Diaghilev's Empire
How the Ballets Russes Enthralled the World
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Diaghilev's Empire: The Visionary Impresario Who Revolutionized Ballet and Transformed European Culture
In this daring and impeccably researched reassessment, renowned dance critic Rupert Christiansen explores the fiery conflicts, outsize personalities, and extraordinary artistic innovations that defined Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev's Empire, published on the 150th anniversary of Diaghilev's birth, unveils the sweeping history of a cultural revolution that transformed the European artistic landscape.
Diaghilev, an art critic and connoisseur with no formal training in dance, dreamed of bringing Russian art, music, and expression to the West. Bringing together legendary talents like Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, Diaghilev created a new form of ballet defined by artistic integrity, creative freedom, and an all-encompassing experience of art, movement, and music.
Called "barbaric" by the Parisian press, the Ballets Russes' explosive color combinations, sensual and androgynous choreography, and experimental sounds usurped traditional ballet's entrenched mores. Christiansen's infectious delight in this complex story of triumph and disaster shines through in a book hailed as a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and The Telegraph.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sublime art leaps from great showmanship in this vibrant chronicle of early 20th-century ballet. Dance journalist Christiansen (The Complete Book of Aunts) centers his narrative on Sergei Diaghilev, the Russian impresario who took Paris and London by storm before and after WWI with his Ballets Russes troupe, which showcased Russian dancers and choreographers in ballets that revolutionized the form. His Diaghilev is a larger-than-life rogue forever summoning reluctant male employees to his bed; an avowed charlatan with no talents except the ability to galvanize talented people into putting on a show; and with a restless, fertile sense of boredom that made him push the avant-garde. Surrounding Diaghilev and vividly sketched are such Ballets Russes geniuses as the preternaturally gifted (and possibly autistic) Vaslav Nijinsky—whose settings of modernist lightning bolts Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun by Debussy and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring almost caused riots with their strange movements, eroticism, and cacophony—brilliant choreographers Leonide Massine and George Balanchine, and set designer Pablo Picasso. Christiansen writes about ballet as evocatively as one can (prima ballerina Anna Pavlova was "a fluttering dragonfly, a melting snowflake, a winsome dryad, a will-o'-the-wisp—and... a dying swan, her arms quivering with a frustrated desire to take wing as the life force fades"). The result is a stimulating recreation of a cultural watershed. Photos.
