How the radical Ballets Russes dragged dance into the 20th century

I confess to being an incurable balletomane – a morbid affliction of which the chief symptom is the daily expense of an unconscionable amount of time watching, thinking or dreaming about classical dance and dancers. I don’t merely like, appreciate or enjoy ballet; I deeply and secretly need it, as irrationally infatuated with my home team (the Royal Ballet, to which I have been wedded for over half a century) as others are to Spurs or the Red Sox. I study form, follow the relevant social media, review the annual accounts. Oh dear.

Why do I feel like this? I can only say, naively perhaps, that to me, ballet communicates a compelling idea of beauty, a form of dramatic poetry that can be expressive beyond words, and a fascinating struggle with the possibilities and limitations of the human body. A dream of perfection is within its reach; a frisson of erotic attraction enters the mix too.

Ballet is now a minority interest, I admit, but it was not always so. Opera may have been the most imaginative and powerful of the performing arts through the 19th century, but in the first half of the 20th century, ballet, along with cinema, took pride of place at the heart of Western culture. This was largely thanks to the impresario Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, who in 1909 conceived the Ballets Russes as a Russian export designed to appeal to Western tastes.

Combining sophistication with a degree of low cunning, he followed no prototype and had no predecessors. Many have emulated him since, but while his name remains a byword, loosely applied to any buccaneering impresario who takes risks on the new – I recently noticed Malcolm McLaren described as “the Diaghilev of Punk” – none has been able to match his record or his reach.

How did Diaghilev do it? He was neither an intellectual nor a theorist, and he had no creative gift of his own – the ideas were harvested largely from others. Some even accused him of being a mere opportunist without genuine personal vision. There is some truth in this, but he was no fraud: if he jumped on to bandwagons, then he soon ended up taking the reins. 

His genius was simply to spot and gather the necessary talents, to render them effective, and to get results. “Success, my friend, is the one thing that redeems everything and covers up everything,” he lectured the designer Alexandre Benois, who later would give the most sharply illuminating summary of Diaghilev: “[He] was not a creative genius, he was perhaps rather lacking in creative imagination, but he had one characteristic, one ability, which none of us had and which made of him what he later became: he knew how to will a thing, and he knew how to carry his will into practice...” In modern parlance, he was a superb manager; he made things happen.

Diaghilev can usefully be classified among the speculators in modernism – the dealers, collectors and patrons of the early 20th century who took a punt on marginal young artists, composers and writers in rebellion against the pieties of their parents: for instance, Ambroise Vollard who traded in Cézanne and Picasso; Sylvia Beach who bankrolled James Joyce; the Princesse de Polignac (Winnaretta Singer) who drew on her family sewing­-machine fortune to commission Stravinsky. All such figures, like Diaghilev, bought into rule-breakers cheap and early, stoked a public appetite, and bided their time. Sometimes their faith misled them and the investment failed, but they had the courage to take gambles based on instinct. Without them, the power would never have been connected to the grid.

Diaghilev might well have become an art dealer – in the first phase of his career, he curated exhibitions – but Russian painting had no potential to shock or enthral. His master stroke was understanding that ballet did have that potential.

At the turn of the century, it was moribund and infantilised, surviving either as overstuffed family-friendly entertainment for court theatres such as the Opéra in Paris and the Mariinsky in St Petersburg, or as part of a fancy parade in variety halls. Out of this jejune material Diaghilev sensed that something better could be made – one-act dramas that could have meaningful content, absorb recent developments in art and music, and run with the social liberations of the post-Victorian era. Now that the dust has settled, it should not be controversial to claim that works such as Nijinsky’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Massine’s Le Tricorne, Les Noces by Nijinsky’s sister Bronislava Nijinska, and Apollo by Balanchine should rank alongside Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as turning points in our culture.

The appeal of ballet – like that of film, the popularity of which rose in parallel – was based in motion, the way it looked as it moved. This was where it crucially scored over opera. Richard Wagner had championed the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a theatrical work of art combining musical, visual and philosophical elements, but nothing he created ever achieved that ideal synthesis. His operas might have sounded wonderful, but they looked deadly – scenically cluttered affairs in which the performers were poor actors who remained stationary or ridiculous however sublimely they sang, framed by backcloths painted in a style of antiquarian realism with pantomime effects and crude lighting.

