Yesterday’s Music History Monday marked the death of the Russian impresario and polymath Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929). Serge Diaghilev was a facilitator of genius. His special gift was for “creative administration.” He could spot talent from 100 miles away, then bring that talent together, all the while imposing his own taste, vision, artistic and aesthetic will on a project. He was a narcissist, an egomaniac, and a born leader, who created a way of doing things that had not existed before him. The medium of ballet was Diaghilev’s all-inclusive art form – his gesamtkunstwerke – and through ballet he managed to influence almost all the arts of his time, not just dance but music, theater, painting, literature, design, fashion, and early cinema as well. It was Serge Diaghilev who gave the young Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) the opportunity to become Stravinsky. Without Diaghilev, Stravinsky would never have become an international sensation at the age of 28. Without Diaghilev, some of Stravinsky’s greatest masterworks – Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Les Noces, and Pulcinella would never have been composed. Without Diaghilev, twentieth century music and dance would have evolved in a manner entirely different than it did, and not for the better. But thanks to […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for Serge Diaghilev
On June 25, 1910 – 108 years ago today – Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird received its premiere at the Paris Opera House, in a ballet performance produced by Serge Diaghilev, staged by the Ballets Russes, and conducted by Gabriel Pierné. With choreography by Michel Fokine and the Firebird herself danced by the great Tamara Karsavina, The Firebird was a smash, a sensation, a runaway hit from the first. The not-quite 28-year-old Stravinsky was hailed as the successor to the Moguchaya Kuchka, the Russian Five, the group of nineteenth-century composers who put Russian nationalist music on the international musical map: Mily Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Modest Musorgsky, Alexander Borodin, and Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Writing in the Nouvelle Revue française, the critic Henri Ghéon called The Firebird: “the most exquisite marvel of equilibrium that we have ever imagined between sounds, movements, and forms: [a] danced symphony.” There’s no need to quote additional reviews, because one after the other, they echo the one just quoted. Thanks to The Firebird’s triumph, the young Stravinsky instantly became the star composer of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, in which capacity he would turn out the magnificent Petrushka in 1911 and the seminal The Rite of Spring in 1913. The Firebird is […]
Continue ReadingMay 29 was an incredibly rich day in music history. So much to write about, so little space! Check it out. On May 29, 1801 – 216 years ago today – Joseph Haydn’s final masterwork, The Season, received its public premiere at the Redoutensaal: the still-extant great ballroom in the Imperial Palace (Hofburg) in central Vienna. (FYI: Wikipedia gives the date of this premiere as being May 19. Incorrecto!) For our further information, among the audience was Haydn’s one-time “student”, Ludwig van Beethoven. 157 years ago today – on May 29, 1860 – the composer Isaac Albéniz was born in Camprodón, Spain. Albéniz was a brilliant pianist and as evidenced by his suite for piano Iberia (written between 1905-1909), a composer of genius. May 29, 1910 saw the death of Mily Balakirev in St. Petersburg; May 29, 1922 saw the birth of the composer Iannis Xenakis in Braila, Roumania. Finally – because I cannot not mention it before going on – May 29 marks the 320 anniversary of the assassination of the 44 year-old Italian castrato Giovanni Grossi (known popularly as “Siface”). One of the most famous singers of the entire Baroque era, Siface met his end on May 29, […]
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