by Lucy Moore
In Russia, Diaghilev had raised money by introducing rich merchants who wanted titles to grand dukes, like Vladimir, with access to patents of nobility; his friends sniggered about his enterprises being sponsored by rubber barons (galoshisty, or rubber-makers, with the word ‘rubber’ having the same connotation in Russian as in English). In Paris, initially through Grand Duke Vladimir and his wife, he had become friends with a small group of rich lovers of music, particularly of opera, who would become the Ballets Russes’ sponsors. These included Misia Edwards, the Comtesses de Chevigné and Greffulhe, models for Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes (he began writing À la recherche du temps perdu in 1909), and Winnaretta Singer, the American sewing-machine heiress and devoted Wagnerian, who was married to the Prince de Polignac.
These women were fabulously rich but they were also unconventional. The formidable Princesse de Polignac may have been married to one of the pillars of French society but it was a mariage blanc; she was known to her friends as Tante Winnie – tante in the same way as the St Petersburg tyotki were aunties. Madame Greffulhe, descended from the Thermidorian beauty Thérésia Tallien, was a trained classical musician and the President of the Société des grandes auditions musicales de France. When her husband took to frequenting the company of what she called ‘little ladies who enjoy jumping on mattresses’ she simply raised a graceful eyebrow, and she told a friend she considered it of no importance whatever whether someone slept with ‘a man, a woman or a canary-bird’. She took Diaghilev at first for an adventurer, but he won her over with his knowledge of art and his wonderful piano-playing.
Voluptuous, flame-haired Misia Edwards (later and best known as Misia Sert) was the most important of the women Diaghilev befriended in the mid-1900s, the most steadfast champion of the Ballets Russes and for the rest of his life his closest woman friend – in many ways the replacement for his beloved stepmother. As the muse for a roll-call of artists including Vuillard, Bonnard, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, friend of the poets Verlaine and Mallarmé, student of Liszt and patron of Fauré and Ravel, her artistic credentials were impeccable and must have impressed even Diaghilev.
Her disregard for convention was a match for Diaghilev’s – married twice (the second time to the immensely rich newspaper magnate, Alfred Edwards) and divorced once by 1909, she was living adulterously with the man who would become her third husband, the Spanish painter José-Maria Sert – and, also like Diaghilev, her friends loved and despaired of her in equal measure. She was ‘a fairy godmother one moment and a witch the next, frightfully malicious, adorably generous’, inspiring nicknames like Tante Brutus and Tante Tue-Tout, as well as Proust’s dreadful Madame Verdurin – though her best qualities were also revealed in Princess Yourbeletieff, Proust’s exquisite patron of the Russian ballet. She and Diaghilev plotted together on the telephone every morning – the drawing room of her rue de Rivoli apartment, with its vast Bonnard mural, would become Diaghilev’s unofficial headquarters whenever he was in Paris.
Two men were also essential to the business side of Diaghilev’s enterprise in 1909: Baron Dmitry de Günzburg, introduced by Walter Nouvel, who stepped in with generous funds after the Tsar withdrew his backing from the Saison Russe; and Gabriel Astruc, the French impresario who brought Artur Rubinstein and Mata Hari to Paris and who had secured 100,000 francs from each what he called a ‘tournée des mécènes’ for Diaghilev’s 1908 opera season. Astruc knew everyone, ‘mes chers snobs’, without whom no venture could prosper in Paris, and had done the deal for Diaghilev’s 1909 Saison Russe with the shabby and rather unfashionable Théâtre du Châtelet, known principally as a home for operetta.
In St Petersburg, Diaghilev’s committee had been drinking weak tea since the previous autumn while they planned their season. Diaghilev, his exercise book in front of him, was omnipresent. Other regulars were the miriskutnik artists Alexandre Benois, Nicholas Roerich and Léon Bakst; Walter Nouvel, a gifted amateur musician; and Mikhail Fokine, who was choreographing every new piece they would present. Fokine had suggested his friend Sergey Grigoriev as company regisseur or manager. A ‘benevolent giant’, Grigoriev saw everything that went on in the company, noting it down (along with the relevant fine) in the little notebook he always carried.
