Checkmate

Despite her insistence that “it takes more than one to make a ballet company,” the indomitable and visionary Dame Ninette de Valois must take the principal credit for creating, in The Royal Ballet, a truly native British ballet tradition, in parallel with the equally legendary Dame Marie Rambert.

Born Edris Stannus in 1898 in County Wicklow, Ireland, she began dancing at the age of 10, studied with Cecchetti, and danced in pantomime, revue, and opera before joining the Massine- Lopokhova company (1922) and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1923-1925), having changed her name legally to Ninette de Valois (1921) when ballet dancers required French or Russian stage names. In 1926, de Valois opened her London Academy of Choreographic Art and was invited in 1928 by the equally formidable Lilian Baylis to provide dancers and coach actors in drama and opera productions at her Old Vic Theatre.

De Valois persuaded Baylis to present ballet evenings with such success that she closed her private academy in 1931 and became resident at Baylis’ newly reopened Sadler’s Wells Theatre, where she founded the school and company that became the Vic-Wells, then Sadler’s Wells and finally (1956) The Royal Ballet after taking up residence in 1946 at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. She continued to dance (especially in character roles) until 1937, ran the company and school, and nurtured the talents of exceptional dancers and choreographers (Margot Fonteyn, Robert Helpmann, Frederick Ashton, Beryl Grey, Moira Shearer, and Michael Somes).

Throughout the 1930s, before her growing administrative duties took priority over her choreographic output, de Valois created a series of masterworks, including Job (1931), The Rake’s Progress (1935), and Checkmate (1937). In her ballets, she strove to produce a distinctively English style of choreography, drawing on English themes or sources, often preferring British composers (Bliss, Vaughan Williams, Gordon) and constantly working to realize her vision of an internationally excellent native ballet with homegrown stars, which bore spectacular fruit with her company’s sensationally triumphant 1949 American debut tour headed by Fonteyn, Shearer, and Helpmann.

Her total dedication and often formidable presence continued to influence and guide The Royal Ballet long after her 1963 retirement as its Director, earning her the affectionately respectful nickname “Madam,” nine honorary doctorates, countless awards and prizes, the Order of Merit, Companion of Honour, and a Damehood (DBE). Widowed in 1986 from Arthur Connell, the Irish surgeon she married in 1935, de Valois had no children and continued to guide the fortunes of The Royal Ballet, making public appearances until her death at the age of 102 in 2001.

With an American father and English mother, Bliss was born in 1891, was schooled at Rugby and Cambridge University, and studied music at the Royal College of Music under Stanford before serving in the Grenadier Guards in World War I. He was a leading English musical voice between the wars.

His composing career blossomed in the 1920s and 1930s with innovative, cutting-edge works for voice and orchestra, influenced by Stravinsky and Debussy, including his notable Colour Symphony (1922). Thereafter, Bliss moved towards the English music tradition with choral works (Pastoral and Morning Heroes) and three major 1930s compositions: the ballet Checkmate, the film score for Korda’s Things to Come, and his Piano Concerto, which premiered at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In 1944, he wrote the scores for Robert Helpmann’s popular ballet Miracle in the Gorbals and in 1946 for his more experimental Adam Zero.

During World War II, Bliss was Director of Music at the BBC. He was knighted in 1950 and succeeded Arnold Bax as Master of the Queen’s Musick in 1953, where he composed memorable music for Her Majesty’s coronation.

Bliss’ post-war reputation suffered from the relative failure of a series of important works, including his Covent Garden opera The Olympians, his oratorio The Beatitudes, and the Cello Concerto. His final major orchestral work, Metamorphic Variations, premiered three years before his death in 1975. Bliss’ reputation awaits reassessment, despite the individual character of his opus and his significant 1930s achievement. 

One of the most successful and prolific poster artists of the 1920s and 1930s, Kauffer raised commercial advertising to the status of high art; and yet he was a prophet without honor in his own country. Born 1890 in Montana, he studied in San Francisco and Chicago before continuing his studies in Munich and Paris (1913), and basing himself in London for 25 years. “I felt at home there for the first time,” he wrote, a brief 1921 USA return and a successful 1937 one-man show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art notwithstanding.

In London he had become a member of the London Group of painters and developed strong links to the Bloomsbury Movement (working for Roger Fry’s famous Omega Workshop) before turning to advertising and winning fame with posters showing Cubist influences and making a major impact on Modernism with his work for London Underground. Prohibited as an alien from making any contribution to the British war effort, Kauffer sailed home in 1940 with his companion, the designer Marion Dorn, on the last passenger ship to New York.

There Kauffer, who had worked so successfully in England, had little success despite a 1947 commission to design a major poster campaign for American Airlines. Depression, drink and despair followed and he died in 1954.