Krafft-Ebing Follies

While the audience in Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House waited & waited for the curtain to rise, they whiled away the time by reading in their programs an apologia--by Surrealist Salvador Dali himself--for the surrealist ballet they were about to see:

"Perhaps, and without perhaps, every passing day makes me feel myself, so to say, and this is the moment to state, nailed to my own geology. . . . My brain and my eyes have always been attracted by mountains. And of all mountains, it was Wagner who produced the greatest effect upon me. . . . If Wagner is the most difficult mountain to be observed distinctly, not only due to the lyric vapour in which he so often drowns, but also because of his non prehensible morphology, the contours of the Venusberg, one of the last mountains ascended by Wagner, . . . are much more difficult to delimit. . . . You will see Louis II, Venus, Leda, the Swan, Sacher Masoch and his wife, Lola Montez. You will see the Three Graces, with so many graces attached to their anatomies that it is incredible."

The audience was quite willing to believe it. When at long last the curtain rose on Dali's brand-new setting for the Venusberg Bacchanale scene from Wagner's Tannhaeuser they saw what they had come for. At the back of the stage, before a punctured mountain on a windswept plain, an ossified swan spread 15-ft. wings. In and out of its ruptured, bony breast the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo's ballerinas climbed like the maggoty stuffing of a decayed Thanksgiving turkey. In the orchestra pit the staid Metropolitan Opera orchestra surged and noodled conventionally through Wagner's foaming music. But the cavorting it accompanied would have turned a Wagnerian's hair white in a single act. No Tannhaeuser was its central protagonist, but mad King Ludwig of Bavaria (Wagner's patron), who reared and reeled in the costume of Lohengrin. Before him, like something sired by George White out of Krafft-Ebing, pranced a bleached Venus (Nini Theilade), a hoop-pantalooned Lola Montez (Ludwig's grandfather's mistress) with a belt of false teeth, Mr. and Mrs. Sacher Masoch in riding breeches, and enough assorted subconscious erotica to strain the limbo of an experienced psychopath. Meanwhile, at one side of the stage, a moribund, vine-sprouting faun in red tights concentrated on knitting a sock with three-foot knitting needles.

The second round found King Ludwig still on his feet, shaking a sword while badgered by a corpse-faced woman with huge plaster breasts. Then they began to bring in the crutches. But not for Ludwig. While other mimes and ballerinas were hung and propped, while even the desiccated swan on the backdrop drooped under the caresses of a clambering nymph in white winter underwear, Ludwig stood it out. But as the music trailed off into the Pilgrim's Chorus, Ludwig sank to earth, plaintively opening a black umbrella.

When it was all over, half the audience applauded, half booed. By the time the second performance came round, even Choreographer Leonide Massine got cold feet, whittled down the plaster-breasted woman's breasts, and draped her in a shawl.

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