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That Serge Diaghilev believed in Russian art and its spirit can never be doubted. His company, the Ballets Russes, exploded every myth about dance. From its start at the specially redecorated Théâtre du Châtelet on 19 May, 1909, until his and his company’s death in the summer of 1929, every conceivable artistic development had been reflected in its repertoire, which was choreographed and danced by an unequalled galaxy of balletic genius, leaving a glamour and legacy without rival even today. The company was originally made up of dancers on summer leave from St Petersburg and Moscow, including Tamara Karsavina, Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinksy and Adolph Bolm. They danced new works choreographed on them by Mikhail Fokine. The fin du siècle world of Marius Petipa was challenged and replaced by a series of one-act ballets in which costumes, décor, music, lighting, dance and mime formed a colourful dramatic whole. On Diaghilev’s invitation the young Igor Stravinsky composed The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring in quick succession. For The Rite of Spring Fokine was supplanted by Nijinsky as choreographer – a vivid example of Diaghilev’s ruthlessness in the pursuit of his artistic ambition. As a result of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, the company was marooned in Western Europe. This subsequent period was dominated choreographically by Léonide Massine, Bronislava Nijinska and George Balanchine successively. Léon Bakst and Alexandre Benois as designers, gave way to the likes of Pablo Picasso and André Derain, though Stravinsky remained. Surviving a financial disaster with The Sleeping Princess (Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty) in London in 1921, the company eventually settled in Monte Carlo, where it worked until Diaghilev’s death. Beneath all the changes and triumphs – and the occasional failure and titanic rows – the personality of Diaghilev was the company’s constant animating, artistic and cultural force.

The banner photograph is of the 1909 ballet Les Sylphides, choreographed by Mikhail Folkine, designed by Alexandre Benois was taken in 1911 when Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes were in London for the coronation of King George V.  This picture, taken in 1911, was reproduced in Ballet Panorama: An Illustrated Chronicle of Three Centuries (A.L. Haskell 1938). Wikimedia Commons

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Some fragments:

from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917)

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table; …

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;  …

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’  …

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?  …

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;  …

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

from The Waste Land (1922)

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.  …

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.  …

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag —  …

‘On Margate Sands.

I can connect

Nothing with nothing.’  …

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

from The Hollow Men (1925)

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpieces filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass. …

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

For many, T. S. Eliot’s early poetry is the voice of Modernism, but he is an unlikely flagbearer for the movement. The son of a Boston Brahmin family with strict Unitarian principles, he ended his life as a naturalised Briton, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and a member of the Order of Merit. It was three years only after the publication of The Hollow Men that he declared himself: ‘a classicist in literature, a Royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion’.

‘In my beginning is my end.’  (Four Quartets  1943, East Coker  1940 )

As a young man, leaving Harvard for a year in Europe, he was much influenced by French Symbolist poets, and wrote some of his early poetry in French. After a year in Paris, 1910 – 1911, and a brief return to Harvard, he settled in England for most of the remainder of his life. His friendship with the ultra-Modernist, Ezra Pound, had a direct influence upon the composition of his most celebrated Modernist work, The Waste Land (1922). He acknowledged Pound’s influence in his dedication of the poem:

For Ezra Pound

Il miglior fabbro

 His widow, Valerie, published the annotated manuscripts and typescripts in 1971 which revealed just how much of the jagged incoherence was owed to Pound: he stripped out and re-shaped much of Eliot’s originally more conventional and formal prosody.

Eliot’s originality had been established earlier, however, in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) dedicated to a French friend, Jean Verdenal, killed at the Dardanelles. The accompanying quotation from Dante expresses love for a departed friend. Multi-cultural references abound in Eliot’s work. My opening fragments echo Chaucer and Dante as well as the obvious Shakespeare. For Eliot, past tradition had to be incorporated into and transformed by the modern(ist) writer. He found some inspiration for this in the world of ballet.

He was a great admirer of Diaghilev’s creation of the Gesamtkunstwerk in which all elements – story, music, décor, choreography – were commissioned to form a complete whole, as in Parade seen in London’s 1919 season where Cocteau, Satie, Picasso and Massine collaborated; but he was also admiring of the deep-rooted traditions of Russian ballet and folklore which were the starting points for creation.

