What Was the Ballets Russes?
On 19 May 1909, at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, the curtain went up on the first Ballets Russes season. The opening programme was the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor, with Chaliapin; the Le Pavillon d’Armide, with designs by Alexandre Benois and choreography by Michel Fokine; and a mixed bill of Glinka, Borodin, Grieg, and Glazunov. The Paris papers, the Comœdia of Clemenceau and the Comoedia illustrée, ran photographs of Nijinsky, Karsavina, and Fokine and proclaimed the début of a “Saison russe” that was to change the European performing arts (Buckle, Diaghilev, 1979; Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1996).
Diaghilev was thirty-six, an art historian from the Perm province who had been expelled from the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1891 for making a joke about the dead body of Alexander III. He had founded the journal Mir iskusstva (World of Art) in 1898, had organised the Russian retrospective at the Salon d’Automne of 1906, and had toured the Vrubel, Serov, and Benois shows in 1907 and 1908. The 1909 ballet season was the third of his foreign seasons and the first that did not need a subsidy.
The company
The first year drew sixty dancers from the Imperial Theatres — the chief soloists being Nijinsky, Pavlova, Karsavina, Fokine, Cecchetti, Karsavin — and a single manager, the lawyer Vladimir Nikitich Argutinsky-Dolgorukov. The first contracts of 1909 reserved the right of the Imperial Theatres Director to recall any dancer, with sixty days’ notice; Pavlova, Karsavina, and Fokine were recalled in 1914, and Nijinsky had been released in 1913. The company never had a permanent home. The base was Monte Carlo in 1909–1914, then 1917–1929; the company toured to Paris (every year from 1909), London (from 1911, with most seasons at Drury Lane or the Alhambra), Madrid, Buenos Aires, New York, and the Italian provincial cities (Buckle, 1979; Lieven, The Birth of Ballets Russes, 1936).
Productions
The first six years saw the stagings that defined European modernism:
- L’Oiseau de feu (1910) — music by the 28-year-old Stravinsky, choreography by Fokine, designs by Léon Bakst and Golovin.
- Schéhérazade (1910) — Rimsky-Korsakov, choreography by Fokine, designs by Bakst.
- Le Spectre de la rose (1911) — Weber, choreography by Fokine, with Nijinsky.
- Petrushka (1911) — Stravinsky, choreography by Fokine, designs by Benois.
- Le Sacre du printemps (1913) — Stravinsky, choreography by Nijinsky, designs by Nicholas Roerich. The première at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913 was stopped by a riot that lasted through the first half of the ballet.
- Parade (1917) — Satie, designs by Picasso, choreography by Massine.
The twenty-year output of new ballets was about fifty (Pozharskaya, The Diaghilev Ballet, 1909–1929, 1979).
The dancers and choreographers
Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un faune (1912) and Le Sacre (1913) are the two ballets that ended nineteenth-century dance. Nijinsky was committed to a Hungarian sanatorium in Budapest in 1919 and did not return to the stage; he died in London on 8 April 1950. The post-1918 company was built around the choreographers Léonide Massine and the Russian-American George Balanchine, who married Diaghilev’s dancer Tamara Geva in 1924 and was artistic director of the Paris-based ensemble from 1925. Anna Pavlova, who left in 1914, founded the Pavlova Company; her dying performance in The Hague was on 23 January 1931 (Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 1989; Buckle, 1979).
Diaghilev’s death
Diaghilev died in Venice on 19 August 1929, age fifty-seven. He was buried in the Orthodox section of the San Michele cemetery. The company collapsed; the London-based Ballet Rambert (1926–) and the Monte-Carlo-based Ballets Russes of Colonel Wassily de Basil (1932–) were the principal successors. The Balanchine–Stravinsky collaboration continued in the American New York City Ballet from 1948 (Garafola, 1989; Taruskin, 1996).