The Atlantic Serial: Sergei Diaghilev: Monte Carlo and Paris

14

THE day after my arrival in Monte Carlo my routine took shape and for the remaining four weeks my life was directed towards the production of my ballet. I worked with Léonide Massine, the choreographer, from ten to one and sometimes again from three to six. I thumped out over and over again parts of my ballet on the horrible little upright pianos which populated all the rehearsal halls of the Monte Carlo theater. Massine was composing the choreography while I played and in the intervals between parts and sections he would ask me to explain the construction of the music. “Where does this melody end? What instruments hold this chord? Is it correct for me to assume that this is one long phrase? Then he would take profuse notes in an imposing leatherbound scrapbook which he carried around.

Contrary to what I expected, Massine, who in those years was unusually stern and taciturn, was voluble with me and at moments even gay and smiling. On the whole our work progressed without a hitch. There was, however, an inherent anomaly in our collaboration. It came from the fact that I had no experience whatsoever in working with a choreographer. To judge choreography “in the rough” under the drab conditions of a rehearsal hall requires experience and imagination. I felt unable to make any valid judgment about what Massine was doing, for what I saw were disconnected bits of a whole which my imagination could not put together. Besides this, there was something disconcerting in having to repeat the same measures at the piano hundreds of times and see the same steps accompany them. At times I felt so completely dulled at the end of a rehearsal that I did not know whether I liked it or not. How could I know whet her it was good or bad? I did what many young composers do with their first stage works I acquiesced to most everything Massine did with my music. After all, he was a famous choreographer who had been “in the business” for more than a decade while I was a complete newcomer. When he would ask me, “Do you like this?" or “Do you think this fits your music?" I would usually reply in the affirmative.

Not until the broad outlines of the choreographic whole began to be recognizable (which happened about the third week of my stay at Monte Carlo) did it dawn on me that with the exception of two or three lovely lyrical dances, Massine’s choreography, although probably very good in itself, had very little to do with my music and with the whole eminently romantic mood of Ode. Curiously enough it was Diaghilev who made me aware of it. He came one day to a morning rehearsal to watch Massine compose a dance for Serge Lifar. He sat through half of it, his eyes closed, his head drooping. Then, without saying a word, he got up and left. Astonished, Massine and I looked at each other. Massine laughed and said, “I don’t see the point of his coming to rehearsals when he does nothing but sleep through them.”

But Diaghilev had not slept. Quite the contrary, he was very much awake and equally upset. At eleven o’clock that evening I was hauled out of bed by a messenger who told me that Diaghilev was waiting for me in the rehearsal room, that he wanted to see Lifar’s dance again, and that several messengers had been dispatched all over Monte Carlo to search for Lifar and the librettist Kochno, who were both somewhere at a party.

When I arrived at the theater Diaghilev was all alone in the tiny office next to the rehearsal room. In the hall I found his old “uncle” Pavel Iegórovitch Koribút-Koubútovitch, who really was his cousin and whose face was as funny as his name. He was sitting in a large club chair, his fat body slumped, his bearded, Pan-like features contorted with worry. “Be careful,” he whispered, “he is in a rage.”

But Diaghilev, though angry, was calm with me and looked genuinely concerned. He said that what he had seen that morning was “utter rubbish,” that Massine did not understand anything at all — “not the first thing” — about Ode. He said that he wanted to see it now, again, without Massine’s presence (Diaghilev and Massine had been at odds since the early twenties), but that the coureurs (meaning Lifar and Kochno) could not be found at that hour. He then gave me a long instructive talk about how he imagined the choreography of my ballet. He saw it as romantic, lyrical, with rich, suave, and soft movements, “rather of a Fokinesque” character. “At moments it should be pure pageantry—festive, glittering and brilliant. At other moments it should be tender, mysterious and gentle. What Massine is doing is modern cold angular stuff that has nothing to do with your music.”

We waited for more than an hour, but neither Lifar nor Kochno appeared. Finally he said in a sad, tired way, “Nika, you had better go back to bed. I’m sorry about your ballet, but what can I do? Nobody seems willing to coöperate.”