The young spirit of the 20th century required something lighter, pacier and subtler: it was drawn to anything that moved fast – bicycles, aeroplanes, motor cars, the masterfully timed slapstick of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin – and it had learned to distrust antiquarian realism. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes would oblige.

One day in 1890, Diaghilev arrived in St Petersburg from the distant city of Perm to study law. He was a puzzle: uncouth and rather too rawly Russian in style for the Westernised Petersburgers. His eyes were soulful, with an expression often compared to that of a bulldog, but his tem­perament was exuberant: when he laughed, his vast mouth opened like a cavern. Nobody ever saw him read a book. “We thought him inferior to us,” wrote one intellectual, “and we treated him with a certain marked superiority.”

He was masterly at charming susceptible grand ladies who might give him money and he had no prejudice against female artistic talent, to which he would give unprecedented opportunities. But his would always essentially be a man’s world, and his erotic proclivities were entirely homosexual, specifically directed towards slender young men whom he could educate. This was something that, strikingly, he never gloried in nor agonised over; he seems to have accepted it as simply the way he was.

On trips to Europe, Diaghilev cannily began collecting minor works from the new crop of symbolists and impressionists. Back in St Petersburg with his little haul, he puffed himself up, adopting a dandyish monocle and top hat. He wrote his beloved stepmother a frequently quoted letter, swaggering with shameless self-knowledge: “First of all I am a great charlatan, although one with flair; second I’m a great charmer; third I’ve great nerve; fourth I’m a man with a great deal of logic and few principles; and fifth I think I lack talent; but if you like, I think I’ve found my real calling – patronage of the arts. Everything has been given me but money – mais ça viendra.”

In 1904, Diaghilev put all his phenomenal energies into curating an exhibition of 4,000 historical portraits of Russian dignitaries. He appears to have travelled thousands of miles, accepting loans from more than 500 sources (including the elderly Leo Tolstoy), as well as writing the catalogue, raising the money and supervising every detail of the hanging in St Petersburg.

The process left a profound mark on him: “The end was here in front of me,” he said as he recalled his odyssey through the mouldering estates of aristocratic and gentrified families such as his own. “It wasn’t just men and women ending their lives here, but a whole way of life. We are witnessing the greatest hour of reckoning where things are coming to an end in the name of a new, unknown culture, one which we will create but which will in time also sweep us away. And therefore, without fear or doubt, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of those beautiful palaces, and in equal measure to the new commandments of the new aesthetic.”

He came to the canny realisation that a more profitable future lay in introducing the little-known and undervalued commodity of his native Russia to western Europe. Paris, the city where trends were set, would be the place to launch such a strategy.

His first gambit there was to arrange another large­-scale exhibition of Russian art. Paris loved a novelty, and although the idea of Russia wasn’t exactly that – a Russian pavilion at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 had featured a kitsch reconstruction of an onion­-dome church attended by theatrical peasants – the tradition of Russian art, as exhibited by Diaghilev at the Grand Palais in 1906, from the spiritually charged medieval icons to the colourist bril­liance of painters such as Mikhail Larionov and Nicholas Roerich, came as a revelation.

Diaghilev always detested repetition, so for his next spectacular, he turned to Russian orchestral music. In May 1907 he introduced Paris to the likes of Scriabin, Rachmaninov, Glazunov and Rimsky-­Korsakov, as well as the astounding bass Chaliapin. In 1908, he managed to stage Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov at the Opéra, with Chaliapin in the title role. A more extensive season of Russian opera, with Chaliapin the star attraction, would be his next move. But that could be ruinously expensive. So what about filling out the programme with some ready-mixed Russian ballet too?

Posses of Russian dancers had already begun to tour European capitals and resorts, but they were presented essentially as vaudeville turns offering a pas de deux sandwiched between performing dogs and jugglers. Diaghilev’s ambitions were much grander: he wanted to transport not only stars in costume, but an entire theatrical and musical culture. His jewels would be the ballerinas Anna Pavlova and Tamara Karsavina dancing one-act ballets by the gifted young choreographer Michel Fokine; his hand grenade was the teenager Vaslav Nijinsky.