‘A conference was like a council of war,’ wrote one observer of these meetings. ‘Each would pour out his ideas into a common pool, but Diaghilev – have no doubt of it – was the supreme commander, he imposed a unity of form and aesthetic conception, he turned a mass of brilliant projects into an ordered and coherent work of art,’ inspiring each of his collaborators to produce for him their best work. ‘It was impossible to know where the work of one began and another ended.’
When Karsavina signed her contract with Diaghilev the following year, he took her into his bedroom so they could discuss it in private, and she was fascinated to find the room ‘bare of adornment … I could not realise then that the glamour of his personality spent itself in creations of fancy’. Diaghilev was uninterested in ownership. His friend, the critic Michel Calvocoressi, asked him why he hadn’t bought some objets d’art that he had admired and he replied that he ‘did not want to own them. I have no possessions and wish for none. To own things is cumbersome and tedious. A couple of trunkfuls of personal effects is all I have in the world.’ Even then he knew that what he created would be more important than anything he might own: his vocation was the ephemeral.
Benois remembered the company’s rehearsals in St Petersburg’s Catherine Hall in the spring of 1909 being infused by a picnic spirit, an atmosphere of adventure and excitement, of joy and hope at watching something mature ‘that would amaze the world’. Fokine, composing the Polovtsian Dances for the opera Prince Igor in a matter of hours, was at the top of his form, inspiring everyone around him. He ‘shouted himself hoarse, tore his hair, and produced marvels’. Benois, who, despite seeing Diaghilev almost daily for the past year, had never seen him with Nijinsky before, noticed at these rehearsals an intimacy between the two which surprised him.
In Paris the almost celebratory mood continued during two weeks of frenetic rehearsals at the Châtelet before their first night. It was so hot in the theatre that Karsavina said you could have bred salamanders and they danced through the dust and drying paint while the builders made trap doors, extended the orchestra pit, removed seats, added boxes, resurfaced the stage with fresh pine boards and laid thick new carpet in the lobbies. Rather than breaking for meals, Diaghilev would order roast chickens, paté and salad from Larue’s and the company would eat on packing boxes amidst the scenery, as if they were picnicking in the porcelain colours – apple green, rose pink and duck-egg blue – of Armida’s enchanted garden.
Diaghilev was tireless. He could spot a single bulb that had burned out among the stage lights or hear when the orchestra’s second trumpet was playing flat. Shadowed by the spectral Grigoriev, he supervised costumes, hair, make-up, musicians, backdrops, press briefings and photography sessions, complimentary tickets to potential sponsors – and everything else that had to be done. Karsavina said that she ‘had seen a Japanese performer once, exhibiting feats of quadruple concentration. I failed to be impressed by him: I had seen Diaghilev at work.’
A few days before the dress rehearsal, Anna Pavlova, who featured in a graceful arabesque on Saison Russe posters all over Paris, informed Diaghilev that she would arrive in Paris two weeks later than planned, missing the opening night, perhaps because she wanted to see how the company would be received before joining it. If so, it was a tactical misjudgement, allowing Karsavina to step into her roles and providing Diaghilev with the perfect excuse to present Vaslav Nijinsky to the already fascinated newspapermen as his company’s star.
Every seat at the Châtelet was taken on the night of 19 May 1909. Astruc had even arranged for the prettiest actresses in Paris to be seated around the front row of the balcony, alternating blonde and brunette. (The next day the press called them Astruc’s corbeille, or flower basket, and since then t
he dress circles of French theatres have been known as corbeilles.) Bronia watched her brother waiting on stage for his role in Le Pavillon d’Armide – the first performance of the first night – to begin. ‘His whole body is alive with an inner movement, his whole being radiant with inner joy.’ At the end of his pas de trois, Nijinsky, in what looked to Karsavina like an explosion of delight, leapt instead of walking off stage, landing out of sight and giving the impression that he had flown off the stage. The audience gasped audibly: ‘a storm of applause broke; the orchestra had to stop’.
For the second piece, the Polovtsian Dances, Nicholas Roerich’s depiction of a nomadic camp on the steppes of southern Russia, with long, low, dark tents from which a few thin columns of smoke rose into a vast, sulphurous sky, transported the audience from the refined rococo loveliness of Armida’s palace to a place of barbaric wilderness. The warlike dances of the Tatar warriors and their maidens, led by Adolph Bolm, provoked such an enthusiastic response from the audience that in the interval that followed admirers flooded backstage. The stage became so crowded that Nijinsky and Karsavina could not practise their lifts from the pas de deux they were about to perform as part of Le Festin, adapted from the Blue Bird variation which Nijinsky had danced with Pavlova in St Petersburg the previous season.
