Diaghilev's Empire
How the Ballets Russes Enthralled the World
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Best Book of the Year at The New Yorker and The Telegraph
“Amusing and assertive . . . [Christiansen’s] delight is infectious.” —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review
Rupert Christiansen, a renowned dance critic and arts correspondent, presents a sweeping history of the Ballets Russes and of Serge Diaghilev’s dream of bringing Russian art and culture to the West.
Serge Diaghilev, the Russian impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes, is often said to have invented modern ballet. An art critic and connoisseur, Diaghilev had no training in dance or choreography, but he had a dream of bringing Russian art, music, design, and expression to the West and a mission to drive a cultural and artistic revolution.
Bringing together such legendary talents as Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, this complex and visionary genius created a new form of ballet defined by artistic integrity, creative freedom, and an all-encompassing experience of art, movement, and music. The explosive color combinations, sensual and androgynous choreography, and experimental sounds of the Ballets Russes were called “barbaric” by the Parisian press, but its radical style usurped the entrenched mores of traditional ballet and transformed the European cultural sphere at large.
Diaghilev’s Empire, the publication of which marks the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of Diaghilev’s birth, is a daring, impeccably researched reassessment of the phenomenon of the Ballets Russes and the Russian Revolution in twentieth-century art and culture. Rupert Christiansen, a leading dance critic, explores the fiery conflicts, outsize personalities, and extraordinary artistic innovations that make up this enduring story of 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.