Obsessively tidy and compulsive, withdrawn to the point of narcissism, yet with an explosive temper, Nijinsky remains a psychological conundrum. One dancer, Lydia Sokolova, later recalled: “Although he was virtually never alone, he was as it were always alone with himself. He could not mingle in any way, he very rarely addressed anyone in conversation. If he did it was with somebody with whom he was dancing and then he spoke so shyly and softly, without looking at the person as he spoke, and would get away as quickly as possible.” His 
sister Nijinska put it more bleakly: “He never had a friend.”

An extensive promotional campaign bolstered the Ballets Russes’s Paris premiere and the repertory was tailored to appeal to Parisian sensibilities. Chief on the programme was Fokine’s Le Pavillon d’Armide, set in the grounds of a French chateau, conservative in spirit to the point of nostalgia for autocracy, and sumptuously designed in the manner of a Fragonard painting.

But it was Russian music and Russian dancers that brought it to life. Here was born one of the legends of the Ballets Russes: Nijinsky’s supernatural hovering jump, powered by his muscled legs and springy toes.

One tradition maintained in late 19th-century Russia but entirely lost elsewhere was the masculinity of ballet. In London, the male dancer had long been considered irrelevant: the roles of handsome prince or boyish suitor were invariably taken by transvestite women. In Paris, male dancers might be tolerated as scene­-swelling attendants and elderly nonentities, but no more. In a parliamentary debate on the budget for the Opéra in 1891, one wag suggested that money could be saved by replacing them with bus drivers and paying them accordingly.

Nijinsky’s jump was therefore perceived as miraculous, and crowned, often on a whim of the dancer’s own, by a trajectory into the wings that rose to its highest point just as he vanished from view and left an impression of ever- increasing altitude. Nobody ever measured or filmed this miraculous illusion. Nijin­sky himself always downplayed it as simply something he had learned to do, like backflipping or juggling balls. “No! No! Not difficult,” he would say when inter­rogated. “You just have to go up and then... pause a little.”

There was no question of Diaghilev resting on his laurels or playing safe. Next year, the Ballets Russes presented Scheherazade, for which the designer Léon Bakst, formerly a portrait painter, conjured up an extravagant fantasy of a harem. In place of the customary flat backcloths and wings came great swags of curtain, mounds of cushions, pendant lamps and Turkish carpets; the costumes tantalisingly concealed as much as they revealed; and the colour scheme was a peacock riot. “There are reds which are triumphal and there are reds which assassinate,” wrote Bakst. “There is a blue which can be the colour of a St Madeleine and there is a blue of Messalina.”

No other work of the Diaghilev repertory would exert such cultural influence. Bakst’s “absolute harmony” of vibrant contrasts was imitated by fashionable domestic decorators, while couturiers were inspired by the exoticism of the women’s costumes of turban, loosely cut pantaloons and blouses adorned with ropes of pearls. In London, Mayfair’s “pale pastel shades were replaced by a riot of barbaric hues – jade green, purple, every variety of crimson and scarlet, and above all, orange” – a high style that filtered down so that “soon there was not a middle­-class home without its green and orange cushions on a black carpet”, and manufacturers adopted such colours for “felt hats and cotton dresses and woollen sweaters”.

Diaghilev now felt empowered to up his game by forming his own year-round company, rather than engaging dancers from the Russian imperial theatres during their summer vacations. A farcical turn of events played into his hands. In January 1911, Nijinsky – still a relatively junior dancer in Russia – made his St Petersburg debut as Albrecht in Giselle, in the presence of the tsar’s mother. Nijinsky was always fussy about what he wore on stage and he insisted on wearing the same Renaissance­-style costume, consisting of a jerkin and tights, that he had worn in Paris.

