Everywhere Man - Magazine - The Atlantic: Count Harry Kessler dined with Diaghilev, fought for Germany, and penned one of the greatest diaries ever published.
HE WAS COSMOPOLITAN, and a member of a new aristocracy. He grew up in Paris, in England, in Germany, and on Staten Island. Though his mother was Anglo-Irish, Count Harry Kessler was, or became, intensely German, as if by a sort of tragic choice; and he also became, through his experiences and through the anguished searching of his spirit, something close to a representative man.
The diary he wrote, starting in 1880 when he was 12 and continuing until his death in 1937, is said by the editor and translator of the volume, Laird M. Easton, to be one of the greatest ever written, “comparable in its stature to those of Samuel Pepys, André Gide, Henri Frédéric Amiel, Beatrice Webb, or Virginia Woolf.” Kessler moves between countries and is intimate with high society in England, France, and Germany. He seeks out great artists and gives us memorable portraits of Verlaine in old age, of Degas and Renoir, of Rodin and Maillol, of Rilke and Hofmannsthal, of Cosima Wagner, of Richard Strauss, of Diaghilev and Nijinsky, and of other great dancers and theatrical figures of the age. He tells us of the intrigues of the German Imperial Court. We see him helping Hofmannsthal to work out the plot of Der Rosenkavalier. We accompany his party to the premiere of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and to the dinner afterward with Nijinsky, Cocteau, Misia Sert (as she later became), Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Bakst, Ravel, Hofmannsthal, and—a late arrival, covered in gems from the Persian Ball—the Aga Khan, who, “sitting next to Nijinsky with his jaw and vulgar face, was like a fat sack of real money next to a fantastic dream of wealth.” The cast list alone makes this an amazing diary.
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Here, at Edward Gordon Craig’s production of Ibsen’s Vikings, we witness the invention of modern theatrical production style:
The chief reforms: he completely abolishes the ramp lights, and the stage decorations almost completely. He uses only overhead lights and props. The stage is surrounded as if by cloths that remain almost invisible behind the changing lighting effects and the colored veil of lights. You feel as if you were looking into a kind of infinite space. Your entire attention is concentrated, however, on the action that takes place, lit up brightly and variably, according to the mood in this sidereal, so to speak, infinity. These basic ideas seem to me of great value, and the impression is in any case much stronger than with the usual papier-mâché decoration because the imagination has more room and the attention is concentrated.
