Overall, Dorf does a good job of establishing Polignac’s influence on the work as a whole but doesn’t adequately convince me how the piece was impacted by their sexuality. Dorf does show that Barney’s treatment of Greece is obvious lesbian, but Polignac’s not so much. Dorf also notes that Satie’s social network included many queer people, and that he himself was later labelled asexual, but argues that his sexuality isn’t important. However Satie’s sexuality does matter, since any queer themes in the ballet could be attributed to Satie as easily as Polignac. Additionally as much as I like the argument about how sexuality in the work is hidden because that was the culture, I think Dorf could have done more to argue that the apparent lack of queerness was a way of expressing that queerness. Otherwise the same could be said about any piece from the time
Moore does a better job of connecting various ways of looking at a section to build to the argument that Poulenc’s identity influenced it. For example Moore discusses the Woman in Blue, bringing up how the costume references a male character in Les Sylphides, the androgynous choreography, reactions by critics who did and didn’t understand, and how this appears in the music. Of these the weakest is the connection to the music, both through the ambiguity inherent in music and how Poulenc created alibis to protect himself from being outed. Moore shows how the music for this character is purposely original, and that references to Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping beauty are heteronormative but that quality is interrupted by musical interjections. Neither of these are explicitly queer, but that is one of the qualities of the camp aesthetic Moore is talking about. The reason this works better than the Dorf article is because Moore establishes the ballet’s queer influences, which opens the door to a more queer reading of the music.