Sergei Diaghilev

What an impresario actually does

Diaghilev's job has no modern equivalent, which is why his name is less familiar than the names he assembled. He was, in the V&A's phrase, 'a Russian ballet impresario and founder of the legendary Ballets Russes dance company', and the work consisted of judgement and nerve: hearing a twenty-seven-year-old's short orchestral piece and commissioning a full ballet score from him; putting a Cubist painter in charge of a curtain; deciding that a fashion designer should dress a ballet about the Riviera. He recruited, in the museum's list, 'composers, choreographers, designers and performers, including Mikhail Fokine, Léon Bakst and Vaslav Nijinsky' — and then paid for it, usually with money he did not have. Of those three, Fokine invented the steps, Bakst designed the sets and costumes, and Nijinsky was the dancer the whole of Europe came to see.

He was born in 1872 in Novgorod Province, into a family of provincial gentry that went bankrupt, studied law in St Petersburg while taking singing and composition lessons, and was told by his teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the most eminent Russian composer of the day, that he had no talent as a composer. He turned instead to editing and exhibiting: from 1898 he ran the magazine Mir iskusstva — 'World of Art' — with the painters Alexandre Benois and Léon Bakst, which gave him the two things his later career ran on, a house style and a circle.

The conquest of Paris, 1906–1909

Diaghilev took Russian art to Paris in instalments, each one larger than the last. In 1906 he organised an exhibition of Russian painting at the Salon d'Automne, Paris's big autumn survey show; in 1907 he staged concerts of Russian music; in 1908 he brought the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov — the story of a guilt-ridden tsar — to the Paris Opera, the vast state opera house on the Right Bank, with Fyodor Chaliapin, the most celebrated bass singer of the day, in the title role. Each venture was a critical triumph and a financial hole.

Then, on 19 May 1909, after weeks of advance publicity, he launched his first season of Russian ballet in Paris, at the Théâtre du Châtelet on the place du Châtelet — a big commercial theatre on the Right Bank that he had redecorated for the occasion. 'Audiences were dazzled by the dancing and striking designs,' the V&A records. What dazzled them was a kind of performance Paris had not seen: Bakst's saturated colour, Fokine's choreography, and dancers — Vaslav Nijinsky and the ballerina Tamara Karsavina above all — trained at the imperial schools of St Petersburg to a standard the Western companies had lost. The season made Nijinsky famous within a fortnight and made ballet, for the first time in half a century, something serious people argued about.

Stravinsky, and the riot of 1913

In 1909 Diaghilev heard two short orchestral pieces by an unknown twenty-seven-year-old at a concert in St Petersburg and gambled a commission on him. The unknown was Igor Stravinsky, and the commission became The Firebird, premiered at the Paris Opera on 25 June 1910. Petrushka followed at the Théâtre du Châtelet in June 1911, with Nijinsky dancing the puppet. Three Paris premieres in four years turned Stravinsky — a law graduate with no career in music to speak of — into the most discussed composer alive.

The third was The Rite of Spring, on 29 May 1913 at the newly opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées — Stravinsky's score of hammering dissonance, Nijinsky's choreography of turned-in feet and stamping, and an audience that howled the orchestra down. The Fondation Igor Stravinsky, the body that keeps the composer's estate and archive, calls it a near-riot; the legend has Diaghilev flicking the house lights on and off to quiet the room. It is the most famous evening in the history of ballet, and it happened because an impresario put a difficult score and a difficult choreographer on the same stage on purpose.

Nijinsky's own story ended badly and quickly. The greatest male dancer in Europe and Diaghilev's lover, he married the Hungarian dancer Romola de Pulszky while on tour in South America in 1913; Diaghilev dismissed him from the company, and after the war a schizophrenia diagnosis ended his career altogether. He spent the last thirty years of his life in and out of institutions.

Parade, 1917: four artists, one afternoon

The war scattered the company across neutral countries and nearly finished it, and Diaghilev answered with the most consequential single production of his life. Parade, premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 18 May 1917, had a scenario by the poet Jean Cocteau, a score by Erik Satie that called for a typewriter and a siren, choreography by Léonide Massine, and curtain, sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso, who built two of the characters as walking Cubist constructions. The house booed. In his programme note the poet Guillaume Apollinaire called the result 'une sorte de sur-réalisme' — 'a kind of surrealism' — the word's first prominent appearance in print and, seven years later, the name of a movement.

Parade is the clearest demonstration of what Diaghilev was for. Cocteau, Satie and Picasso were not collaborators by temperament and would not have found each other; the ballet exists because one man commissioned all three, held them in the same room, and put the result in front of a paying Paris audience in the middle of a war.

The 1920s: painters, couturiers, and Le Train Bleu

After the war the company settled into a rhythm of winters in Monte Carlo and seasons in Paris, and Diaghilev kept commissioning the most conspicuous artists in the city: Picasso again for Pulcinella (1920), with Stravinsky recomposing eighteenth-century scores; the painters Henri Matisse and André Derain for designs; the painter Marie Laurencin for Les Biches ("The Does", 1924), a ballet of flirtation at a house party; Sonia Delaunay, another painter, dressing his dancers in what she called simultaneous colour — blocks of pure colour set side by side so that each makes the others vibrate. He also made the alliance the fashion world has never forgotten.

Le Train Bleu ("The Blue Train"), premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 20 June 1924, was named after the express train that carried the rich from Paris to the Riviera, and it dressed its dancers as holidaymakers: Coco Chanel made the costumes — knitted bathing suits, golf sweaters, pearls — while Picasso supplied the giant painted front cloth of two women running on a beach, which the V&A holds to this day. Cocteau wrote the scenario, the composer Darius Milhaud the score, Bronislava Nijinska, Nijinsky's sister and the company's choreographer in these years, the choreography, and the sculptor Henri Laurens the set. The whole apparatus of Paris modernism, hired for one evening by a Russian with no money.

Venice, 1929

Diaghilev's last commission was Stravinsky's Apollon musagète ("Apollo, Leader of the Muses") in 1928 — 'the last ballet staged by Diaghilev one year before his death', as the Fondation Igor Stravinsky puts it. He had diabetes and ignored it. On 19 August 1929 he died in Venice, the city he loved and went to when he could not work, and was buried on the cemetery island of San Michele. He left debts and no institution: the Ballets Russes did not survive him, and the dancers and choreographers he had trained scattered into the companies that became the ballet world of the twentieth century — his last choreographer, George Balanchine, to New York, where he built what became New York City Ballet; the touring troupes of Colonel Wassily de Basil and Léonide Massine across Europe and the Americas.

Stravinsky, who had met him as an unknown twenty-seven-year-old and outlived him by forty-two years, is buried a few steps away on the same island. The V&A gathered the surviving costumes, curtains and designs — including the Picasso front cloth for Le Train Bleu — for its 2010–11 exhibition Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 1909–1929, which is where most of what is left of these evenings can now be seen.