Diaghilev’s Empire by Rupert Christiansen — the mastermind of modern ballet

“Serge Diaghilev: The Untold Story” would surely be a candidate for one of the world’s shortest books. The dazzling 20-year existence of the original Ballets Russes and its artists has been pretty well picked clean since the impresario’s early death in 1929 in a never-ending stream of memoirs, biographies and coffee-table books, but Diaghilev’s Empire is a worthy addition to the canon.

Rupert Christiansen, a ballet and opera writer of more than 25 years’ standing, surveys the company’s repertoire with a critic’s eye, placing the work in its social and artistic context and reminding us of its enduring legacy. His account is peppered with memories, anecdotes and bons mots from the massive cast of artists, musicians and writers drawn into Diaghilev’s orbit — Alexandre Benois, Harry Kessler, Jean Cocteau, Lydia Lopokova — giving his text a deliciously conversational tone and allowing us to eavesdrop on one of the most creative episodes in the history of the arts.

By 1909 classical ballet was fast degenerating, as Christiansen writes, into a novelty act: “vaudeville turns offering a pas de deux sandwiched between performing dogs and jugglers”. Diaghilev, raised in the provincial Russian city of Perm, was neither artist, composer nor choreographer, but by “combining sophisticated taste with a degree of low cunning” he managed to mastermind an electrifying synthesis of cutting-edge visual art (Goncharova, Picasso, Matisse), music (Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Satie) and dance. The list of his protégés — Michel Fokine, Alicia Markova, Ninette de Valois, Marie Rambert, Bronislava Nijinska, George Balanchine, Leonid Massine, Serge Lifar — reads like a Who’s Who of 20th-century ballet.

Thrilling, multi-faceted productions such as The Firebird, Cléopâtre and Prince Igor took the west by storm, and the dance divinities they showcased — Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina, Olga Spessivtseva — were lionised wherever they toured, but sadly for Diaghilev and his many creditors, the Ballets Russes was never a profitable enterprise. When finally shamed into paying the prima ballerina Madame Karsavina the £2,000 back pay he owed her in 1914 (roughly £160,000 today), Diaghilev immediately borrowed £400 of it back, operating (as ever) “on the principle of the French army: ‘On se débrouille’. (We’ll muddle through somehow)”. 

For Christiansen, Diaghilev’s productions ‘adumbrated a new form of sensuality’, loosening the stays of Edwardian society

Diaghilev’s role as a tastemaker is undeniable — “What Diaghilev commissioned served as the main shop window for the innovations of Stravinsky, Picasso and the modernist movement.” In 1910, when he premiered Michel Fokine’s Scheherazade, an orientalist extravaganza set to a score by Rimsky-Korsakov, the fauvist palette of Léon Bakst’s sets and costumes was copied far and wide. As Prince Peter Lieven, an early chronicler of the Ballets Russes, noted: “Soon there was not a middle-class home without its green and orange cushions on a black carpet.”

But for Christiansen, Diaghilev’s productions also “adumbrated a new form of sensuality”, loosening the stays of Edwardian society. Scheherazade, in which Nijinsky’s harem-panted Golden Slave ravishes his very willing mistress, proved to be something of a horse-frightener. New York — “relatively unsophisticated and prim” — was in two minds about it, but when the Ballets Russes finally played Kansas City in 1916 a local police officer wasted no time telling “Dogleaf” that “we won’t stand for any of that highbrow immorality”.

In fact, Diaghilev thrived on controversy. L’Après-midi d’un faune (1912), choreographed and danced by his lover Nijinsky, climaxed (quite literally) with the Faun lowering himself suggestively on to a stolen scarf. The response was “wild cheers mixed with hissing”, and Diaghilev, delighted by his succès de scandale, announced an immediate encore. A year later he unleashed The Rite of Spring.

There are more than a hundred accounts of the near-riot that greeted Nijinsky’s ballet, but Christiansen manages to bring the infamous premiere to life: dancers baffled by Stravinsky’s complex, polyrhythmic score; audiences intrigued (and infuriated) by its unballetic, faux-primitive footwork. Christiansen, whose last book was City of Light: The Reinvention of Paris, reminds us that “the catcalling and hissing of groundbreaking works was, after all, a fairly commonplace response in Parisian theatres” — in 1891, Ibsen’s Wild Duck was met with a chorus of quacks. Shamelessly off-topic, perhaps, but it is Christiansen’s delight in sharing such theatrical titbits that makes his book such a pleasure to read.

Diaghilev’s Empire: How the Ballets Russes Enthralled the World by Rupert Christiansen Faber, £25, 374 pages

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