When the curtain fell for the last time, pandemonium broke out. ‘The familiar barriers between the stage and the audience were broken.’ Karsavina had been so swept away by the moment that she had not noticed cutting herself on Nijinsky’s jewelled costume while they danced and backstage afterwards she remembered someone ‘exquisitely dressed’ using his ‘cobwebby handkerchief’ to staunch the blood trickling down her arm. ‘Somebody was asking Nijinsky if it was difficult to stay in the air as he did while he was jumping; he did not understand at first [if only he had paid better attention to his French lessons at school], and then, very obligingly: “No! No! Not difficult. You have just to go up and then pause a little up there.”’ From that night on, Karsavina said, a proud Diaghilev called her and Nijinsky his children.
The second programme premiered on 4 June. Pavlova and Nijinsky floated ethereally through the melancholy beauty of Les Sylphides, Fokine’s masterful ballet blanc, an homage to the age of romanticism. Here Nijinsky dazzled as the only male dancer on a moonlit stage inhabited by ghostly maidens in long tutus and delicate gauze wings. This was a demonstration of faultless poise, in which ‘every movement was so graceful that he seemed ideal, almost god-like’. Writing many years after seeing Nijinsky as the poet, one critic could still recall ‘the billowing of his white silk sleeve as he curved and extended his arm’.
Until the Russians’ arrival in Paris, ballet had been seen as an all but dead art form. The dancers Edgar Degas painted at the old Paris Opéra were popularly known as Petits Rats (and in fact were taught by a woman called Madame Rat). Far from being objects of beauty to their contemporaries, they were seen rather as drab, miserable little creatures waiting to be selected to become the mistresses of wealthy philistines on a stage that was hardly more than a brothel. Even the physical layout of the Paris Opéra encouraged this association of ballet with selling sex: interested gentlemen could examine the goods on offer in the foyer de la danse as the ballerinas warmed up before a performance.*
The reserved, thoughtful elegance of La Karsavina (as she quickly became known) was very far from this popular idea of a ballerina and, because there were no classically trained male dancers outside Russia, Nijinsky, Fokine, Bolm and the other male dancers of Diaghilev’s troupe were a revelation. Until their arrival in Paris, dancing had been seen as so unmasculine that even male roles were usually danced by women en travesti. Not since Auguste Vestris in the early nineteenth century had male dancers of their calibre been seen on a European stage. The critic Henri Gauthier-Villars (Colette’s husband) called Nijinsky a ‘wonder of wonders’ and Le Figaro hailed him the God of the Dance – a title the French had last given Vestris.*
Russia was already an established French ally and the object of some fascination in Paris. The great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century had been translated into French and were read avidly. Exhibitions in 1900 and 1907 of Russian arts and crafts had been huge successes and Diaghilev’s concerts and opera season had stimulated this interest still further. Russian folk dances had even been shown on film in France in the late 1890s (Degas had painted them). Kshesinskaya had danced at the Opéra in 1908. Still, what Diaghilev’s company gave Paris in 1909 was something entirely new. No one had ‘seen anything like it before,’ said the pianist Artur Rubinstein. ‘The music, the daring colours of the décor, the explosive sensuality of the dances – it was overpowering, and quickly became the talk of Paris.’ This was particularly true of Bakst’s Cléopâtre, possibly the greatest success of the season, which had its premiere the same night as Les Sylphides.
Although Pavlova had the central dancing role, as the slave Ta-Hor who watches her beloved, Amoun (Fokine), share a night of love with Cleopatra, knowing that he will be killed in the morning, the star of the piece was Ida Rubinstein as the licentious queen. Rubinstein was a rich, eccentric beauty who was determined to be a famous actress. To that end, aged twenty, she had enlisted an adoring Bakst as her personal set designer and he had introduced her to Mikhail Fokine, who taught her the dance of the seven veils for her own production of Salomé in St Petersburg in 1908.