Eliot’s London Letter, published in The Dial (Oct. 1921) reviews the revival of The Rite of Spring in the Ballets Russes’ London season that year:

‘Whether Stravinsky’s music be permanent or ephemeral I do not know; but it did seem to transform the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motorhorn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to transform these despairing noises into music.’

Eliot published The Waste Land, his own transformation of the ‘despairing noises of modern life’, the following year.

There is much uncorroborated speculation and much accurately referenced detail to link Eliot to the world of dance, and to the Ballets Russes in particular.

John Hayward, his friend and editor, assumed that the ‘spectre of a rose reference in Little Gidding (1942) was derived from Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne Burial. Eliot corrected him: ‘I suppose it is reminiscence, but I was thinking of the ballet.’ If he saw the ballet, it must have been during his Paris year. He preferred Massine’s choreography of The Rite of Spring to that danced by Nijinsky, which seems to corroborate visits to the 1911 Paris season. His admiration for Massine led him to push for an invitation to dinner with him, and his subsequent references in Dial and Criterion essays to the ‘impersonal’ nature of the dancer’s art, where hard work, discipline and painfully acquired technique turn the artist into a vessel  in which tradition is invoked and reinvented lies behind many of his ideas on art and writing in the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919). In this essay he claims that a poet must embody ‘the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer’, while simultaneously expressing their contemporary environment.

In his London Letter, The Dial, July 1921, while anticipating seeing the new season of the Ballets Russes, he remembers their 1919 season and comments on its importance as a model: ‘what is needed of art is a simplification of current life into something rich and strange.’

Shakespeare’s The Tempest is referenced throughout The Waste Land but this reference to Ariel’s song is particularly echoed in the poem’s first section: ‘the drowned Phoenician sailor/(Those are pearls that were his eyes}’

Both Eliot and Yeats saw the contemporary ballet (Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan and Diaghilev’s company) as the inspiration for their visions of new types of theatre.

Valerie Eliot stated that Eliot had the marionette in Petrushka in mind when creating the Straw Men in The Hollow Men (1925).

There are come celebrated references to dance in the Four Quartets.

In Burnt Norton  (1936) dance is invoked to signify ‘the eternal moment’ (to cite E. M. Forster’s story title) the transcendent moment both in and out of time:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement form nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

[The Bloomsbury Group, of which Eliot could be said to be an occasional member, was paradoxically focused on the transience and confusion of life, as in ‘stream of consciousness’, and art’s ability to fix and find significant form in it. J. M. Keynes, a central member, married Lydia Lopokhova of Diaghilev’s company.]

In the first section of East Coker Eliot, returning to his ancestral English roots, and the village where his ashes are now interred, quotes his Tudor predecessor, Sir Thomas Elyot:

“The association of man and woman

In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie –

A dignified and commodious sacrament.

Two and two, necessarye coniunction,

Holding eceh other by the handor the arm

Which betokeneth concorde”

Significant patterning, but linked in this section to the rhythm of the seasons in country life, rooted in:

“Dung and death.”

At the end of the second section:

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

Gone to the darkness which awaits us all.

In the third section, the paradoxical link between movement and stillness is joined to meditation:

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing.

This reaches a culmination at the very end of East Coker:

Here and there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union. A deeper communion

I am going to interleave two passages from Eliot’s essay Four Elizabethan Dramatists (1924) with extracts from East Coker and The Dry Salvages  (1941) to suggest the ways in which dance can be seen to have influenced his thinking and to emerge in his writing:

Anyone who has observed one of the great dancers of the Russian school will have observed that the man or woman whom we admire is a being who exists only during the performances, that it is a personality, a vital flame, which appears from nowhere, disappears into nothing and is complete and sufficient in its appearance.

As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment   [East Coker]

The difference between a great dancer and a merely competent dancer is in the vital flame, that impersonal, and , if you like, the inhuman force which transpires between each of the great dancer’s movements.

