Vaslav Nijinsky with Tamara Karsavina, with whom he danced in 1911, in one of the most famous ballets of the time, Le Spectre de la Rose
For the aristocracy and intelligentsia of Russia and the Balkans at the start of the 20th century, France was a second home. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, French was the language of polite conversation. So many Russians wintered on the Côte d’Azur that the city of Nice built an Orthodox cathedral to serve them. Paris had another, just as large, and a Russian cemetery besides.
Russian ballet and theater had followed France ever since Jean-Baptiste Landé founded the Imperial Theatre School in 1738. When Serge Diaghilev launched his Ballets Russes in 1909, to base it in Paris made perfect sense. But he didn’t anticipate that the Slavic passion of its composers, designers and dancers would, in the company’s brief life, influence performance everywhere.
Vaslav Nijinsky with Tamara Karsavina, with whom he danced in 1911, in one of the most famous ballets of the time, Le Spectre de la Rose
The Diaghilev family got rich brewing vodka in the provincial city of Perm but moved to fashionable St. Petersburg, where young Serge flourished in its cultured high society. The most powerful influence on his life was an affectionate and artistic stepmother on whom he doted. Even after bankruptcy ended their lavish lifestyle—their dining table seated fifty—a small inheritance allowed Serge to maintain a fingerhold on that privileged existence.
He flirted with musical composition until the great Rimsky-Korsakov called his first efforts “ridiculous.” After that, he immersed himself in art history. He was almost 30 before he realized that his knowledge of art and music, access to aristocracy and its money, and regiment of theatrical and artistic friends, mostly, like himself, gay, fitted him perfectly for the role of impresario.
In 1908, after mounting successful exhibitions of new European art in Russia, he persuaded his patrons to back a season of concerts, art shows and operas in Paris, all 100 percent Russian. Applauded by French critics, in the pampering of whom Diaghilev showed true entrepreneurial flair, his productions, particularly of Mussorgsky’s epic historical opera Boris Godunov, electrified Paris’s staid art establishment.
The season lost money, but one couldn’t ignore its critical success. How to exploit it? Audaciously, Diaghilev selected the neglected and discredited field of ballet.
Joan Acocella, a modern historian of dance, writing in The New Yorker, has dismissed early 20th century ballet as “a decadent, frivolous business—a pantie parade.” A few companies plodded along, replicating classic productions with antiquated choreography. Swans in tutus danced with fairies, none showing any more emotion than a wax doll. Except as props and supports for prima ballerinas, male dancers had almost disappeared.
In this moribund world, such Ballets Russes productions as the 1910 premiere of Scheherazade at the Paris Opera exploded like a grenade. To the sensuous music of Rimsky-Korsakov, an Arabian queen and her handmaidens enjoy an orgy with her black slaves until all are butchered by her furious husband. Choreographer Michael Fokine wrote the libretto with Léon Bakst, who also designed the sets and costumes. Dancing the role of the queen’s favorite, the Golden Slave, the athletic young Vaslav Nijinsky, Diaghilev’s lover, dazzled audiences. Paris’s most elegant gays clustered in the wings, competing to sponge down his sweating body as he staggered exhausted off stage.
Costume sketches by Leon Bakst for Scheherazade, 1910
For years, European painters had sneaked sex and violence into their work by setting their subjects in exotic oriental locales, but Diaghilev was the first to do so with theater. As Rimsky-Korsakov’s music swooped and soared, the costumes and décor of Bakst and Alexander Benois swamped the stage in color. Most striking of all, the bodies of the dancers, no longer constrained by formal movements or traditional costumes, writhed erotically. The composer’s widow protested that his music had never been intended to be danced to, least of all in such gaudy bad taste. She relented as Scheherazade became the most popular of all his works.
Bakst’s vivid sets and costumes made him a star overnight. Diaghilev invited Paris’s most successful painters, including Edouard Vuillard, Georges Seurat and Pierre Bonnard, to attend rehearsals. They were uniformly enthusiastic. Diaghilev hailed Bakst, then 44 and convinced he would never achieve fame, as “the hero of our ballet.” Bakst wrote his wife that “Serge embraced me and kissed me in front of everyone, and the whole ballet exploded into applause and then set about chairing me on their shoulders.”
Scheherazade fever swept Paris. The Musée des Arts Decoratifs bought Bakst’s original sketches, dress shops advertised gowns in etoffes Scheherasades—Scheherezadian fabrics. Actresses asked him to create costumes, and Paul Poiret, Paris’s most fashionable couturier, paid 12,000 francs for 12 designs. When someone asked Bonnard if the Ballets Russes had influenced his work, he replied, “But they influence everyone!”
Success brought Diaghilev little satisfaction. Living in a succession of hotel suites, increasingly ill from the diabetes he perversely refused to treat, and haunted by the dire predictions of fortune tellers, he bullied his collaborators as tirelessly as he drove himself. Photographs that show a tall, overweight man with a plump, puffy face and incongruous moustache convey nothing of his furious drive and violent temper. All agree that in the flesh he was terrifying. Dancers quailed, and even his closest collaborators avoided confrontations.
