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Micheline's Blog

~ Art, music, books, history & current events

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Tag Archives: Diaghilev

Léon Bakst & Massenet’s “Thais”

22 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in Art

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Ballet Russes, Diaghilev, Imperial Academy of Arts, Léon Bakst, Michel Fokine, Mir Iskusstva, Paris, Sergei Diaghilev

  
 
Photo Credit: The Red List 
Narcisse, 1911
Comoedia, 1914
Négress, Shéhérazade, 1923
Cléopâtre, 1909
Salomé in La Danse des Sept Voiles, 1908 
 
Music:
Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet (12 May 1842 – 13 August 1912): Méditation from Thaïs, an Opera based on a novel by Anatole France (16 April 1844 – 12 October 1924)
Librettist: Louis Gallet
Violinist: Michael Rabin 
 

Léon Samoilovitch Bakst (1866–1924)

Léon Bakst was a painter who became stage and costume designer for Sergei Diaghilev‘s Ballets Russes, a prominent private ballet company that was active during la Belle Époque (1890-1914), a golden age in France, and remained active until Diaghilev’s death, in 1929, the year the stock market was allowed to crash.

We have already met the cast, so to speak.  When Sergei Diaguilev produced Scheherazade (1910), his star dancer was Vaslav Nijinski, his choreographer, Michel Fokine (23 April 1880 – 22 August 1942) and his stage and costume designer Léon Bakst, whose art I am featuring today.

Biographical Notes

Léon Bakst was Russian and Jewish.  He was born in Grodno (currently Belarus) to a middle-class family and his real name was Lev (Leib) Samoilovich Rosenberg.  He studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts as a noncredit student, working part-time as a book illustrator.(Wikipedia)  Bakst was his mother’s maiden name.

The Mir Iskusstva art movement

Bakts’s association with Sergei Diaghilev dates back to the mid-1890s.  He was first a member of the circle of writers and artists formed by Sergei Diaghilev and Alexandre Benois, which later became the Mir Iskusstva art movement.

In 1899, Bakst co-founded with Sergei Diaghilev the influential periodical Mir Iskusstva, meaning “World of Art.”  It is at that moment that his graphics started to bring him fame.(Wikipedia)

He started showing his work in 1890 as a member of the Society of Watercolourists.  From 1893 to 1897 he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris, but returned to Saint Petersburg often.

During his visits to Saint Petersburg he taught in Zvantseva’s school, where one of his students was Marc Chagall (1908–1910) and, in 1914, one the eve of the Revolution, he was elected a member of the Imperial Academy of Arts.

After 1909, Bakst lived mainly outside Russia.  As a Jew, he had to live in the Pale of Settlement.  He broke with Diaghilev in 1922, traveled to America where he had a patron in art philanthropist  Alice Warder Garrett (1877–1952).  He worked as her personal interior decorator in her Baltimore residence, Evergreen (now a museum and a gallery).

Two years after parting with Diaghilev, he died in Paris of what seems a lung disease.

With Léon Bakst, we are not looking at landscapes and seascapes, but at human beings in full flight.  No backdrop encroaches on the dancer.

I hope you enjoy these few pictures.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
© Micheline Walker
22 August 2012
WordPress
 
composer: Jules Massenet (12 May 1842 – 13 August 1912)
work: Méditation, Thaïs
violinist: Michael Rabin (2 May 1936 – 19 January 1972)
 
45.408358 -71.934658

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The Ballets Russes, Vaslav Nijinsky & George Barbier

27 Friday Jul 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in Art, Music

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Ballet Russes, Diaghilev, Enrico Cecchetti, Marius Petipa, Nijinsky, Paris, Sergei Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky

 
 

The above picture, a pochoir by George Barbier, shows Mikhail Fokin‘s (23 April 1880 – 22 August 1942) choreography of Schéhérazade, danced to music by Mily Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakoff, and starring Nijinsky.  On 12 July 2012, I published a post on Sergei Diaghilev‘s Ballets Russes, an immensely successful corps de ballet or ballet company, founded in 1909,  whose artistic director was Léon Bakst.

Among its stars, Vaslav Nijinsky was probably the finest.  Nijinsky had acquired skills few male ballet dancers had attained, such as dancing en pointe, on his toes.  However, Nijinsky’s career was very short.  It was interrupted by a mental illness, schizophrenia,  that manifested itself when he was at the height of his career, in 1916, approximately.  He died in London, in 1950.

