Sjeng Scheijen's Biography of Serge Diaghilev

I just finished reading Sjeng Scheijen's biography of Serge Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes. The author didn't go into too much detail regarding certain events, like the fabled opening of "The Rite of Spring" on May 29, 1913, but filmmakers couldn't resist the spectacle. 

This is from the 2009 film, "Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky." The Ballet Russe had premiered another dance recently, of which the audience disapproved, so they came into this premiere already in a foul mood. The birth of Modernism and a story about Siberian shamans (or Slavic, or Germanic) just wasn't what they wanted that night. 

If I ever think I'm misunderstood, I just watch this clip, and I feel better.

 

Here is a bit from a review of the Sjeng Scheijen's biography:

An itinerant troupe, lurching from season to season on a tide of artistic conflict and rackety financing, the Ballets Russes drew to itself a constellation of talent so lustrous as to transform the theatrical and musical arts forever. At its helm, tirelessly forging deals and collaborations, was Diaghilev. From a purveyor of fashionable exotica such as Scheherazade, which married the music of Rimsky-Korsakov to the virtuosity of Vaslav Nijinsky and the designs of Léon Bakst, he became a pioneer of the avant garde, presenting works such as Parade, which brought together Satie, Cocteau and Picasso. Diaghilev launched the careers of scores of creative luminaries, including Stravinsky and Balanchine, and today most of the world's major classical dance companies can trace their roots, directly or indirectly, to the Ballets Russes.

...That said, this might not be the book for those new to the subject area, for, unlike his predecessors, Scheijen describes the ballets themselves only glancingly. His calculation, presumably, is that the accounts of eye-witnesses such as Sergey Grigoriev (Diaghilev's company manager) and Nijinsky's wife, Romola, have been reproduced so often that they do not bear repetition. But Scheijen takes this policy too far. Of Le Spectre de la Rose, the ballet at the heart of the Nijinsky cult which was so central to the early success of the Ballets Russes, he writes only that it "proved to be an audience favourite". Carnaval, an equally important work by the same choreographer, Mikhail Fokine, doesn't even rate a mention.

...Scheijen's real interest is in the complex and often antagonistic web of male relationships surrounding Diaghilev. Ambitious and celebrity-struck from the start, he had made it his business, by the age of 22, to scrape acquaintance with Tolstoy, Zola, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Verdi and Borodin.

...A decade later, as the editor of the influential Mir iskusstva ("The World of Art"), he was able to mount an exhibition of more than 4,000 historic Russian portraits at the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg, with the Tsar standing surety for the loans.

By then, Diaghilev was part of an upper-crust homosexual coterie whose mores Scheijen describes in diverting detail. The clique included the designers Alexandre Benois and Leon Bakst, and writer Walter Nouvel. They liked to cruise for sex in St Petersburg's Tauride Gardens, boasting of their conquests (mostly hard-up students and cadets), and swapping partners.

...As Scheijen makes clear, the emotional dynamics of the Ballets Russes were as relentless as the financial pressures. Diaghilev was always happy to trample on the feelings of his colleagues if he thought that the outcome merited it and at different times we see Fokine, Benois, Bakst and Nijinsky all desolated by jealousy and injured amour-propre. We are presented with a charming and ruthless tyrant, whose sexual and emotional manipulations of those around him were born of a need for absolute control.