The influence of the Ballets Russes: political or artistic?

This article is about how the Ballets Russes influenced their contemporaries, and the extent by which they were influenced by the political.

The tight control of an authoritarian regime

The artistic history of the Ballets Russes is deeply linked to the political history of Russia. Indeed, as an authoritarian country the regime’s control over the arts impacted the freedom of every composer be it the choreographers or the musicians composing original music for the different dance pieces.

A private independent company

In 1909, the company of Les Ballets russes de Diaghilev defined itself as a private and independent company: it did not focus on any particular theatre and began an international tour that year. From 1911 onwards, the company moved to Paris, Monte-Carlo and London in particular, but also performed in Rome, Vienna, Geneva, Barcelona and Madrid. During its years of apogee it began a tour of South America in 1913 and the United States in 1915, then performed in Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands after the First World War. The last performance took place on August 4, 1929 in Vichy, Diaghilev died on August 19 the following year.

Their particularity of being a private institutions and moreover, being based out of Russia made of this company one that was able to stay away from the very strong embargo of the regime over the arts.

An influence rather artistic than political

This did not hinder the influence that the Russian Ballets had on their contemporary composers. The example of the strong friendship that linked two iconic composers, Stravinsky and Diaghilev. Stravinsky decided to leave Russia even before the fall of tsarism to leave his homeland. In 1917, he was in France and in the 1920s, he arrived in the United States, two countries of which he later became a citizen. And in 1929, after the death of Serge Diaghilev, the great master of Russian ballet to whom he owes his fame – they collaborated on Petrouchka (1911), Le Sacre du Printemps (1913), L’Oiseau de feu (1910), Pulcinella (1919), Les Noces (1923) – Stravinsky breaks with Russian music. “His emotional attachment to Russia became musically exhausted in the 1920s“, says André Lischke.

We can thus see how the influence of the Ballets Russes can be explained easier when talking about the artistic links it created rather than defined by a political agenda.