Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde

摘要

When Serge Diaghilev, the great Russian-born impresario, died in Venice in August 1929 it was a twist in a story that not only had echoes of the eerie death of the fictional composer Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice (1912) but also that of one of Diaghilev's heroes-Richard Wagner, who had died in Venice in 1883. Like Wagner, Diaghilev believed profoundly in the integration, rather than the separation, of the arts-from the aural and textual to the visual and corporeal. However, unlike other proponents of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), ranging from French Symbolists and Viennese Secessionists to Bauhausian theorists, Diaghilev placed actual bodies-in the form of ballet-at the centre of his project. This new book, Modernism on Stage, by the American scholar Juliet Bellow, aims to look closer at how Diaghilev's Ballets Russes achieved a new type of integrated and innovative artwork that revealed a profound, if now largely ignored, dialogue between ballet and modernism.