Afternoon of a Faun (Robbins)

Lore & Background

Jerome Robbins was inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé's poem L'après-midi d'un faune, which also inspired Debussy's score, as well as Vaslav Nijinsky's 1912 ballet to the same score. Robbins also drew from his own observation of dancers: watching Edward Villella stretch in class, and watching Louis Johnson and a female student rehearse the adagio from Swan Lake while watching themselves in the mirror. Robbins decided to set the ballet in a dance studio rather than a Greek setting, and removed the nymph attendants, instead having two young dancers meet there. The costumes were designed by Irene Sharaff, with the woman in a practice tunic and the man in tights and bare-chested. The set and lighting were by Jean Rosenthal, who conceived the idea of using white silk as the wall after Robbins showed her a drawing by Paul Cadmus.

Reader's Guide

Afternoon of a Faun is significant as a key work in Jerome Robbins' career and in the repertory of the New York City Ballet. It continues to be a mainstay of that company's repertory and has been performed by numerous other companies worldwide, including the Royal Ballet, Australian Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, and San Francisco Ballet. The ballet is deliberately devoid of flashy steps or complicated lifts, described as spare and poetic. It has been interpreted in various ways, with different ballerinas bringing different qualities to the female role. The performance by original dancers Tanaquil Le Clercq and Francisco Moncion is generally deemed closest to Robbins' ideas. The ballet also has a notable history regarding casting: Robbins originally considered Buzz Miller and Louis Johnson for the male role, but Johnson was not cast, with speculation that it was due to the all-white New York City Ballet's reservation about an interracial couple performing a romantic pas de deux.

Did You Know?

• The ballet's title is a stripped-down English version, unlike the French title used in both the poem and the score.
• Robbins was inspired by watching Edward Villella stretch in a ballet class, noting how animalistic it was.
• The only footage of Le Clercq and Moncion in the ballet is an amateur silent black-and-white film shot from the side.
• Robbins allowed Valery Panov to perform the ballet without paying royalty fees.

The Robbins Choreography and Its Place in Ballet History

In 1958, Jerome Robbins mounted his own ballet interpretation of Debussy's Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune, creating a work that has since been frequently performed by numerous dance companies around the world. This production arrived nearly half a century after the original 1912 Nijinsky staging, meaning the choreographic tradition surrounding this particular score had already been established and, in some respects, mythologized. Robbins' version entered a landscape where the faun's story—its erotic undertones, its pursuit of elusive nymphs, its surrender to dream—had already provoked controversy and fascination. By taking on this material, Robbins positioned his choreography within a lineage that stretched back to Debussy's 1894 composition and Mallarmé's poem, while simultaneously offering a fresh physical vocabulary for the same musical and literary impulses. The fact that his staging has remained in active repertory at many companies speaks to its enduring resonance as a dance work in its own right, not merely a historical curiosity.

The Nijinsky Precedent and the Controversial Legacy

The 1912 ballet that first transformed Debussy's score into a staged dance work was choreographed and performed by Vaslav Nijinsky, with costumes and sets designed by the painter Léon Bakst. The production proved highly controversial for two principal reasons: the dancers employed movements that departed sharply from classical ballet conventions, and at one point the faun appears to engage in masturbation on stage. This combination of avant-garde physicality and explicit eroticism made the Nijinsky version a lightning rod for critics and audiences alike, cementing the Afternoon of a Faun as one of the most charged subjects in early twentieth-century dance. The controversy surrounding that 1912 staging created a complex inheritance for any subsequent choreographer who would tackle the same material. When Jerome Robbins approached the score in 1958, he was working in the shadow of Nijinsky's scandal, meaning his interpretation had to negotiate the expectations and memories that the original had left behind. The faun's story, with its themes of desire, pursuit, and dream, had already been marked as transgressive, and any new staging would inevitably be measured against that precedent.

The Musical Canvas: Debussy's Score as Choreographic Source

The music that Robbins and Nijinsky both set to dance is Debussy's 1894 symphonic poem, a work of approximately ten minutes scored for three flutes, two oboes, an English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two harps, two crotales, and strings. Though often labeled a tone poem, the piece lacks the programmatic architecture typical of that genre; instead, its slow, mediated melody and layered orchestration evoke the erotic atmosphere of Mallarmé's source poem. Debussy described it as a succession of scenes tracking the faun's desires, dreams, and eventual intoxicating sleep. Structurally, the work contains 110 bars—a number that coincides with the 110 lines of Mallarmé's text. Its surface appears improvisational, yet closer analysis reveals a sophisticated architecture of musical cells traded among woodwinds, with the main theme migrating from solo flute to oboe, to unison flutes, to clarinet. Recurring techniques include whole-tone scale passages, tritones in both melody and harmony, and harmonic fluidity that avoids lengthy modulations. For a choreographer, this means a score rich in shifting timbral color and subtle melodic transformation rather than in rigid formal sections.

Cultural Afterlife and Cross-Media Resonance

Beyond the concert hall and the ballet stage, Debussy's Prélude has permeated a wide range of artistic media. Pierre Boulez regarded the score as the starting point of modern music, remarking that the faun's flute brought new breath to the art of music. In Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, the protagonist Hans Castorp listens to the piece on a gramophone, and it becomes one of his favorite recordings, triggering daydreams of a faun playing pipes in a dreamlike landscape. In cinema, Bruno Bozzetto's 1976 animated film Allegro non troppo opens with an animation sequence driven by the Prélude, depicting an elderly satyr who attempts in vain to cosmetically recapture his youth and virility. These diverse appropriations—literary, cinematic, choreographic—demonstrate that the work functions not as a fixed object but as a generative source. For Jerome Robbins' 1958 ballet, the score carried this accumulated cultural weight: it was simultaneously a masterpiece of Impressionist composition, a controversial ballet subject, a literary evocation, and a touchstone for modernism. Each new staging inherited all of these associations at once.

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