Sergei Diaghilev: The Man Who Invented the Impresario
He thought ballet was beneath serious attention. "Anyone with no special wit can enjoy it," he said; "there is no sense or subject in ballet." Serge Lifar recalled that for his entire life Diaghilev referred to the corps de ballet as "a herd of cattle." He then spent twenty years building the company that turned ballet into the most advanced art form in Europe, and commissioned along the way the single most notorious premiere in the history of the theatre.
Perm, and a House Full of Music
Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev was born on 31 March 1872 in Selishchi, Novgorod Governorate, son of a noble officer, Pavel Diaghilev. His mother died of childbed fever shortly after; in 1873 his father married Elena Panaeva, who raised him as her own with real affection. The family house in Perm functioned as a cultural centre, with musical evenings every second Thursday and Modest Mussorgsky among the regular guests. He composed his first romance at fifteen.
Six Years to Take a Law Degree
At Saint Petersburg Imperial University he studied law on paper and everything else in practice, taking private lessons with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and deliberately stretching a four-year degree to six because, he said, he needed the time "to look around." His cousin Dmitry Filosofov introduced him to the Nevsky Pickwickians, a circle of aesthetes including Alexandre Benois, Konstantin Somov, Walter Nouvel and Léon Bakst. They did not accept him readily. Benois tutored him in Russian and Western art history, and within two years he was among the best-informed of them. Seven months after finally graduating, he opened his first exhibition.
World of Art
In 1898, with Benois and backing from Savva Mamontov and Princess Maria Tenisheva, he founded Mir iskusstva — World of Art — and its journal, which set out to "serve the god Apollo." He designed its look, wrote its criticism, and in 1904 published a monograph on the eighteenth-century painter Dmitry Levitzky. Benois noted the paradox coolly: Diaghilev was the member of the circle least interested in philosophy and literature, frequently revealing "huge gaps in his knowledge of the classics." He was also the only one of them who could make anything happen.
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Prince Serge Wolkonsky appointed him to a nominal post at Russia's Imperial Theatres in 1899. Diaghilev turned it into a machine, rebuilding the house annual into a luxurious magazine with better paper stock, real criticism and his World of Art friends as illustrators, and finding the sponsorship to pay for it. Dancers, amazed by the dandy with the grey streak in his hair, nicknamed him "Chinchilla." In 1900 he was handed Delibes' *Sylvia* to stage, reconceived it with Benois, fought everyone, and was discharged in 1901. Wolkonsky was sacked within the week. Nicholas II, lobbied by the ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska, had sided with the junior man.
Exporting Russia
He turned to exhibitions. In March 1905 he filled the Tauride Palace with Russian portraiture gathered from 450 owners — over 4,000 paintings, with a catalogue he wrote himself covering 2,300 works. In 1906 he took Russian art to the Salon d'Automne in Paris: 750 works by 103 artists across twelve rooms of the Grand Palais, designed by Bakst. Paris went *à la russe*. Offered the Legion of Honour, he refused because Bakst had been excluded from it. Concerts of Russian music followed in 1907, and in spring 1908 Mussorgsky's *Boris Godunov* at the Paris Opéra with Feodor Chaliapin, for which the artist Ivan Bilibin was despatched to Arkhangelsk to buy authentic costumes. It was a sensation and lost 85,000 francs.
1909, and the Company That Should Not Have Worked
By 1909 he had quarrelled with Kschessinska, the Russian treasury had cut him off, and he was reduced to renting the unfashionable Théâtre du Châtelet with help from his friend Misia Sert. The first *Saison Russe* mixed ballets — *Le Pavillon d'Armide*, *Polovtsian Dances*, *Nuit d'Egypte*, *Les Sylphides* — with opera, and made instant international stars of Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, Ida Rubinstein and Mikhail Mordkin. The innovation was not any single element but the fusion: dance, score, painting, costume and set conceived as one work rather than assembled from separate departments.
Rite, Riot, and the Cost of Being First
What followed is a roll call of modernism. He heard Stravinsky's *Fireworks* and *Scherzo fantastique*, hired him to arrange Chopin, then commissioned *The Firebird* (1910), *Petrushka* (1911), *The Rite of Spring* (1913), *Pulcinella* (1920) and *Les noces* (1923). Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Falla, Richard Strauss, Respighi and Poulenc all wrote for him. Picasso designed *Pulcinella*, and in 1917 *Parade* with Satie and Massine. Prokofiev's career was substantially his doing: a rejected first commission, then *Chout*, *Le pas d'acier* and *The Prodigal Son* in 1929. Nijinsky's erotic *L'Après-midi d'un faune* caused a scandal in 1912; his choreography for *The Rite of Spring* the following year caused a riot. Rimsky-Korsakov's widow published open letters of protest. In 1921 Diaghilev mounted a magnificent *Sleeping Beauty* in London, insisted on calling it *The Sleeping Princess* — "Because I have no beauties!" — and lost a fortune on it.
The Tyrant and the Father
He was frightening to work for. Ninette de Valois was too afraid to meet his eye; Balanchine remembered the cane he banged in rehearsal when displeased. He could flatten a dancer with a single look. He was also the man who, stranded and bankrupt in Spain during the war, gave his last cash to Lydia Sokolova for her daughter's medical care, and who promised the very young Alicia Markova he would look after her like a daughter — she called him "Sergypops." He financed the company hand to mouth and wore beautifully tailored suits with visibly frayed cuffs. His lovers included Nijinsky, whom he dismissed summarily in 1913 after the dancer married Romola de Pulszky, and later Léonide Massine, Anton Dolin, Serge Lifar and his secretary Boris Kochno.
Why Sergei Is Called a Genius
Diaghilev choreographed nothing, composed nothing, designed nothing, and by his own account did not much like ballet. The genius claimed for him is a different faculty and worth naming precisely: curatorial judgement operating at speed, in public, with money he did not have. He identified Stravinsky from two orchestral pieces and commissioned a masterpiece from him at twenty-eight. He put Picasso in a theatre. He gave Balanchine a company. He rescued Prokofiev from a score he had himself rejected. The hit rate is the argument — across twenty years, the list of people he was right about early reads like the syllabus of European modernism.
The second insight is structural: that a ballet is a single object rather than a score with dancing on top, and that the way to make it new was to force painters, composers and choreographers into the same room. That idea outlived him entirely. Coco Chanel's line — "Diaghilev invented Russia for foreigners" — is more exact than it sounds; he curated a national identity for export.
The counter-case is that everything he is admired for was made by somebody else, and that he was often wrong: the later seasons were criticised as too intellectual and too stylish, and several of his finest productions were financial catastrophes. Benois thought him under-read. He was not an artist. He was the condition under which artists worked, which is rarer, and not the same thing.
Legacy
He had a lifelong terror of dying in water and avoided sea travel. He died of diabetes in Venice on 19 August 1929, aged fifty-seven, and lies on the Isola di San Michele near Stravinsky's grave. The Soviet regime spent sixty years erasing him as an exemplar of bourgeois decadence. His people, meanwhile, built everything that came next: Balanchine founded what became New York City Ballet, Ninette de Valois and Marie Rambert founded British ballet, Lifar led a technical revival at the Paris Opera Ballet, and Ruth Page carried the idea to Chicago. Nijinsky's bitter reflections on him gave W. H. Auden a stanza in "September 1, 1939." *The Red Shoes* borrowed his methods for its impresario. The job he invented is still the one every arts organisation on earth is trying to fill.