15

THE evenings at Monte Carlo were usually spent at the Ballet or at the Opera and it was there that I had the opportunity to sec much of Diaghilev’s repertoire that was not always played during the ballet seasons of the company in the capital cities. Some of this repertoire was totally obsolete — when Diaghilev revived it, he himself could not look at it without laughing; but some of it, on the other hand, was as fresh as when it had been first, produced. Thus by seeing his old productions anew Diaghiley was able to choose a few of them, freshen them up, and prepare them for an eventual revival in Paris.

This was one of the unique advantages which Diaghilev’s contract with the Casino gave him over the many “latter-day” itinerant ballet companies in America. Monte Carlo was for Diaghilev and his ballet company a workshop, a storehouse, a resort ; it was endowed with one of the most perfect theaters to work in and, besides, it was placed in one of the most beautiful spots in the world. The American ballet companies suffer in many ways from the absence of such places as Monte Carlo (and the generous contract with the Casino authorities). They have never had such convenient conditions and opportunities for the creation of new works as had the Diaghilev Company during the ten-odd years of its existence.

April, 1928, was not the first time I had visited Monte Carlo. I had been there quite often before on short visits from Nice, where my mother used to live in the middle twenties. Yet it is only when one stays in Monte Carlo for some time that the unreality, the grotesqueness, the absurdity of this “jewel of the French Riviera,” as the proud Monegasques call their city, become apparent.

Monte Carlo is a set of clichés. It is the happy ending of all Hollywood movies, the night clubs’ hula-hula, and the enticing language of American bra advertising translated into all levels of life. The scenery: a colored postal card (or as Virgil Thomson once remarked, “expensive real estate”). The houses: an anticipation of juke boxes. The lawns: Italian opera (the outdoor Swiss or Scotch peasant scene). The people: character extras from Warner Brothers.

There is always a creature in white lace and organdy, bedecked like a Christmas tree with all the tinsel of Victorian jewelry. Her worn, spaniel face is covered with many coats of powder and rouge while the blue under her eyes, the pencil marks on her brows, and the mascara on her remaining ten and a half eyelashes are hopelessly asymmetrical. She is led on a leash by a microscopic ball of fuzzy wool, and she clutches in her hand a 20-franc note which the bored croupier has slipped under the table into the palm of her hand.

These women are known as the rentières du Casino and next to the professional pickpockets they are the management’s worst pests. When one of them gets a seat at t be roulette table she begins by watching her neighbors’ games. Only after long delay, prodded by fairly brutal hints of bystanders and sometimes even by the croupier, she starts playing her “system.” The game for her is a passionless ritual which she performs with the calm of a mortician embalming a body. Her face never changes, her eyes are fixed on her green square (her “dozen”) of the gambling carpet. She starts with the smallest stake (2 francs, in my time), then she doubles it and continues her geometric progression to the second power, always returning her bet to the same square, the same “dozen.” If after three or four bets her “dozen” turns up, she wins, and having colleeted her 18 or 34 francs she goes home as deliberately as she came. If after three bets the little black ball does not fall upon one of the numbers of her “dozen,” she plays the system once more, but never more than twice the same day.

The whole procedure takes up a full afternoon. This is why the croupiers of Monte Carlo prefer to pay the rentières 20 francs in advance (many rentières settle for 10, provided it is on a regular “salary” basis) to prevent them from hogging a seat at the roulette table.

Then there are the desperados, those “addicts of gambling,” straight from the Musée Grévin or Madame Tussaud’s collection of wax vices. They sun themselves on the benches in front of the Casino and look like villains from an 1880 melodrama. Their faces under their worn boaters are sanguine and apoplectic, their eyes embedded m deep blue-green caverns, their chapped lips and false teeth scarcely concealed by tar-black mustachios. At any moment they appear ready to rush into the gambling room, unscrew their right arms, squeeze out their glass eyes, and hand them to the croupier for a last two-bits worth of chips.

In all this unreality, this smorgåsbord of clichés and monstrosities, only two things seemed real to me: first, the lovely old city of Monaco, the hinterland of the principality, where in dignified Mediterranean poverty and apparent happiness lived some 20,000 Monegasques— loyal subjects of His Highness Prince Albert of Monaco and Monte Carlo; and second, the Ballet Russe of Diaghilev. It is significant that Diaghilev never went into the gambling rooms and that gambling rarely attracted the members of the company. When I told Diaghilev that I wanted to see the gambling, he tried to discourage me; “Why? It’s boring and flat. I hate it,” and he added with a satisfied smile, “Mine is a different kind of gambling.”

