Rudolf Nureyev, R I P.

THERE was always an aura of danger about Rudolf Nureyev--the dark Romanticism onstage; the reckless hunger to leave no style of dance unexplored, no part of the world unvisited, no nightclub unenjoyed. The wonder, actually, is that he lived so long.

The scandal-seekers are reveling in the presumptive cause of death; but the doctor's dignified announcement--"Following Mr. Nureyev's wishes, I can say no more"--was in keeping with his patient's consistent refusal to make private matters public. One recalls Dick Cavett's increasingly frantic efforts, twenty years ago, to extract from Nureyev some confession, any confession. Homosexuality, an adulterous affair with Margot Fonteyn--the ineffable Mr. Cavett would have been equally delighted with either; but all he got was a deft turning of every question into other channels. As Mr. Nureyev told a more serious interviewer: "Of course I have a personal life. Something goes on, I'm sure. But I don't think the public should know about that. Do you?"

There was a matter less congenial to most interviewers, however, on which he was quite willing to talk: the ravages of Communism. When, a decade after Nureyev's own "leap to freedom" in 1961, a wave of other Soviet dancers defected, the party line among American journalists was that there was nothing political about their decision--it was merely a matter of "artistic freedom." Nureyev refused to let them get away with that, regularly mentioning the ways in which "artistic freedom" and just plain freedom were related. He even recommended that they read The Gulag Archipelago, as he had done.

But the center of his life and the reason people cared about his opinions on other matters--was what happened on stage. Audiences were dazzled by the combination of technical bravura and dramatic art. Other dancers (though not many) might leap as high and stay in the air as long. Others might have as beautiful a line (the figure made by the angles of arms and legs and the carriage of torso and head). But no one since Nijinsky had put them together as well; and for dramatic comparisons critics were more likely to look to Laurence Olivier than to other dancers. The bravura eventually faded (grands jetes are a young man's sport); the performances remained worth watching for a long time after. But do catch the early film of the "Corsaire" pas de deux to see how he conquered people who had never seen a ballet before and confirmed balletomanes alike.

When Nureyev approached George Balanchine about the possibility of their working together, Balanchine said something like: 'When you're tired of dancing all those roles of princes, come over to me." Nureyev replied: "I may sometimes get tired of them, but the princes never get tired of having me dance them." The last time New Yorkers saw him in Giselle--the ballet that had begun his legendary partnership with Margot Fonteyn a quarter of a century earlier--neither he nor Prince Albrecht looked a bit tired of the other.

And flights of angels sing him to his rest.