Rubinstein had little to do as Cleopatra except exude a fatal sex appeal, a skill which came naturally to her. Six slaves carried a gold and ebony chest onto the stage, then lifted a mummy out of it which they placed upright and carefully began to unwind. Veil after veil of shimmering colours – red embroidered with silver crocodiles, shot orange and deep blue – were removed until a semi-naked Rubinstein was revealed wearing a heavily fringed blue wig and blue-green body paint, one jewel-encrusted hand resting on the dark head of her favourite slave – Nijinsky (in danger of being typecast) – crouching like an adoring panther beside her. The audience were spellbound by her ‘vacant eyes, pallid cheeks, and open mouth’ and powerful sense of drama.
Like Pavlova, Rubinstein wasn’t pretty according to the conventions of the day – Jean Cocteau described her legs as being ‘so thin you thought you were looking at an ibis in the Nile’ – but she gave off an irresistible essence of enchantment. Paris became obsessed: she was seen swathed in furs, her eyes rimmed with kohl, walking her pet leopard on a chain; it was said that she drank only champagne and ate only biscuits; she declared that when she left Paris she would go lion-hunting in Africa; she gave the bohemian Italian poet D’Annunzio a live tortoise with a gilded shell; her romantic conquests reputedly included not just husbands but their wives as well.
Diaghilev and Bakst’s association of the Orient with unrestrained sensuality was nothing new. Since Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign over a century earlier the French had been in thrall to the colour-saturated exotic. By 1909 the designer Paul Poiret was dressing his clients in oriental-style tunics; Henri Matisse had been painting in Tangier for years; and recently a new French edition of the Arabian Nights had been released. Even in St Petersburg fashionable Prince Lvov had an oriental room, complete with tiled walls, tropical plants, goldfish swimming in a fountain and stars twinkling down from a blue-painted ceiling.
But while to the French the Orient was foreign, for Russians it was part of their heritage. Their empire, after all, included Bukhara, the Caucasus and Siberia. When Bakst and Diaghilev were looking for costumes for Prince Igor in 1908, they found everything they wanted – brocade shawls, embroidered collars, kilim coats, fantastic headdresses – in the Tatar markets in St Petersburg. Fokine had amassed a collection of Islamic miniatures when he visited the Caucasus in 1900. And to French eyes, even Russian folk culture as reimagined through the Talashkino workshops of Princess Tenisheva looked unimaginably exotic.
Understanding and absorbing these trends was one aspect of Diaghilev’s particular genius. Lopokova described ‘the cunning with which he knew how t
o combine the excellent with the fashionable, the beautiful with the chic, and revolutionary art with the atmosphere of the old regime’ – all at the same time as being obsessed by the box office. Most important of all, ‘he couldn’t stand anything that wasn’t absolutely first class’.
The real power of Diaghilev’s artistic achievement, though, was its coherence. The exquisite scenery and costumes, the music, the skill of the dancers and the innovative choreography combined seamlessly to create the impression with each ballet of a single work of art that had reached a new height of perfection, in which the whole surpassed the sum of its individually marvellous parts: as Benois said, ‘not this, that or the other all in isolation, but everything together’. ‘We really did stagger the world,’ he remembered, and Sergey Grigoriev, not naturally given to hyperbole, agreed. During those weeks in the late spring of 1909, ‘we all lived in an unreal and enchanted world, which was shared not only by those in close touch with us but even by the public, over whom we seemed to have cast our spell’.
Parisian socialites fell over one another to rhapsodise about the Ballets Russes. ‘Right away I understood that I was witnessing a miracle … [they] took possession of our souls,’ wrote Anna de Noailles. Elegant Madame Greffulhe, one of the season’s sponsors, may have been appalled by how ‘drably provincial and uncultivated’ the dancers were when she gave a dinner at the Hotel Crillon for them (Bronia had been right to worry about her hat), but seeing the dress rehearsal won her over – she was captivated. Perhaps the society composer Reynaldo Hahn best summed up the mood: ‘When one has seen Nijinsky dance, nothing else matters.’
Wherever he was, Vaslav’s day began with class and in Paris it was no different. After a few cups of tea at his hotel he would go to the Châtelet and go through his daily routine while Maestro Cecchetti watched over him with bright, critical eyes, his cane banging time on the floor, shouting out instructions in his fabulously idiosyncratic mixture of Italian, French and Russian. The other dancers said that he could walk upright between Nijinsky’s legs when Nijinsky jumped.