Here the past and future

Are conquered, and reconciled,

Where action were otherwise movement

Of that which is merely moved

And has in it no source of movement –

Driven by daemonic, chthonic

Powers.   [The Dry Salvages]

In the concluding Quartet, [Little Gidding], Eliot ends the second section dialogue with the ‘familiar compound ghost … of some dead master’ with this invocation of purgatorial release:

“From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit

Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire

Where you must move in measure like a dancer.”

In Section V, as a conclusion to the entire sequence, he employs the image of dancing to signify the pleasing effect of a successful poem:

The complete consort dancing together

In homage to Eliot’s consistent theme of the renewing of tradition, I should like to trace a less obvious. But no less significant sequence culminating at the conclusion of The Four Quartets which reveals the transformation of tradition, making:

My words echo/ Thus in your mind. [Burnt Norton]

In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, IV, iv, Prince Florizel is trying to evoke his admiration for Perdita in the guise of the queen of the feast:

When you do dance I wish you

A wave of the sea, that you might ever do

Nothing but that, move still, still so,

And own no other function. Each your doing,

So singular in each particular,

Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds,

That all your acts are queens.

Shakespeare uses exactly the same puns on ‘still’ to mean both permanence and continuity, and ‘move’ to mean both motion and emotion, which Eliot employs in the opening of section V of Burnt Norton:

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

[Keats employs one of these puns in his Ode: On a Grecian Urn:

‘Thou still unravish’d bride’.]

The paradoxical tension between stillness and movement which is so essential to ballet is evoked in Florizel’s image of the wave, particularly the still point, the zen moment beloved of surfers, when the wave gathers its energy before breaking. Shakespeare brilliantly requires us to enact that moment by making the line metrically deficient, requiring a pause between the two ‘stiil’s; Eliot drops the line between the two key words to achieve a similar effect.

Observers felt that Nijinsky achieved some such still point at the height of his leap. A moment in and out of time.

At the conclusion of The Four Quartets, Eliot reaches into his memory and finds:

the stillness/ Between two waves of the sea.

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‘Improvement’, wrote William Blake, ‘makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without improvement, are the roads of Genius.’ Was Sergei Diaghilev a ‘genius’? I’ve met people, knowledgeable people, who protest that he wasn’t. He was a highly-effective talent-spotter, they argue, an ingenious synthesizer of others’ skills; but if he had a talent of his own, wasn’t it simply for delegation – that, and an unabashed flair for self-promotion?

Even if that were true, as a musician one fact stands out for me like a blinding light. Look at the number of twentieth century ballet scores that have become regulars in the concert hall – not just in selected and edited ‘suites’, but also as complete self-standing ‘works’ in their own right. An astonishing number of them were Diaghilev commissions. To take only the ones heard entire, as composed for Diaghilev, there are Debussy’s Jeux, Ravel’s Daphnis & Chloe, Satie’s Parade, Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, not to mention five of the greatest (some would say the greatest) Stravinsky ballet scores: The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Les Noces, Pulcinella. Not only are they widely popular and much-admired today, a century after they were composed, but the Debussy, the Ravel and all five of the Stravinskys are seminal works, exerting a huge influence on the development of music as an art in its own right. Doesn’t this alone indicate that even if Diaghilev was just a talent-spotter, he has a right to be considered a talent-spotter of genius?

Blake’s comment about ‘crooked roads’ provides a helpful shaft of light. Look in most small reference books and you will commonly find Diaghilev credited as a ‘ballet impresario’, fairly often with the words ‘great’ or ‘greatness’ lurking somewhere in the background. In all probability the imagination will start to construct a brief speculative biography: a sensitive Russian boy with a highly developed imagination is taken to the court theatre at an impressionable age, is entranced and bowled over, and conceives a dream. Perhaps the dream requires a little modification: it’s soon clear that he won’t become a dancer – but to create ballets… And from that small but potent seed a colossal, luxuriant tree grows, providing shelter and nourishment for a wide range of exotic and wonderful creatures: dancers, choreographers, designers and, of course, composers.

