Sergei Diaghilev: first lord of the dance

Sergei Diaghilev set early 20th-century Paris ablaze with his Ballets Russes – and his impact on the world of dance can still be felt today
Sergei Diaghilev
Sergei Diaghilev: "Of all the wonders that the world had to offer, only art promised immortality." Photograph: Rue des Archives/ PVDE

In the tangled narrative of 20th century art, there is no more colourful or influential figure than Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev. The son of a bankrupt Russian vodka distiller, Diaghilev would reinvent himself as the greatest impresario of all time, conquering first Europe and then the world with the Ballets Russes. This was more than just a dance company; it was a creative movement which, from its inception, drew to itself the greatest musical, theatrical and artistic talents of the day.

The adventure began in 1909, when Diaghilev arrived in Paris with a troupe of dancers recruited on their summer break from the imperial ballet of St Petersburg. At 37 years of age, Diaghilev was a significant figure in the Russian cultural sphere, having launched a well-received art review, organised a major exhibition of historical portraits, and taken parties of opera singers to Paris.

The troupe took up residence at the city's Châtelet theatre. The pieces they danced were all new. They had been choreographed by an iconoclastic young dancer named Mikhail Fokine, and set among ravishing designs by Leon Bakst and other artists. But it was the season's star performers who really captivated Paris: Vaslav Nijinsky with his phenomenal virtuosity, Anna Pavlova with her ethereal delicacy, Tamara Karsavina with her refined, sensuous beauty. To the Parisians, Diaghilev's troupe combined the lyrical and the exotic in perfect measure, and the four-week season was a vast succès d'estime.

A year later, Diaghilev's second Paris season outdid the first. In Fokine's Carnaval Nijinsky was an enigmatic Harlequin opposite Karsavina's Columbine, and in the violent, sexually charged Scheherazade, which he danced, according to one witness, "with horrifying virtuosity", he was the exotic Golden Slave. But it was Fokine's third ballet of the season, L'oiseau de feu (The Firebird), which was perhaps the most significant, introducing as it did the music of Igor Stravinsky, a blazingly innovative young composer. Stravinsky would produce a second masterly score for the 1911 season when Fokine choreographed Petrushka, the sad, sinister tale of a puppet which provided yet another vehicle for the uncanny talents of Nijinsky. This was the year in which Diaghilev severed his links with St Petersburg, and the Ballets Russes became a permanent, itinerant European company, enjoying hugely successful seasons in London, Berlin and Monte Carlo as well as in Paris.

1912 would see Nijinsky's emergence as a choreographer, with one of the strangest, most haunting ballets of all time: L'après-midi d'un faune (Afternoon of a Faun). In this work, set to the dreamily impressionistic music of Claude Debussy, the male dancer enacts the role of a half-human, half-animal figure who happens on a party of nymphs. The piece courted controversy when Nijinsky appeared to shudder in orgasm over a scarf abandoned by one of the nymphs, but the outcry was far exceeded the following year at the premiere of Nijinsky's account of human sacrifice Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), set to Stravinsky's brutal, elemental score. The event turned into a riot, with different factions of Parisian society hurling insults at one another. The press, predictably, had a field day. "Exactly what I wanted," Diaghilev confided to Stravinsky in a restaurant afterwards.

As time passed, Diaghilev involved himself increasingly with the avant-garde, drawing into his orbit artists as diverse as Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and the composer Erik Satie, who all collaborated on the 1917 ballet Parade. The result is a masterpiece of the bizarre, with Satie's score involving gunshots and clacking typewriter keys. Over the years André Derain, Juan Gris, Joan Miró, Marie Laurencin, Georges Braque, Georges Rouault, Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico would all design for the Ballets Russes, just as Stravinsky, Debussy, Richard Strauss, Manuel de Falla, Satie and Sergei Prokofiev would compose for them. Great careers would be launched, of which the most influential were those of George Balanchine, who would create New York City Ballet, Ninette de Valois, who would found the Royal Ballet, and Serge Lifar, who would oversee the resurrection of the Paris Opera Ballet.

The consummate achievement, however, was Diaghilev's. Over the two decades between that first Paris season and his death in 1929, he kept the venture afloat, sometimes on more than one continent at once, against almost impossible odds. The war of 1914-1918 saw the company scattered to the four corners of the globe, while infighting and professional rivalries all took their toll. From their first performance to Diaghilev's death, the Ballets Russes were in a state of acute financial crisis, and neither the company nor its director ever had a permanent home.

The strategies with which Diaghilev addressed these obstacles are astonishingly modern in their scope. He was a master of spin with a sophisticated understanding of the nature of celebrity and power, a consummate networker, and he knew exactly how to manipulate the press. In 1913, for example, when Faun opened in London and the critics failed to be shocked, Diaghilev ensured that the ballet was publicised by leaking a private exchange of telegrams between Nijinsky and Debussy to the Daily Mail.