Somehow the hothouse atmosphere of the gambling rooms never reached Diaghilev’s hard-working organization, and this is perhaps why even an old, stuffy ballet like the Russian Fairy Tales, when performed by Diaghilev’s troupe in Monte Carlo, seemed real and fresh in comparison with the activities in the rest, of the Casino.

16

THE troupe at that time was a splendid, wellfunctioning organization. Most of its dancers, including its corps de ballet, were young, competent, and devoted. It had two permanent choreographers, Léonide Massine and George Balanchine. It also contained in its repertoire the best inventions of Michel Fokine and Bronislava Nijinska, composed over a period of some twenty to twenty-four years.

Some of the first dancers and guest dancers of the ballet, notably Tamara Karsavina and Olga Spessivtzeva, were certainly the best dancers of the period, and the younger dancers like Doubrovska, Nemchinova, Nikitina, Danilova, and Markova (who then was only in her late teens) were, I believe, of a class far superior to the average prima ballerinas of the present-day epigonal Monte Carlist Russian ballets. The male complement was equally good. Of course, it did not have Nijinsky, but there wereold-timers like Massine, Voizikovsky, Idzikovsky, and the younger men like George Balanchine and Lifar.

But besides all this, what made the Diaghilev workshop at Monte Carlo such a creative, lively enterprise was the many artists around Diaghilev and his company, working at new productions or helping revive old ones. In the month that I was in Monte Carlo, Diaghilev and the ballet company received a stream of visitors from all over Europe, from Paris, from London, from Italy and Germany.

Prokofiev drove up one day with Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke) on the last leg of a gastronomic tour of France. Prokofiev stayed a few days and discussed with Diaghilev plans for a new ballet (which was to become The Prodigal Son - Diaghilev’s last production during the season of 1929). Matisse came from his Provencal villa to look over his sets for Stravinsky’s The Song of the Nightingale, which had been revived with a magnificent new choreography by Balanchine. Vittorio Rieti came to visit us all from his family’s home at San Remo and also to talk to Diaghilev about a new ballet. Stravinsky’s sons came from Nice, where the family lived at that time. Fedya and Svyetik Stravinsky visited the rehearsals of Apollo and went for long walks around Monte Carlo. (One of the walks I loved best was through the hanging gardens high above the city, a masterpiece of unreal landscaping full of fantasy and of the strangest botanical freaks.)

Then, too, there were the “rich” visitors, Diaghilev’s financial patron saints (or, as the composer Henri Sauget called them, les poires de Diaghilev — Diaghilev’s suckers): the Otto Kahns and the Aga Khans, the Rothermeres and the Rothschilds, the Poliakovs and the Polignacs.

Balanchine, Kochno, Derain, and a number of dancers patronized a small Italian restaurant, Giardinos, on top of the hill in the upper reaches of Monte Carlo. There we used to have noisy, guy lunch parties. Diaghilev liked to join us and bring his visitors from outside. When he came, the bill was paid for all of us. Lunch then became a sumptuous two-hour affair with many courses and much wine, although Diaghilev himself never drank either wine or liquor. Only the funny “uncle” KoribútKoubítovitch, the perennial butt of Diaghilev’s teasing, would not be permitted to choose his own meal.

“You better bring him a small portion of . . . bœuf bouilli,” Diaghilev would say to the waiter. “That’s the best thing for him, he is too fat anyhow.”

The “uncle,” both a gourmand and a gourmet, would shiver with indignation and shout, “I don’t want bœuf bouilli. I won’t eat bœuf bouilli,” his voice trembling and tearful.

Diaghilev would roar back, “Pavka! eat your bœuf bouilli. The doctor says it’s good for you.”

Finally he would give in and meekly eat his boiled beef.

17

As I had hoped before coming to Monte Carlo, I saw Diaghilev almost every day. Between rehearsals and during meals I often had long, exciting conversations with him. Egged on by my questions, he would reminisce about his early years in Paris, about the first performances of Boris Godunov, The Rites of Spring, or the first. concerts of Russian music which he organized in Paris in 1906. He would talk about the great dancers of that period — Nijinsky, Bolm, Fokine, Karsavina, Pavlova, and Trefilova.

