her. In her vision, she follows the White Lady into a misty garden, where her betrothed appears amid celestial splendors. But he suddenly disappears, replaced by the hot and horny Abderakhman, who tries to force himself on Raymonda. She faints, the White Lady disappears and the Act One curtain falls.
Act Two opens at a feast to celebrate de Brienne’s arrival. Raymonda is uneasy that her fiance has not yet come. Then the dark vision revealed by the White Lady comes true. Abderakhman insistently tries to seduce her. After she repeatedly rejects his advances, he decides the only way to achieve his heart’s desire is to go full Bill Cosby on her. He has his cup bearers pour a roofie-like drug into everyone’s glass. When the guests are nodding off, the sinister sexpot from the exotic East attempts to physically abduct her. Fortunately, at this very moment the good guys, in the form of Jean de Brienne and his patron, the King of Hungary, arrive. De Brienne rescues Raymonda from Abderakhman. The King of Hungary orders the two adversaries to fight a duel. During the battle the White Lady appears on the castle tower. This apparition dazes the evil Abderakhman and de Brienne runs him through with his sword. They get married, everyone lives happily ever after and Edward Said adds an epilogue to his book.
This is pretty thin gruel. But at least it’s clear and emotionally consistent. Raymonda loves de Brienne. The apparition of the Muslim Mandingo activates a boatload of Freudian repressed lust and other psychic hoo-hah that comes out in the dream scenes, but she fights it off, does the right thing, upholds her womanly virtue and stops the barbarians at the gates of Vienna (or in this case Provence).
The San Francisco Ballet’s artistic director, Tamara Rojo, decided to pretty much tear this entire libretto up, with the intention of making it less retrograde both in its portrayal of Raymonda and of the walking Orientalist cliché Abderakhman. She said she wanted her version to be “more conscious of the culture in which we live today.” She succeeded, but at a high price.
In Rojo’s reworked Raymonda, a version of which was first performed in 2022 at the English National Ballet, the setting has changed from the Crusades to the Crimean War in 1854, and Raymonda is now British. When her longtime friend John de Bryan enlists and leaves for the front, she decides to serve her country as a nurse and embarks on the journey to Crimea. After she arrives, de Bryan asks her to marry him, and out of compassion and a sense of duty, she reluctantly agrees. Suddenly armies allied with the British, including those of the Ottoman Empire, France, and Sardinia) arrive; among them is an Ottoman prince and friend of de Bryan’s, Abdur Rahman. Rahman is immediately entranced with Raymonda, and the feeling is clearly mutual. In a dream scene, she dances with both men. The next day, she attends a party at Abdur Rahman’s tent, where the attraction between them becomes apparent. When John returns from battle, she is clearly torn. The third and final act takes place on Raymonda and John’s wedding day. Raymonda is not quite as incandescent with joy as she should be, and the presence of Abdur Rahman (a much better behaved and docile version than the smoldering, date-rapey Saracen in the original) does not help. In the ballet’s climactic moment, when the guests are toasting the newlyweds, Raymonda takes a lamp and exits the stage, heading for the front to work as a nurse.
The problem with this revised story is that it removes all of Raymonda’s emotional passion and drive. In this version, love not only doesn’t conquer all, it barely exists—or at least it takes a decided back seat to Raymonda’s modern, admirable, feminist decision to become another Florence Nightingale. What exactly does or did Raymonda think of John? Did she only marry him because she felt sorry for him? And the same question applies to Abdur Rahman. Was he just a hot fantasy object? Or if she really loved him, why didn’t she break up with Mr. Nice Guy John and follow her heart? All we know is that she blew them both off. Of course her decision to go work as a nurse is ethically unimpeachable, but it isn’t as if she was forced by some dramatic exigency to make that decision: she just walks out, leaving the competing lovers and the audience to say “Wha’ happen?” All we’re left with is the didactic moral lesson that it’s good to take the high road. This version is like a passionless modern reversal of the old, nothing-but-passion story. Frankly, I’ll take the dumb passion. And I’d rather see the retrograde sexpot Saracen, too. Are contemporary audiences really going to wig out because an 1898 Russian ballet presents a Muslim warrior prince as an amoral heat-seeking missile?
Fortunately, none of this matters much. As mentioned, ballets (and operas) can survive much worse stories than these. Ballet, after all, is first of all about dance, second about music, and last about story. And the dancing in Raymonda is simply exquisite.
Misa Kuranaga’s performance in the title role on Thursday night was a triumph. The diminutive Kuranaga has a flawless line: her every movement exudes elegance, and she has complete mastery of every demanding move that Petipa and Rojo’s choreography called for. She is poetry in stillness and poetry in motion. Her two suitors were also first-rate, and their roles were nicely differentiated. Harrison James as John de Bryan brought a classical fluidity and a kind of graceful weightiness to his movements; the way he hung in the air during his leaps was particularly impressive. Cavan Conley’s Abdur Rahman was more athletic, angular and aggressive but equally compelling. The pair’s pas de deux with Kuranaga were gorgeous. The supporting dancers, in particular Seojung Yun as Raymonda’s high-spirited friend Henrietta, were also uniformly excellent, as was the corps de ballet. Wondrous, technically amazing set pieces abounded, like one in which four male dancers executed simultaneous double spins. The numerous folkloric dances, many of them Hungarian, were executed with zest and precision. Bravo to Rojo for bringing back this wondrous and little-known ballet, and to the San Francisco Ballet for delivering such a magnificent performance of it.
As for Glazunov’s score, it is so ravishing it has made me totally recant my lifelong use of him as a punching bag. As a kid I used to listen to the local classical radio KKHI, and whenever Glazunov came on, which seemed to be at least once an hour, I would groan and change the station. It was the 19th century version of movie music, corny and syrupy, the aural equivalent of overstuffed, doily-covered Victorian furniture, embodying everything that I liked least about classical music. After hearing this incredibly rich and sonorous score—Tchaikovsky called it the greatest music ever written for ballet—I am heading straight to Spotify to listen to Glazunov until my eyes glaze over.
The San Francisco Ballet’s Raymonda plays at the War Memorial Opera House Friday March 7 at 8 pm, and Saturday March 8 at 2 pm and 8 pm.