When young Serge Diaghilev set out to save an art form, ballet was not his first choice. The law student from the unpromising city of Perm in the Urals had started the 20th century by wanting to be a composer, until he showed his music to Rimsky-Korsakov, who was simply appalled. Then he switched to curating Russian avant-garde art, which was thrilling but had no international market. Finally, he worked his way around to ballet, which had struck him as silly when he first encountered it. Still, that was half the fun. As his friend Alexandre Benois said later: “He knew how to will a thing, he knew how to carry his will into practice.”
The will in this case involved taking an exhausted, despoiled art form and twisting it into such thrilling new shapes that the world could not help but sit up and take notice. Diaghilev inherited an art practice that was positively sclerotic, churning out nostalgic tales about dying swans and sleeping princesses for an audience composed mainly of middled-aged men who had come to ogle the girls and speculate on whether they wore knickers. His great triumph was to inject Russian ballet – he called his new French-based company the Ballets Russes – with a shot of creative adrenaline so that it was engaged in creating ecstatic moods and moments rather simply retelling implausible stories. At its heart was a new kind of body too, one that could jump as high and fast as before, but also arrange itself with a new graphic vitality. The kind of body, then, that would look right at home in the Paris of cubism and Coco Chanel.
The story of Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes has been told many times before, but no one is able to master it more engagingly than Rupert Christiansen, the veteran opera critic and self-confessed “incurable balletomane”. He comes to his subject with a head stuffed full not just of pas de deux and grands jetés but also all the gossip and scandal that trailed in Diaghilev’s choppy wake. Everyone who was anyone in early 20th-century artistic Europe was attached at some time to his great modernist project, even if they mostly didn’t get paid. Pablo Picasso and Léon Bakst did scenery while Chanel consulted on the wardrobe. The choreographers included Michel Fokine, Léonide Massine and George Balanchine, which is as starry as you can get. Then there were the dancers: Vaslav Nijinsky, who appeared to be able to fly; “butterball” Lydia Lopokova, who married John Maynard Keynes; dying swan Anna Pavlova and Hilda Munnings from Essex, who preferred to be known as Lydia Sokolova.
Whirling around this focal point is a cast of supporting characters including patrons such as Princesse de Polignac, also known as Winnaretta Singer, the sewing machine heiress from Yonkers, and the heroic workhorse Bronislava Nijinska, the dancer’s sister, who may have been “fat, deaf and shouty”, but could whip a corps into line like no other. Christiansen is not an author who feels the need to spare the feelings of his subjects and one of the great joys of this compulsively readable book is his ability to skewer people in a few choice words. So, he informs us that sex with Diaghilev, who was happily gay and went in for “gentlemen’s mischief” with the boys from the ballet, was like having a cuddle “with a nice fat old lady”. In return the ageing lothario liked to give his young friends presents of plus fours. You could always spot who was the current favourite by the width of his trousers.
Quite apart from all this backstage gossip, Christiansen takes us through the Ballets Russes’ peak moments, including the riot in the Paris streets in 1913 that followed the first night of Stravinsky’s dissonant, erotic, baffling ballet The Rite of Spring. He is concerned too to extend the Diaghilev story beyond his early death in 1929. In deft, elegant prose Christiansen takes us through the postwar period, showing us how Diaghilev’s revolutionary vision was carried forward by a corps of British-based star choreographers and dancers including Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, Robert Helpmann, Ninette de Valois, Anton Dolin and Margot Fonteyn. Then of course there is Rudolf Nureyev, who burst out of the Soviet Union in 1961 like a Tatar dervish straight from one of Diaghilev’s fever dreams.
• Diaghilev’s Empire: How the Ballets Russes Enthralled the World is published by Faber (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer order a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
