Word: diaghilev
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Promoter. Serge Pavlovich Diaghilev had also once applied to Rimsky-Korsakov for advice, and, the story goes, was told to try some other line of work. Diaghilev was a rich young fellow with an itch to dabble in the arts. Vain and hot-tempered but a man of impeccable taste, he decided that if he couldn't be a great artist himself he could encourage and sponsor men who were. In Paris he put on a giant show of Russian art, a series of concerts of Russian music, and the first Parisian performance of Musorgsky's great opera...
...Diaghilev's "Ballet Russe" took Europe's breath away; and kept it breathless for a generation. The Ballet's heyday was a succession of champagne parties, command performances and brilliant triumphs; all the first-rate artists of the day were caught up in it: composers like Ravel, Richard Strauss and DeFalla; artists like Picasso, Matisse, Bakst and Rouault; dancers like Nijinsky and Karsavina; choreographers like Fokine, Massine and Balanchine...
...standing on a chair, screaming sixteen, seventeen, eighteen'-they had their own method of counting time. [But] naturally the poor dancers could hear nothing ... I had to hold Nijinsky by his clothes, for he was furious, and ready to dash on to the stage at any moment . . . Diaghilev kept ordering the electricians to turn the lights on or off, hoping in that way to put a stop to the noise...
Before the gendarmes arrived, Stravinsky scrambled out a backstage window. At 2 in the morning he piled into a cab with Nijinsky, Diaghilev and his friend Jean Cocteau, and drove through the Bois de Boulogne. Cocteau remembers: "We were silent; the night was cool and clear. The odor of the acacias told us we had reached the first trees. Coming to the lakes, Diaghilev, bundled up in opossum, began mumbling in Russian . . . tears running down [his] cheeks...
Daughter of a Scottish civil engineer, Moira had her first dancing lessons at six in Southern Rhodesia from a former member of Diaghilev's famed company. Two years ago she made her first big London hit as Princess Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty...