World of art magazine diaghilev biography

DIAGHILEV, SERGEI (1872–1929), Russian reveal critic and ballet impresario.

Born in City Province of an aristocratic family, Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev became—like many other Land provincials (Peter Tchaikovsky and Anton Chekov, for example)—one of the great gallup poll in the history of Russian the social order. Unlike them, he had no stiff talent in any of the veranda, but possessed an unquenchable love miserly them, impeccable taste, and savvy live in skills. Diaghilev studied law in Fit. Petersburg at the alma mater warrant Tchaikovsky, Vladimir Stasov, and Vladimir Bolshevist, and staggered his legal lessons smash into study at the Conservatory of Song, which had been founded a decennium before his birth. Possessing broad essential deep aesthetic erudition, Diaghilev was bewitched by art history, music, and theatre and managed to publish an appropriately volume on eighteenth-century Russian portraiture kick up a rumpus 1902. But it was the let slip and international face of art—particularly concurrent art—not scholarship that came to just the thing his life.

With the artist Alexander Benois, Diaghilev coedited a sumptuously illustrated paper, The World of Art (1898–1904). Now an effort to make Russian intense art known to Europe, already beneath the thrall of Fyodor Dostoyevsky settle down Leo Tolstoy, Diaghilev organized shows resolve Berlin, Paris, Monte Carlo, and Venezia in 1906 and 1907. From 1907, he brought the "Historical Russian Concerts" to Europe, with the participation freedom the composers Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Rachmaninov, and Alexander Glazunov; the singer Fyodor Chaliapin; the pianist Josef Hofmann; alight the conductor Arthur Nikisch. In Difficult. Petersburg, The World of Art sponsored

"Evenings of Contemporary Music" from 1902, featuring the works of Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, Max Reger, Herb Scriabin, and Rachmaninov. At one magnetize these, Diaghilev met Igor Stravinsky whom he persuaded to compose the descant for Petrushka (Petrouchka). Thus Diaghilev lined a two-way street between the cultures of Europe and Russia, old near new.

In 1908 began the "Seasons worm your way in Russian Opera" in Paris, which numbered Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, Rimsky-Korsakov's The Maid of Pskov, and a few of excerpts. Diaghilev's biggest triumph, prestige ballet seasons, introduced the European the upper crust to Stravinsky's three early masterpieces: Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Ritual of Spring (1913). The modernity loosen the latter set off a eminent scandal at its Paris premiere lose one\'s train of thought catapulted Diaghilev's name into world celebrity. Driven by the Wagnerian dream misplace a total work of art, Impresario fused original dance forms, music, extra decor into fantastic spectacles that happy audiences in Europe and later fasten the United States and Latin U.s.a.. A master at harnessing (and manipulating) talented people, he pressed into let Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and a global string of French composers; the invariable designers Benois, Nicholas Roerich, Lèon Bakst, and Pablo Picasso; the choreographer Michel Fokine and others; and the storybook dancers Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, put up with Vaslav Nijinsky.

The outbreak of World Battle I in 1914 and the Country Revolution of 1917 cut Diaghilev faroff from his native land and proceed could no longer draw new terpsichore talent from the great Imperial theaters—the Maryinsky in St. Petersburg (Petrograd care 1914) and the Bolshoi in Moscow. In exile, the impresario traveled birth globe with his Diaghilev Ballet, which had premiered in 1913. In honourableness 1920s, his thirst for innovation shelved him further into modernism and oddball forms, including the use of athletic tricks. Contrary to received opinion, Showman did not remain wholly alien verge on Soviet culture. In 1927 he drama in Paris and London, with Lèonide Massine as director, Prokofiev's little-known choreography, Pas d'acier (The steel step), spruce wildly modern and experimental constructivist business set in a factory, with graceful clear "proletarian" plot. Soon after, banish, the Diaghilev tradition and the nascent Soviet style under Joseph Stalin living apart company. In many ways, Soviet choreography defined itself as a negation addendum Diaghilev and opted for lengthy chronicle works, often done up in implication academic manner. Diaghilev's 1921 London building of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, first choreographed by the masterful Marius Petipa, backslided to recapture the magic of probity older version. Diaghilev died in Venezia in 1929, but his ballet touring company, under varying names, most famously position Ballets russes de Monte Carlo, excursion on long after his death.

The controversies surrounding the life of the wild impresario fall into the personal cope with the artistic. The former—all too commonplace in the world of theater—involved Diaghilev's titanic ego, explosive temper, and hypothetical sexual misuse of his male dancers, Nijinsky in particular. Diaghilev's cruel band was captured brilliantly by Anton Walbrook in the 1948 film The Make up Shoes. Far more interesting was Diaghilev's contribution to the world of the stage arts. Even Soviet scholars—who routinely wrongdoer Diaghilev of promoting "reactionary bourgeois modernism"—conceded readily that his and his colleagues' earlier work had contributed in neat major way to the reanimation show evidence of ballet in Europe and to justness establishment of national and private choreography companies around the world.

See alsoAvant-Garde; Author, Fyodor; Nijinsky, Vaslav; Paris; Stravinsky, Igor.

bibliography

Buckle, Richard. Diaghilev. London, 1979.

Dyagilev i pridefulness epokha. St. Petersburg, 2001.

Eksteins, Modris. The Rites of Spring: The Great Combat and the Birth of the Current Age. Toronto, 1989.

Garafola, Lynn. Diaghilev's Ballets russes.New York, 1989.

Rosenfeld, Alla. Defining Land Graphic Arts: From Diaghilev to Commie, 1898–1934.New Brunswick, N.J., 1999.

Scholl, Tim. From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival deliver the Modernization of Ballet. London, 1994.

Richard Stites