Sergei Diaghilev

Sergei Diaghilev never choreographed, never danced and never composed, and the Ballets Russes he ran for twenty years is the single most influential enterprise in twentieth-century performing art. He was a provincial nobleman's son who came to St Petersburg to study law, was told by Rimsky-Korsakov that he had no talent for music, and turned instead to editing and exhibiting - the magazine Mir Iskusstva, then exhibitions of Russian painting, then Russian concerts and opera in Paris. The ballet company followed in 1909 and never performed in Russia at all. What he had was judgement and the nerve to commission: Stravinsky was an unknown of twenty-seven when Diaghilev asked him for The Firebird, and then Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, whose premiere in 1913 produced the most famous riot in the history of music. He put Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Derain and Chanel to work on sets and costumes, and Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Falla and Prokofiev on scores. He made stars of Nijinsky, Pavlova, Karsavina, Massine and Balanchine, and his affairs with several of his male dancers were the engine and the wreckage of the company by turns - Nijinsky was expelled for marrying. He was superstitious, terrified of the sea, and died of untreated diabetes in Venice in 1929, broke; the company dissolved within weeks. He is buried on San Michele near Stravinsky. Balanchine took the method to America and founded New York City Ballet on it. Coco Chanel paid for the 1920 revival of The Rite of Spring and kept it quiet for decades. He is said to have told Cocteau to astonish him, which became the standard account of how he commissioned. The company never had a permanent home and toured continuously for twenty years.

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