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NIJINSKY

been so elaborate and at the same time so successful as in this ballet of M. Fokine's, set to the music of Schumann. For though we find in Les Sylphides a parallel attempt to visualise music, scarcely there does the music hold its own with the stage picture, and it is only now and then that the fusion between action and music becomes complete. In Carnaval the fusion is complete all through.

The reason is, probably, that though Le Carnaval was written with no earthly idea as to its suitability for the framework of a ballet, yet theme by theme the composer had in his mind's eye definite images which were intrinsically of such a kind as could be well expressed in terms of pantomime.

Le Carnaval is a work of Schumann's early years, and in these "Scènes Mignonnes," as he described them, there is expressed

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