For some reason, he neglected that night to wear mitigat­ing baggy trunks or a support strap, leaving the bulges of his genitals and his buttocks exposed. The tsar’s mother was scandalised and a message was relayed backstage during the interval that unless decency was brought to bear, they would depart. Nijinsky, never one for a tactful compromise, refused and went on to dance the second act unencumbered.

The next morning he was fired from the Mariinsky for lèse majesté. On being told that an apology could see him reinstated, Nijinsky huffily announced that he considered himself to be the one requiring an apology, and that henceforth he considered himself to belong only to Diaghilev – who was, by then, his lover. Diaghilev, delighted, telegraphed Paris to spread the deliciously titillating story: “Appalling scandal. Use publicity.”

The company now moved to London, where appreciation of dance was markedly less sophisticated than in Paris. “English people do not really understand ballet,” wrote the dancer Lydia Kyasht, who had come to London in 1908. “The truth is they like to come to a theatre and see a dancer kick her legs.” Her regal manner on stage was sometimes met with derision – in the course of one of her more sublime numbers, a slave girl laid a bowl of fruit at her feet. “’Ave a banana!” shouted a wag from the gallery.

Sensing London’s uneducated taste, Diaghilev programmed neither of Fokine’s groundbreaking ballets to Stravinsky’s “difficult” music (Petrushka and The Firebird). Instead, Karsavina and Nijinsky danced exquisitely in the romantic Le Pavillon d’Armide and Carnaval. Les Sylphides, Cléopâtre and Scheherazade followed the next week, by which time London was slavering. “It was like discovering America, paradise rather,” recalled the otherwise dry-­as-dust imperial civil servant Ralph Furse in his memoirs.

The tectonic plates had shifted and the cultural crust was seismically cracked. Bystander magazine immediately noted that “mere opera” had been put “into quite suburban shade” by “the apotheosis of the Body Beautiful which Puritanism and the Victorians banned and banished as not fit or, at any rate, not a quite nice food for the worship of a respectable middle-class nation”. The Daily News concurred: “Judging from the behaviour of the audience at Covent Garden, the Russian term for enthusiasts for the ballet, balletomaniacs, will have to be incorporated into the language.”

But one defining characteristic of Diaghilev’s personality was a low boredom threshold. He already felt that the product was stagnating. Until this point, the productions of the Ballets Russes had been carefully tailored to reflect trends rather than to innovate – even the Stravinsky ballets were fundamentally exercises in nostalgic folklore. Now was the time for Diaghilev to rewrite some of the rules, and Nijinsky would lead the charge.

In him Diaghilev had detected, on nothing but a hunch, a genius that went beyond his capacity to incarnate other identities and leap like a big cat. In private, their relationship was becoming tetchy – Diaghilev twitchily jealous and possessive, Nijinsky uncommunicative and sexually reluctant – but over the next year they would be intensely engaged in a great adventure.

Diaghilev picked Debussy’s voluptuous tone-poem of 1894, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (only 10 minutes long, and therefore damage-limited) as the music. Certain aspects of the piece were not original: the idea of moving in profile with the palms of the hand held flat, evoking figures on ancient Greek vases or friezes, was even something of a cliché. Amorous fauns and shy nymphs in laced sandals weren’t unfamiliar either.

What was unprecedented, however, was a ballet in which all the rules of classical elegance of line were entirely flouted. There were no graceful poses here, indeed nothing that would commonly be called dancing. With their feet rocking flatly between heel and toe, the dancers seemed to jerk robotically, conveying no emotion, moving without any direct relation to the meter of the music.

What also shocked was its perverse eroticism. Played by Nijinsky costumed in a fig-leaf bodystocking, the faun was presented as an amoral animal with pointed ears and stubby phallic tail, who picks up the shawl dropped by the nymph fleeing his advances, and caresses it, before laying it on the ground, lowering himself on top of it and graphically arousing himself to orgasm. The overt representation of masturbation was too much for the first-night audience to stomach, and the final ecstatic spasms were subsequently toned down.

Diaghilev positively wanted a scandal. Gratifyingly, the audience for the premiere at the Châtelet in May 1912 greeted Nijinsky’s first ballet with wild cheers mixed with hissing catcalls.