In fact the road to the Ballets Russes was much more crooked than that. Young Sergei’s first dream, or the first one that consolidated into a sustained ambition, was to become a composer. At an early age he was given piano and singing lessons, and it soon became clear that he had a significant talent. A little later he composed a song, or ‘romance’, the style of the father-figure of Russian musical nationalism, Mikhail Glinka, entitled Do you remember, Maria?, the manuscript carefully preserved by his beloved stepmother. Poignantly it is Diaghilev’s only known surviving composition, but more were to follow. When the previously prosperous Diaghilev family fell on hard times, Sergei agreed to follow the practical career option of studying law at St Petersburg University, but increasingly he gravitated towards the world-famous Conservatory of Music, where he graduated in 1892, aged twenty.

Typically, Diaghilev threw himself into St Petersburg’s high-end musical life, becoming a regular at the most prestigious musical soirées, acquainting himself with the works of the famous ‘Mighty Handful’, or ‘Russian Five’, prominent amongst them Mussorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov. He conceived a passion for Tchaikovsky, and news of the latter’s surprisingly premature death in 1893 shook him profoundly, apparently leaving its mark on the violin sonata he was writing at the time. ‘If I were to give it a name,’ Diaghilev wrote, ‘it would be something like this: “The death of Tchaikovsky in particular and the death of all people in general”.’ (Death was to be lifelong morbid obsession for Diaghilev, as it had been for Tchaikovsky.) At the same time, he was nurturing a secret veneration for the music and ideas of Wagner – secret because Wagner was dirty word for many nationalists in Russia at that time. Here perhaps we get a clearer indication of the kind of ‘genius’ Diaghilev was to become. For Wagner, music could not exist fully on its own, as an art-form in its own right. The splitting of the arts into separate life-forms was sign of the rot at the heart of the development of Western civilization. What was needed was a bringing together again, a ‘total work of art’ (Gesamtkunstwerk).

If that provided one pointer along the crooked road, so soon did another more devastating one. In great excitement Diaghilev took his manuscripts to Rimsky-Korsakov, then widely regarded as the outstanding composition teacher in Russia. The encounter was recorded by one of Rimsky’s closest friends, Vasily Yastrebsky. Apparently Rimsky told him how he had been visited by ‘some young man named Diaghilev, who fancies himself a great composer.’ Rimsky pronounced Diaghilev’s efforts ‘absurd’, whereupon Diaghilev swept grandly from the room, informing Rimsky that his verdict would come to occupy a shameful place in his biography and make him repent his rash words, but by then, of course it would be too late! But despite his defiance, Diaghilev was crushed, and the dream died.

Was Rimsky right? It’s worth noting that Rimsky also failed to spot the budding genius of his pupil Igor Stravinsky (despite what the latter subsequently claimed). Diaghilev’s realisation that he had seen what Rimsky hadn’t, and in the process effectively launched the career of one of the century’s musical Titans, must have given him satisfaction. So too must the vehement public protests of Rimsky’s widow, more than a decade later, when Diaghilev staged his own ballet production of Rimsky’s hugely popular tone poem Sheherazade. Diaghilev’s next step along his circuitous road (after a period of desolate self-questioning) was to try to reinvent himself as an art connoisseur, in which he eventually had some success. The lasting beneficial effect of that can be appreciated in accounts of the sheer visual spectacle of the Ballets Russes’s landmark productions. But as Diaghilev’s Finnish near-contemporary, the composer Jean Sibelius, was to come to realise, it is often from failures and broken dreams that the finest and most lasting achievements grow.

