Music: The Afternoon of Lifar

In London, Serge Lifar had two strikes against him. He had had a bad wartime record—he put on shows for Wehrmacht officers during the occupation, and had been jailed as a collaborationist. Then, probably because he thinks of himself as the one man who can fill Nijinsky's pink tights, he had chosen to appear in the narcissistic Afternoon of a Faun, the ballet which combines almost everything that most non-balletomanes dislike about ballet.

Last week, when the curtain went up in London's Cambridge Theater, 41-year-old Serge Lifar, fit as ever but fatter, lay prostrate on a rock, in the faun's familiar costume:...