Vaslav Nijinsky was born Wacław Niżyński, in 1889 or 1890 in Kiev, the Ukraine.  His parents were Polish and he was baptised in Warsaw.  In fact, he considered himself a Pole.  Yet, he was born and grew up in Imperial Russia (before the 1917 revolution) and therefore spoke Russian more fluently than Polish.  But the soul has its laws.  He was a Pole.

Nijinsky was trained at the Imperial Ballet School, where his teachers were Enrico Cecchetti, Nikolai Legat and Pavel Gerdt.  At the age of fourteen, he was selected by famed French choreographer’s Marius Petipa to dance the principal role in La Romance d’un Bouton de rose et d’un Papillon (music by Ricardo Drigo, June 30, 1846 – October 1, 1930.  The Russo–Japanese War made it impossible for the ballet to be performed.  However, during this period, Nijinsky played several solo roles and, in 1910, prima ballerina assoluta Mathilde Kschessinka selected him to dance in a revival of French choreographer Marius Petipa‘s Le Talisman, which brought Nijinsky to the fore.  He created a sensation in the role of the Wind God Vayou.

It is at this stage that Nikinsky met Sergei Diaghilev, an impressario who brought Russian art and ballet to the attention of little less than the whole world.  Diaghilev and Nijinsky had an affair, yet Nijinsky married Hungarian countess Romola de Pulszky  when the Ballets Russes were touring in Latin America.  On his return from Latin America, Diaghilev flew into a rage and fired Nijinsky.

Scandal in Paris

Nijinsky may well have been the most celebrated ballet dancer of his time, but after being dismissed by Diaghilev and working as choreographer and ballet dancer, he scandalized the normally broad-minded le tout Paris.  He did so by showing his character miming masturbation with the scarf of a nymph.  Explicit sexuality was a little much even for a Paris audience. Nijinsky had danced to Claude Debussy‘s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune.  Nijinsky also enjoyed wearing revealing costumes, which was and remains acceptable.

Music and Ballet 

Nijinsky and other choreographers danced to music and, in the case of Debussy, contemporary music.  Nijinsky also danced to the music of Igor Stravinsky (17 June 1882 – 6 April 1971).  In fact, impresario Sergei Diaghilev commissioned three works of music for his Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913).  Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring changed music forever and so did, in ballet, Nijinsky’s use of angular movements.  He was a modernist, a visionary.

But, to return to music, it should be noted that much of Russian music is music for ballets (or opera).  Pyotr Illich Tchaikovsky (7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) wrote music for several ballets (The Nutcracker, Swan Lake), and so did Sergei Prokofiev, whose Romeo and Juliet is an almost unsurpassed composition for ballet.  Diaghilev also commissioned the Prodigal Son from Prokofiev, but died before he could make it into a ballet.  It was choreographed by George Balanchine.  Serge Lifar created the role and the ballet premièred on Tuesday, 21 May 1929, at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, in Paris.

Back to Nijinsky: A tribute

As for Nijinsky, he was treated, unsuccessfully, by psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler.  He spent the rest of his life in and out of hospitals and asylums and, as mentioned above, died in London, in 1950.  His body was later moved to a Paris cemetery, in Montmartre.  He had one daughter, Kyra, who married Ukrainian conductor Igor Markevitch.  They had a son but the marriage did not last.  Nijinsky’s continued fame, despite an abruptly and tragically shortened career, constitutes an eloquent tribute as to his exceptional talent.

George Barbier

George Barbier (1882 – 1932), an immensely talented and prolific  illustrator, produced extraordinary pictures of Nijinsky.  These prompted me to write this post.  Barbier also illustrated books and worked as a fashion illustrator, which can be discussed in a later post.  The Tamara shown in the video is Tamara Karsavina (10 March 1885 – 26 May 1978).

RELATED ARTICLES

  • Les Ballets Russes & the News (12 July 2012)
  • Un peu, beaucoup, passionnément  (19 July 2012) 

Art featured in this post is by George Barbier (Photo credit: Google images).

 
  
 
© Micheline Walker
26 July 2012
WordPress

 

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