Gay Icons Of The Past #6: The Gay Impresario Who Changed The World

[PeterRS]

To be openly gay in the latter days of the Russian Empire was extremely risky. Its most celebrated composer Tchaikovsky, especially famous for his music to the ballets “Swan Lake”, “The Nutcracker” and “Sleeping Beauty”, had agonized whilst keeping his homosexuality private.  His death in 1893 was officially due to cholera. Some researchers now believe he was forced to commit suicide after a threat of being ‘outed’ by a group of princeling students. He was just 53.

One Russian had few concerns about keeping his gay life private. An avowed homosexual, he was destined to change forever the way the world looked at art and the performing arts. Born in 1872, Serge Diaghilev, son of a bankrupt vodka distiller, spent his early years near the Russian city of Perm. At the age of 18 he moved to the capital, St. Petersburg, where he soon managed to find himself part of an artistically-inclined gay clique. With these new friends, he would socialize, swap boyfriends and occasionally cruise for trade in the city’s parks. According to the composer Nicolas Nabokov, “he was perhaps the first grand homosexual who asserted himself and was accepted as such by society.”

In the first decade of the 20th century, St. Petersburg was the place to be if you wanted to work in the classical arts. By 1906 Diaghilev was making a name for himself. He was asked to mount an exhibition of Russian art in Paris. Two years later he again visited Paris with a production of the opera “Boris Godunov” featuring the most famous bass voice of the age, Fyodor Chaliapin. 

 

The tombstone of Chaliapin in Moscow

But it was ballet the French really wanted to see, for the Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg was famed as the finest in the world. So in 1909 Diaghilev persuaded its best dancers to spend their summer holidays in Paris where he would mount a season performed under the title Les Ballets Russes.

The season was a massive success. The exciting new choreography and bold new designs had a far more general appeal than to just the usual aristocratic ballet audience. As important was the astounding virtuosity of the lead dancers. Anna Pavlova (the Pavlova dessert of meringue, fruit and lashings of cream is named after her) was one of the prima ballerinas, but it was the astonishing lead male dancer who utterly electrified Paris. Everyone wanted to see the young, withdrawn and innocent star, Vaslav Nijinsky. Other than showing Paris his extraordinary leaps when he seemed suspended in the air and his supreme emotional involvement on stage, Diaghilev had another reason for wanting Nijinsky on this tour. The two had become lovers with Diaghilev holding an almost Svengali-like hold over his 20-year old protégé. 

Becoming a full member of the Imperial Ballet at the tender age of 17, Nijinsky quickly became a star. He also attracted the attention of the very rich playboy Prince Lvov. Lvov took the shy dancer under his wing – and into his bed – showering him and his family with gifts. Nijinsky was probably not at the time - and may never have been - homosexual. “I loved him because I knew he wished me well,” he is quoted as saying. “Well?” Perhaps, but Lvov was also a good friend of Diaghilev and had no hesitation in lending him Nijinsky for a night or two. Innocent though he might have been, the young dancer knew well that Diaghilev could further his career. So he left Lvov to live with Diaghilev.

Diaghilev with composer Igor Stravinsky 

So successful was that season of Les Ballet Russes that the ensemble was to continue to appear in Paris before and after World War 1, soon becoming a full-time company. The scope of Diaghilev’s achievement was enormous. Composers like Stravinsky, Debussy and Prokofiev, artists like Picasso, Kandinsky and Matisse, and fashion designer Coco Chanel were engaged to create works that were becoming increasingly more avant-garde. And then there were the scandals! Nijinsky wanted more artistic freedom. Diaghilev let him choreograph a work to the music of Claude Debussy. In “L’après-midi d’un faune”, Nijinsky caused a sensation when he appeared to be slowly masturbating with a scarf prior to a brief orgasmic shudder. But the outcry that followed was nothing compared to the riot which took place during the first night of Nijinsky’s choreography for Stravinsky’s brutal, pagan-like “Rite of Spring” which ends with a human sacrifice. Paris was in uproar. No one was more pleased than Diaghilev. “Exactly what I wanted,” he exclaimed!

 

Painting of Nijinsky with the famous scarf

Diaghilev had a premonition he would die at sea. So when the company travelled to South America in 1913, he did not go. Unknown to him, one of the company’s aspiring students had her eye on Nijinsky. She made sure they became close on the long sea voyage and then arranged their marriage in Buenos Aires. On learning the news Diaghilev was incensed! He immediately fired his lover. What did he care? There were plenty more young men in the company and he was to be involved in affairs with several of them. For Nijinsky it was a total disaster. At his wife’s urging, on their return he attempted to run his own company – without success. Soon he started suffering from schizophrenia. Over the years the most famous dancer of all time was examined by many psychiatrists including Sigmund Freud. To no avail. After his last public performance aged just 27 he spent the rest of his life in an out of asylums.

A typical impresario whose love of his work often exceeded his ability to finance it, Diaghilev continued to invite an ever-expanding group of young artists and composers to work with his company. By far his greatest legacy is that from the ranks of the Ballet Russes came the founders of London’s Royal Ballet and New York’s City Ballet. Another completely resurrected the near-moribund Paris Opera Ballet. All three are now amongst the world’s finest.

Diaghilev himself died penniless in Venice aged 57. Although his career with the Ballet Russes had spanned less than 25 years, in that time he had revolutionised the worlds of music, dance, theatre and the visual arts as no one else in history.

[TotallyOz]

Beautiful read. Thank you!