Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev

Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev , 1872-1929, Russian ballet impresario and art critic, grad. St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music, 1892. In 1898 he founded an influential journal, Mir Iskusstva [The World of Art]. He took a company of Russian dancers to Paris (1909) and, with the assistance of the painters L. N. Bakst and Aleksandr Benois and the choreographer Michel Fokine , founded Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, a troupe that was to revolutionize the world of dance. Diaghilev's productions were based on the principles of asymmetry and perpetual motion; both music and scene design became an integral part of the dance. An imposing personality, he was associated with dancers of the first rank, such as Vaslav Nijinsky , Tamara Karsavina , Anna Pavlova , Alicia Markova , and Anton Dolin . His choreographers included Léonide Massine , Bronislava Nijinska , and George Balanchine ; Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Dukas, Falla, Milhaud, and Richard Strauss wrote music that was first performed by his company, and Picasso and Derain often worked with him as scene designers.

Bibliography: See biographies by B. Kochno (1970), J. Percival (1971), A. Haskell (1977), and R. Buckle (1979, repr. 1984); J. Drummond, Speaking of Diaghilev (1999); L. Garafola and N. V. N. Baer, eds., The Ballets Russes and Its World (1999).

Diaghilev, Sergei Pavlovich (1872–1929) Russian ballet impressario. Diaghilev was active in the Russian avant-garde after 1898 and formed (1911) the Ballets Russes, acting as its director until his death. He revolutionized ballet, integrating music and scene design with innovative choreography.

Diaghilev, Sergei (b Grusino, Novgorod province, 19 [31] Mar. 1872; d Venice, 19 Aug. 1929). Russian impresario, famous above all as the founder of the Ballets Russes, through which he exerted great influence on the visual arts as well as on dancing and music. From 1890 to 1896 he studied law in St Petersburg, where he became part of a circle of musicians, painters, and writers including Léon Bakst and Alexandre Benois. In 1899 he founded the magazine World of Art, with the object of interchanging artistic ideas with western Europe. When it ceased publication in 1904 he concentrated for a while on organizing exhibitions, including one of Russian painting at the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris—the most comprehensive to have been seen in the West up to that time. In 1907 he organized a series of concerts of Russian music in Paris, and in 1909 he brought a ballet company for the first time (this is usually described as the Ballets Russes, but the name was first used in 1911). The company was a sensational success, as much for the exotic designs of Bakst as for the music and choreography (the dancers included Nijinsky and Pavlova). For the next two decades, until his death in 1929, Diaghilev toured Europe and America with his ballet (he never returned to Russia after the 1917 Revolution and Paris was the main centre of his operations). He was often on the verge of bankruptcy, but he had a remarkable flair for spotting young talent and for integrating various interests and people, enabling him to bring together as his collaborators some of the foremost artistic personalities of his time; the painters who designed sets and costumes for him included Braque, de Chirico, Derain, Matisse, and Picasso. He liked to use painters rather than artists who had trained as stage designers, as he thought specialists were likely to be too tied to old ideas.