David Dickinson: Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

The lights went out very slowly in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. The stage was dark at first. Balakirev’s music was filled with foreboding, a sad and tragic melody that set the mood for the ballet. As the curtain rose, a great room was revealed, with mauve and purple walls and a green ceiling. There was a fire with a dying glow and on a huge divan lay the sleeping figure of Thamar, Queen of Georgia, stirring uneasily in her sleep.

The date was 12 June 1912, and this was the London premiere of the Ballets Russes’s Thamar , first performed in Paris. The year before, Diaghilev’s company had taken London by storm. They had danced in front of the King and Queen. They had danced on a specially constructed stage at Strawberry Hill and been invited to all the finest society houses. Rupert Brooke had come down from Grantchester fifteen times to see them. A more puritan figure perhaps, Leonard Woolf, former civil servant in Ceylon, had been entranced. Harvey Nichols cleared their windows of the white cream and lilac of summer fashion and replaced them with hangings in the style of Léon Bakst, the artistic director of the company.

At the centre of the Ballets Russes was a pair of lovers. Sergei Diaghilev, thirty-nine years old, broad chested with a homburg hat tilted low over his eyes, a cane always in his hand, was the founder, impresario and inspiration behind the venture. His ballets were set to music by the finest Russian composers, from Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov to Stravinsky. His sets and costumes, designed by Léon Bakst, brought an air of the exotic and the erotic Orient to the more restrained capitals of Western Europe. Diaghilev had met Tolstoy and conversed with Oscar Wilde. He, like most of the company, spoke hardly any English. French, the lingua franca of the Russian intelligentsia in St Petersburg, was also the language of the dance. Large, and running to fat because of his love of food, Diaghilev was believed by Osbert Sitwell to have only three words of English, ‘more chocolate cake’.

Diaghilev was the foremost impresario of his age. His career began in St Petersburg with the launch of a magazine called World of Art . He organized a major exhibition of Russian portrait paintings, travelling across the vast country in search of forgotten artists and lost masterpieces. He had no home of his own. He lived in hotels where he sometimes left without paying the bill. He was neurotic, superstitious, disorganized. Rehearsals were a form of controlled chaos that somehow managed to come right on the night. For several years now he had refused to send letters, preferring the more immediate telephone or cable, which lent themselves better to panic and hysteria. In spite of all this he managed to run the finances, the publicity, the choice of ballets. He teetered permanently on the fringe of bankruptcy.

Diaghilev’s favourite place in the world was Venice. Something about the watery city soothed his troubled spirit. Here, after all, his great hero Richard Wagner had composed the second act of Tristan und Isolde in the Palazzo Giustinian and died in the Ca’ Vendramin Calergi on the Grand Canal. Like Diaghilev, Wagner’s life was characterized by political exile, turbulent love affairs and repeated flights from his creditors.

Diaghilev loved the shimmering waters of the Grand Canal, the palazzos in their Gothic glory, the pompous grandeur and self-importance of the Doge’s Palace, the sense that the entire place was a stage set waiting for one more performance, that opera singers or ballet dancers might suddenly drift out from behind the Hotel Danieli on the waterfront and perform in the great drawing room of St Mark’s Square. His favourite hotel was the Grand Hotel des Bains on the lido, built at the turn of the century for Europe’s rich, in flight from harsher winter climes. Diaghilev was consumed by the desire for artistic perfection. He was supremely Russian but now lived mainly abroad. To his great regret, he had never been able to take his Ballets Russes to St Petersburg. He had problems with the administration of the Imperial Theatre. He had enemies in the Imperial Court.

One of his famous ballerinas was very young when she joined the Ballets Russes and would later say that she always called Diaghilev ‘Sergypops’. Diaghilev’s paramour was the young dancer from the Imperial Ballet, Vaslav Nijinsky. He was already the most famous dancer in the world, apparently able to hang in the air and perform impossible leaps. He drew audiences into theatres like a human magnet.

When Thamar, Queen of Georgia, wakes, she waves a scarf through her window to entice a passing suitor into her castle. When the Prince arrives in his astrakhan cap and huge black cloak, she initially rejects his advances, but fervent dancing follows and the pair kiss. There is a wild Caucasian dance, a kaleidoscope of tossing sleeves and flashing boots where real daggers thud into the floor. The lovers embrace, then they leave the room and the Queen’s followers continue dancing wildly. When the Queen and Prince re-enter, she suddenly stabs him and he falls through a secret panel into the river below. The Queen returns to the window to signal to a new victim with her scarf.

The Covent Garden audience gave the performance a standing ovation. The ballet wasn’t long, but it was like no other ballet the audience had seen before. It was followed by another Diaghilev special, full of Eastern promise, called Scheherazade . When the stars and the corps de ballet came on stage for the final curtain call, there was one notable absentee. Originally it had been Adolph Bolm cast in the role of the Prince in Thamar , but he had been indisposed so an understudy had taken the role instead. The understudy did not appear to take his bow; his body was found below the trapdoor where the Queen had thrown him after she had stabbed him. But this was no mere Russian version of the ancient myth of The King Must Die . The understudy really was dead, stabbed through the heart with one of the daggers used in the dance, as he had been on the stage.

It was hours after the performance before they found the corpse. Sergei Grigoriev, the régisseur who was in charge of all administrative matters, found Diaghilev taking a late supper at the Savoy Hotel with Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina, the ballerina who had danced the title role in Thamar . They were on the second bottle of champagne.

‘Sergei Pavlovich,’ said Grigoriev, ‘you must come back to the theatre at once! Something terrible has happened.’

‘What is it? Can’t you see I’m having my supper?’ The other diners turned to watch the animated conversation in Russian.

‘It’s Taneyev, the understudy who took Bolm’s place in Thamar this evening.’

‘He’s a promising boy, that Alexander Taneyev,’ said Diaghilev. ‘I promoted him to understudy Bolm myself.’

‘Well, he won’t be doing any more work as an understudy,’ Sergei Grigoriev crossed himself three times as fast as he could, ‘not now, he won’t. He’s dead. Stabbed through the heart with one of the daggers used in the ballet. We found him lying in a pool of his own blood.’

‘My God, this is frightful. What an inconsiderate time to die, right at the beginning of a new season. This could ruin everything. Stupid English policemen tramping round the sets of The Firebird and Le Spectre de la Rose in their great boots. God in heaven, it doesn’t bear thinking about.’

Diaghilev stopped for a moment to comfort Tamara Karsavina, who was crying quietly into her oysters. ‘Calm down, child, calm down. You mustn’t ruin your looks.’

Even his critics admitted Diaghilev was a good man in a crisis. By now he had lived through so many of them.

‘Have you told anybody about this, Grigoriev?’