Such power made it relatively easy to impose abrupt changes on the company. Aware that, if he continued to showcase Russian passion, his productions risked becoming as predictable as those they replaced, he broke boldly with his past. Harems and oriental fantasies disappeared, along with the sensual music of Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin. Replacing them were the jagged rhythms of the young Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird, Petrushka and the notorious Rite of Spring, the Paris premiere of which in 1913 caused a near riot, in part because of the choreography by Nijinsky, who was already showing symptoms of schizophrenia. Massine replaced Nijinsky as Diaghilev’s lover, pushing him even closer to madness.
In 1917, Diaghilev agreed to a tour of the United States. As astrologers had foretold his death on water, he stayed in his cabin for the entire voyage. In New York, he was confronted by complaints that Scheherazade and L’Apres-midi d’une Faune were “immoral.” In particular, censors objected to male dancers in black body make-up embracing white women, and he was forced to make cuts. His autocratic manner angered staff at the Metropolitan Opera House. “He detested our democratic ways,” grumbled one. When an exasperated Serge struck a stage manager with his cane, the man’s team nearly beat him up. Later, a lead weight crashed from a stage tower, close enough to slice the impresario’s bowler hat. Malice was suspected but never proved.
Diaghilev sat out World War I in Rome, luring such collaborators as Stravinsky and Prokofiev to the city as needed. Picasso and Cocteau came, bringing their outline of a short ballet to music by Erik Satie. Inspired by the circus, Parade would have Cubist sets and costumes. Cocteau’s libretto called for the sound of a typewriter, Morse code, a dynamo, sirens, a locomotive, an airplane, and a passage played by banging on milk bottles filled to different levels with water. Recognizing the publicity value if such a facetious ballet was performed in wartime, Diaghilev told them to start work. He wasn’t disappointed. The first performance caused a fuss, particularly since Fokine’s choreography incorporated such dances as the one-step, until then seen only in American minstrel shows. Picasso’s Cubist costumes metamorphosed into twelve-foot-high sculptures like walking billboards. Parade became, literally, the hottest ticket in town as couples seeking sensation rented private boxes to have sex during performances.
Moving the company to Monte Carlo, Diaghilev continued to order new work from Stravinsky and Satie while also commissioning composers of the avant garde, including George Auric and Francis Poulenc. The best young French artists—Matisse, Braque, Van Dongen, Derain, and of course Picasso—provided costumes and sets, while the choreography was often by Massine and the young Georges Balanchine. In particular Le Train Bleu of 1924, set on the Côte d’Azur, with a Cocteau libretto, Picasso designs and costumes by Coco Chanel, set the signature of the Ballets Russes on 1920s dance and design.
In 1928, Diaghilev visited Villa Grimaldi in Menton, where pseudoscientist Serge Voronoff claimed to rejuvenate patients by transplanting chimpanzee organs. Another guest, Francis Pastonchi, described his “large bull head that weighs down upon a squat and neglected body. But the forehead has the space for the winds of thought. The eyes seem to glaze over when he is silent, but, when he speaks—almost with an effort, squeezing the phrase between full lips—they suddenly come alive, and, oddly, always look beyond the person he addresses, as if to pursue colorful if fleeting visions.”
Neglect of his health caught up with Diaghilev in 1929—significantly in Venice, a city built on water. Boils brought on by his diabetes became infected, and blood poisoning set in. He was alone in Venice with his protégé Boris Kochno, later the lover of Cole Porter. Relations with his friends and collaborators had deteriorated. He fell out with almost all his old Russian friends, including Stravinsky, and, though he often spoke of visiting post-revolutionary Russia, never saw his native country again. “Poor Serge died on bad terms with those who should have been his best friends,” wrote conductor Ernest Ansermet, “and alone—in short, like a vagabond.” Coco Chanel helped pay for his funeral, and for his suite at the Hôtel des Bains de Mer, since the great impresario died, as he lived, in luxury, but dead broke.
Diaghilev is buried on Venice’s cemetery island of San Michele, as is Stravinsky. Nijinsky died in 1950 after a long mental illness. His grave in Montmartre Cemetery is marked by a statue of him in the costume of the puppet Petrushka, commissioned by the choreographer Serge Lifar whose grave is in the Russian cemetery in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois. The Library/Museum of the Opera Garnier contains many documents, costume designs, scale models and other memorabilia of the Ballets Russes, including those of Bakst and Benois.
The 1948 film The Red Shoes by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger was inspired by the Ballets Russes. Leonid Massine plays the ballet master Grischa Ljubov, while Albert Bassermann, as designer, Ratov reflects Bakst’s importance to the company. As Lermontov, Anton Walbrook is more personable than Diaghilev, and heterosexual besides, but otherwise gives the performance of his career as the inspired–but fatally jealous impresario–to whom ballet is “a religion.”
