Diagilev, Sergei Pavlovich

DIAGILEV, SERGEI PAVLOVICH

(1872–1929), famed Russian impresario.

Sergei Pavlovich Diagilev founded and led the Ballets Russes, a touring ballet company that attained an unprecedented level of fame throughout Europe and the Americas from 1909 until 1929. Diagilev, his company, and his collaborators introduced Russian dancers, choreographers, painters, composers, and musicians to Western audiences that previously had scant knowledge of them. His Ballets Russes single-handedly established the centrality of dance to the artistic culture of the early twentieth century.

A former law student, whose own attempts at musical composition proved a failure, Diagilev brokered the collaborations of some of his century's most celebrated creative artists, Russian and non-Russian (Stravinsky, Balanchine, Nijinsky, Pavlova, and Chaliapin, as well as Debussy, Ravel, Picasso, and Matisse). A series of art exhibits organized in Russian in 1897 marked the beginning of Diagilev's career as an impresario. Those led to the founding of an ambitious art journal, Mir iskusstva (The World of Art, 1898–1904). As Diagilev's attentions shifted to Western Europe, the nucleus of Diagilev's World of Art group remained with him. His first European export was an exhibition of Russian paintings in Paris in 1906. A series of concerts of Russian music followed the next year, and in 1908 Diagilev brought Russian opera to Paris. With designers Alexandre Benois and Léon Bakst, the choreographer Michel Fokine, and dancers of such renown as Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova, Diagilev began to introduce European audiences to Russian ballet in 1909.

The early Ballets Russes repertory included overwrought Orientalist fantasy ballets such as Schéhérazade (1910), investigations of the antique (L'Après-midi d'un Faune, 1912), and folkloric representations of Russian and Slavic culture (The Fire-bird, 1910). The company also introduced such masterworks as Stravinsky's Petrushka (1911, with choreography by Fokine) and Rite of Spring (1913, choreographed by Nijinsky). Whatever the lasting value of these early collaborations (the original choreography of many of them has been lost), the Diagilev ballets were emblematic of Russian Silver Age culture in their synaesthesia (combining music, dance, and décors) and their engagement with the West.

Diagilev's company toured Europe and the Americas for two decades, until the impresario's death in 1929. And while many of Diagilev's original, Russian collaborators broke away from his organization in the years following World War I, Diagilev's troupe became a more cosmopolitan enterprise and featured the work of a number of important French painters and composers in those years. Nonetheless, Diagilev continued to seek out émigré Soviet artists; the final years of his enterprise were crowned by the choreography of George Balanchine, then an unknown dancer and promising choreographer.

Diagilev had long suffered from diabetes and died in Venice in 1929. His influence continued to be felt in the ballets presented, the companies established, and the new popularity of dance in the twentieth century. The relatively short, one-act work, typically choreographed to extant symphonic music, and the new prominence of the male dancer speak to Diagilev's influence. An astonishing number of dance companies established around the world in the twentieth century owe their existence to Diagilev's model; many of them boast a direct lineage.

See also: ballet; silver age

bibliography

Buckle, Richard. (1979). Diaghilev. New York: Atheneum.

Garafola, Lynn. (1989). Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tim Scholl