Nijinsky then worked flat out for months on a madly ambitious score that Stravinsky had been gestating since 1910: The Rite of Spring. It had been conceived in collaboration with the polymathic painter, mystic and amateur archaeologist Nicholas Roerich, who had conducted ethnographic research into the “barbaric” Scythian cultures of the steppes. Out of his findings he developed a scenario focused on an imagined pagan ceremony, during which a tribe celebrates the earth’s renewed fertility, culminating in the sacrifice of a female virgin.

Between December 1912 and May 1913, there were at least 130 rehearsals, all of them fraught. Often violently dissonant and strident, the music had a hammering intensity like nothing that anyone had heard before. In the studio, bashed out on a piano, its syncopations, polyrhythms and irregular time signa­tures were incomprehensible and it hardly helped when Stravinsky came in to play the music himself, banging his feet as he shouted out the counts and pushed the music faster than the dancers could humanly keep pace with.

What made it all the more difficult was Nijinsky’s insistence on absolute precision throughout the movement: a military martinet without the necessary ability to explain his commands to the troops. For the dancers, it must have been hellish: Roerich had designed “authentic” peasant costumes, with long thick wigs, false beards and smocked blouses in coarse flannel embroidered with arcane symbols, all cruelly uncomfortable and sweatily hot as well as plain hideous.

There are said to survive more than a hundred accounts – wildly at variance, often downright contradictory – of the furore on the opening performance in May 1913. Diaghilev anticipated and to some extent fuelled a scandal. As Cocteau cynically put it, “The audience played the role it had to play.” But the performance was far from a fiasco. “At the end,” Harry Kessler wrote in his diary, “the monde and demimonde went at it until a frenetic applause triumphed so that Stravinsky and Nijinsky had to come on stage and take repeated bows.”

The Rite of Spring caused a sharp initial explosion, but the shock it provoked swiftly subsided: by the time the ballet moved to London for three performances a few weeks later, the sensation had been downgraded to the status of a curiosity. “I found it very interesting,” The Lady admitted primly, while The Daily Telegraph found “much to admire” and The Times noted, “The third and last performance was received with scarcely a sign of opposition…”

Addressing the criticism that his work lacked grace and charm, Nijinsky retorted, “I could compose graceful ballets of my own if I wanted to – by the score. The fact is, I detest conventional ‘nightingale and rose’ poetry; my own inclinations are primitive. I eat my meat without sauce Béarnaise.”

But Nijinsky’s work survived only in fading memories and passed into legend. After a total of only 10 performances, his Rite of Spring ceased to exist. It’s an irony that something so vastly and lastingly influential should have survived less than two months.

By the 1960s, Diaghilev’s model, that of an internationally itinerant body of classically trained dancers managed by benevolent dictatorship, presenting a mixed repertory of classics and new work and sustained by a volatile mixture of private patronage and the box office, was no longer viable. It was too hand to mouth. Subsidy, either in the European form of treasury grants or the American form of tax relief to donors, had become the necessary foundation, and more regulated boardroom governance demanded a level of accountability (and accountancy) that Diaghilev would have pooh-poohed.

Some vital spark in ballet was extinguished. The mid-century masterpieces of Ashton and Balanchine were ballet’s last great hurrah. By 2010, Jennifer Homans, in her superb panoptic survey of 400 years of the art, could conclude with a downbeat assertion that ballet is “dying” and the admission that she finds it hard to see how its “decline” could be “reversed”. A comparison might be verse drama, which peaked in the 17th century, survived into the 19th and then had a weak rebirth in the 20th.

But even if all ballet’s vocabulary has now been exhausted, it has continued to hold its own. Over the past half-­century or so, with the help of science, dancers have been sustaining longer careers with stronger bodies than ever before. An influx of young talents from South America and Asia has swelled the ranks. Matthew Bourne’s poppily colourful reinventions of the classics have delighted a large public that a hundred years previously would have filled the variety halls.

So the end is not nigh. But one cannot help looking wistfully back, to an epoch when ballet nursed much grander ambitions, when Diaghilev set out from Russia to ravish the world.

Diaghilev's Empire by Rupert Christiansen is published by Faber at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books