Diaghilev's Empire
How the Ballets Russes Enthralled the World
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Serge Diaghilev was the Russian impresario who is often said to have invented the modern art form of ballet. Commissioning such legendary names as Nijinsky, Fokine, Stravinsky, and Picasso, this intriguingly complex genius produced a series of radically original art works that had a revolutionary impact throughout the western world.Off stage and in its wake came scandal and sensation, as the great artists and mercurial performers involved variously collaborated, clashed, competed while falling in and out of love with each other on a wild carousel of sexual intrigue and temperamental mayhem. The Ballets Russes not only left a matchless artistic legacy - they changed style and glamour, they changed taste, and they changed social behaviour.
The Ballets Russes came to an official end after many vicissitudes with Diaghilev's abrupt death in 1929. But the achievements of its heroic prime had established a paradigm that would continue to define the terms and set the standards for the next. Published to mark the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Diaghilev's birth, Rupert Christiansen - leading critic and self-confessed 'incurable balletomane' - presents this freshly researched and challenging reassessment of a unique phenomenon, exploring passionate conflicts and outsize personalities in a story embracing triumph and disaster.
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.