Diaghilev was also homosexual, which by the early 20th century opened as many doors as it closed. In St Petersburg he had been a member of an artistically inclined gay clique who socialised together, swapped boyfriends and cruised for sex in the city's parks. Having come to terms with his sexuality at an early age, he made no attempt to pretend that his tastes lay elsewhere, and according to the composer Nicolas Nabokov, "he was perhaps the first grand homosexual who asserted himself and was accepted as such by society". By 1909 he had become the lover of the bisexual Nijinsky, who had been passed on to him by Prince Lvov, a gay St Petersburg dilettante. That Diaghilev didn't bother to conceal the affair infuriated socially conservative elements in the city, and in 1911 led to the withdrawal of the tsar's financial support of the Ballets Russes, and Diaghilev's permanent departure from Russia.

But by then he was well established in Europe. In Paris, several years earlier, he had cultivated the poet Robert de Montesquiou, who introduced him to an influential gay network which included Marcel Proust and the young Jean Cocteau. Montesquiou also introduced Diaghilev to his cousin, the Comtesse Greffulhe, who served as the model for the Duchesse de Guermantes in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (the Baron de Charlus was based on Montesquiou) and would provide him with invaluable access to the highest echelon of Parisian society.

These upper-crust contacts were activated by Diaghilev when the Ballet Russes first arrived in Paris, and did much to ensure the company's word-of-mouth success, as well as providing a useful source of funds when cash was short. In return for loans, admirers were granted social access to the dancers, who usually played along courteously enough, although Karsavina drew the line at encouraging the lesbian attentions of one Madame Ephrussi, the wife of a prominent backer.

Everywhere he went, Diaghilev was careful to cultivate those who might be of assistance. In London the artistically inclined Marchioness of Ripon helped him out of more than one tight spot, and when Nijinsky was interned in Hungary during the first world war, his release was engineered by diplomatic efforts involving Queen Alexandra of England, the dowager empress of Russia, the king of Spain, the Austrian emperor and the pope.

Perhaps the most valuable of Diaghilev's aristocratic angels was the Princesse Edmond de Polignac, who came to his rescue after he had bankrupted the company in 1921; not only did her serene highness place funds at his disposal, she also arranged, through family connections to the royal family of Monaco, that the Ballets Russes should have an annual residency at the Grand Théâtre de Monte Carlo.

Diaghilev's fascination with the privileged classes would lead to crisis. In 1911 a young woman from a prominent Hungarian family, Romola de Pulszky, saw Nijinsky dance in Budapest. De Pulszky fell in love with Nijinsky and managed to talk Diaghilev into allowing her to travel with the company and take ballet classes with them. Suspecting nothing, Diaghilev permitted the young Hungarian to accompany the dancers on their first visit to south America in 1913, while he remained behind in Europe. When he learned that, following a shipboard romance, his star dancer and de Pulszky had got married in Buenos Aires, he was incandescent with rage, and ordered that Nijinsky be sacked. Tragically, Nijinsky would soon succumb to schizophrenia, and spend the rest of his life in a series of institutions, watched over to the end by his wife.

Over the years, Diaghilev would take several of his leading men as lovers, and Nijinsky would be followed by Leonide Massine, Serge Lifar and Anton Dolin. Most seem to have approached the arrangement pragmatically, with Massine commenting that sex with Diaghilev "was like going to bed with a nice fat old lady". If the impresario suspected a repetition of the Nijinsky debacle, however, he could turn vindictive, as happened in 1920 when Massine took up with Vera Savina, one of the company's ballerinas. According to legend Diaghilev got Savina drunk, stripped her and threw her at Massine with the words: "Behold your beau idéal!" before firing him.

For Diaghilev this was more than a personal betrayal, it was an artistic one. And art, in the closed circle of the Ballets Russes (Stravinsky, who was not gay, once commented that Diaghilev was surrounded by "a kind of homosexual Swiss Guard"), was akin to religion. A religion which conferred power on its priesthood, and demanded loyalty and self-sacrifice from its servants. Diaghilev's physical relationships with his dancers, which to outsiders might have appeared scandalous, were thus given a metaphysical sense of purpose. The world of the Ballets Russes is brilliantly mirrored in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 film The Red Shoes. Essentially a study of gay tyranny, the film shows how a Diaghilev-like figure named Lermontov (Anton Walbrook, himself openly gay) forces the ballerina Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) to choose between love and art, thus destroying her.

In fact, Diaghilev treated his ballerinas more or less benevolently. In 1911, when Nijinsky's sister Bronislava married another dancer, Diaghilev gave her an expensive sapphire ring, although he didn't fail to inform her that it was to "wed her to her art". He gave similar rings to Nijinsky and Massine, and in their case the message was clear: they were to remain faithful to him and to ballet. But then art, for the exiled Diaghilev, was a homeland. He had lost his religion early in life, he feared death, and he longed for the transcendent. Of all the wonders that the world had to offer, only art promised immortality.

Diaghilev died as he had lived, on credit. His last days were spent in Venice, and after his death, friends had to pay his hotel bill. He left behind him, however, a heritage so rich that we are only now beginning to get its measure. As Prokoviev presciently observed, Diaghilev is "a giant, undoubtedly the only one whose dimensions increase the more he recedes into the distance".