THE MAN WHO BROUGHT BALLET BACK TO LIFE
Diaghilev’s Empire Rupert Christiansen Faber £25 ★★★★★
Charles Dickens proclaimed in 1864 that ‘ballet is dead and gone’. Less than half a century later, British public opinion had done an about-turn: watching ballet dancers on the stage at the coronation of George V was akin to ‘discovering… paradise’ for one convert.
What had happened in these intervening decades to alter ballet’s status so radically? The answer is one person: Sergei Diaghilev – the Russian art critic, founder of the Ballets Russes, and the subject of Rupert Christiansen’s wonderfully graceful new book.
Diaghilev ‘followed no prototype and had no predecessors’ in his mission to take 19th Century ballet – in Christiansen’s words ‘inert’ and ‘preserved in aspic’ – and make it modern, dramatic, and new.
In the place of Russia’s stiff formality, his dancers played with sexuality and gender in performances choreographed by Mikhail Fokine, composed by Igor Stravinsky, and on sets designed by Picasso and Matisse.
Performances were a far cry from technical perfection, and all the rules of classical elegance of line were entirely flouted, but the final product was revolutionary: a mixture of eroticism, decadence, and ‘awesome splendour’. The Ballets Russes may have been Russian in origin (and non-Russian dancers often changed their names to sound more Slavic), but it did not stay in Russia for long. The company criss-crossed Europe in the years following 1909 and was seen by everyone from Virginia Woolf to Coco Chanel (who even designed costumes for the dancers).
Success with audiences was occasionally hit-and-miss (at the premiere of The Rite Of Spring in 1913, the audience members who felt ‘carried beyond [them]selves’ were outnumbered by those who catcalled, hissed, and shouted at the dancers), but a greater problem was Diaghilev’s tendency to fall out with his colleagues, friends and lovers – and especially the young men, such as the ‘exotically sensual’ Vaslav Nijinsky, who filled all three roles.
The whole of the book is star-studded with melodrama and intense emotion, from proposals between lovers who could not speak the same language, to the tragedy of Nijinsky’s dancing career ending prematurely with a schizophrenia diagnosis. But Christiansen’s book elegantly leaps through these highs and lows, without ever falling into unneeded theatricality.
Diaghilev died in 1929 at the age of only 57 – but his legacy of a ballet that danced through the avant-garde lasted long after his demise. Christiansen’s innovative new book rightly puts Diaghilev on a par with the other impresarios of modernism, and makes a convincing case for this period of ballet to be considered as radical, and as important, as the better-known worlds of art, literature and music.