And so we have those extraordinary ballet scores. How much Diaghilev communicated specific suggestions and requests isn’t always easy to tell: understandably composers like to cover their tracks when it comes to acknowledging the input of others into ‘their’ creative work. And Diaghilev’s overbearing, Svengali-like character does seem to have had the effect of making his some of his protégés want to downplay his influence in retrospect. It’s quite possible that some of them read his desires and expectations by a kind of mental osmosis, rather like the mysterious way some great conductors have immediately changed the sound an orchestra made just by stepping onto the platform – there are several trustworthy accounts of the legendary Wilhelm Furtwängler having exactly that effect. Reading Stravinsky’s accounts of his breakthrough collaboration with Diaghilev on Firebird, however, one notes the keen interest Diaghilev took in the appearance of Stravinsky’s sketches on the piano stand, and his concern to involve Stravinsky in the practical processes of preparing the epochal first performance in 1910. Playing the piano for the dancers in rehearsal Stravinsky clearly learned a great deal about how the human body moves, and how music can prompt it to even greater heights of agility and expressive elegance. So many of Stravinsky’s scores from Firebird onwards – including those written purely for the concert hall – manifest an extraordinary flair for ‘sprung’ rhythms, the kind of rhythms you can’t hear without wanting in some way to move along with them.

Rhythm is such a feature of the classic Diaghilev scores that it’s hard to believe he wasn’t in some way its presiding genius. With his Wagner-enhanced feeling for the melodic and rhythmic patterns of speech, and of how they mark the character of a culture’s folk music – so vitally and vibrantly in the case of Russian folk music – Diaghilev clearly communicated something similar to his composers. Stravinsky’s music pre-Firebird shows no special flair for rhythm – in fact it can be rather foursquare. But there, in the climactic dance for Kashchei, are those amazing pounding, heart-stoppingly asymmetrical dance patterns that seem to yank the dancers up and twist and jerk them around like puppets. The astonishing, elemental rhythmic innovations of The Rite of Spring, which three years later was to explode like a bomb on a stunned Paris, were surely conceived here. If it had just been Stravinsky then Diaghilev’s putative influence could perhaps be discounted. But what about the weird dissociative games Debussy plays with his basic waltz-tempo in Jeux, not like anything he’d ever done before; and what about the most un-Ravel-like Dionysian 5/4 dance that ends Daphnis and Chloe, premiered the year before The Rite of Spring? Knowing that there were dancers who could dance to this sort of thing would have been an encouragement – perhaps. Even so the Ballet Russes troupe found they could only cope with Ravel’s alarming metrical patterns by chanting Ser-gei-dia-ghi-lev along to the music. Even in the basic pulse, Diaghilev’s name was imprinted on the music.

Diaghilev’s early involvement with the most progressively-minded musical circles in St Petersburg, and later at Wagner’s Bayreuth and in radical-chic Paris, also clearly helped him understand something else: the titillating appeal of the appetisingly shocking novelty. Nothing set the tills ringing like a scandal – as Richard Strauss had recently discovered after the sensational shock-impact premiere of his opera Salome. ‘Salome will do Strauss a lot of damage!’ opined the Kaiser; ‘So much damage’, Strauss observed wryly, ‘that with the takings I was able to build my villa at Garmisch.’ Where better in the world to exploit the success de scandale than in the city that gave the world that very phrase, Paris. And when Paris threw up its exquisite hands in delighted horror, the rest of the world, slowly but surely, would follow. At all costs avoid getting stuck in a rut: so when people come to expect the perfumed exoticism of Firebird, give them the spit-sawdust-and-vodka-fume realism of Petrushka; when they’ve just about accustomed themselves to the ear-splitting dissonances of Rite of Spring, give them the faux-naivety and absurdity (foghorns, gunshots and musical typewriters thrown in) of Satie’s Parade; and then, when they think they’re prepared for anything, give them the half-ironic, half-affectionate eighteenth-century parody of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella – in the process launching Stravinsky’s equally notorious ‘neo-classical’ period. Should Diaghilev be given major credit for that too? It would appear so.

Above all there was his love of opulence, of spectacle, of luxury: ‘You want an orchestra with a hundred players? Leave it to me.’ And there’s something else that Diaghilev must have realised, if only intuitively, something that often gets forgotten in histories of the major developments in twentieth century music. The list of hugely influential and hugely popular innovative Diaghilev scores – to which the names of Prokofiev, Poulenc and Respighi should also be added – reminds us something important which often gets forgotten by today’s new music champions: challenging new musical ideas go down a lot better when they’re helped by a good story and plenty of strong visual aids. (Pop video producers have known that for a long time.)  Perhaps once again Diaghilev has something to important to teach composers and promoters, something we need to hear.

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