In the excited voice of someone who remembers something particularly dear to him, he would speak of his work in Russia, of the foundation of the art magazine Mir Iskousstva in 1903, with a group of friends, chiefly Alexander Benois and Léon Bakst, and of the famous art exhibitions organized by this group, which were like a breath of air in the stale atmosphere of St. Petersburg.

He spoke of his work in the Imperial Theatre and described the stuffy, intrigue-ridden atmosphere of its management. (“I couldn’t stand it. It was like living in a morgue,”) But chiefly he liked to speak about the great exhibition of Russian portraits which he organized in 1904 in St. Petersburg, for which he collected some 3000 masterpieces of Russian portraiture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was a tremendous job of artistic research which involved thousands of miles of travel. Diaghilev was a pioneer in this research and did it almost singlehanded. His stories about how he discovered lost treasures of Russian art in palaces and country estates of Imperial Russia were full of adventure and were told with an explorer’s sense of observation.

“I would get a hint,” he would say, “by reading in somebody’s memoirs or letters that, the painter Borovikovsky [one of the two finest Russian portrait painters of the eighteenth century] spent a month at the Volga estate of Prince O. That would start me on one of my hunting trips. First I would visit the direct heirs of the eighteenth-century seigneur, who were so often half-witted in matters of art, and I would try to find out from them whether there was a Borovikovsky portrait in the family. If no one knew, I would take a trip to the Volga estate of Prince O. There I would turn the place upside down until I found what I was looking for.

“You can’t imagine how many of these palatial estates, these jewels of eighteenth-century architecture, were falling in ruins at that time. Their gardens were unkept forests, the floors of their empty salons and ballrooms were littered with fallen plaster. The pigeons and swallows had made their nests in the galleries. Everything was death, decay, the collapse of a lost civilization. It was there that I felt how inevitable the revolution was, how the pygmy heirs of a great period were not able to keep the past alive or cope with the ideas of the present, the new trends, the now desires and the new needs of our time. Sometimes in an obscure and dilapidated country estate in a remote government beyond the Volga I would be greeted by a whole row of superb portraits painted by some anonymous serf. They would be hanging, cracked, dirty, their varnish gone, in the drab office of the administration building. No one would know or care who painted the pictures, when they were painted, and whom they represented.”

But of course the main topic of conversation was music. I asked Diaghilev a thousand questions about composers he had known, operas he had heard, and music he had liked most during his life. His answers were whole stories, amusing anecdotes full of charm and witty details.

He told me how one day on the streets of Paris he met Gounod, who had just become rich after the success of his Faust. Diaghilev asked him about his plans for the coming season.

“I’m preparing my old opera Adam and, Eve for production,” said Gounod.

“And may I ask, cher Maîre, in what costumes the opera will be played?” asked Diaghilev. “In . . . fig leaves?”

“ Tiens, je n’ai pas peasé à ce detail,” said the embarrassed composer.

Or hovv he saw Debussy emerge from the train at the Moscow station with enormous mittens on his hands despite pleasantly warm fall weather (“that barbarous climate of Russia!”) and how he took Debussy to a Moscow night club to listen to the singing of gypsies and how Debussy could not tear himself away from hw songs, “those languorous gypsy melodies,” and how, in his last letter to Diaghilev, in the spring of 1917, he spoke of them with tenderness and longing.

Diaghilev spoke of Rimsky-Korsakoy and Tchaikovsky, of Richard Strauss and Scriabin, of the musical taste of the late Pope Leo XIII (who loved Viennese waltzes and would dance them in his private salons with the Cardinal Secretary of State to the accompaniment at the piano of Abbé Liszt) and of the lack of musical taste of the whole Romanov dynasty, and of course of his contemporaries, his collaborators, Stravinsky, Ravel, Prokofiev, Satie, and many, many others.

Since the night of crisis when he had wanted Lifar to show him Massine’s utter rubbish again, Diaghilev never brought up the subject of Ode, nor did he ever seem interested in Massine’s choreography. He stopped coming to the rehearsals to see what Massine was doing, and when I would mention my ballet in his presence he would keep silent or change the subject.

Only once did he acknowledge the fact that the project of Ode still existed, when he asked me to bring over the score and the orchestral parts and told me that the orchestra had twenty minutes of free time and could read it through. I tried to dissuade him by saying that Ode was forty minutes long and that, besides, the parts were still full of mistakes. He replied that Scotto, the conductor, would read it through in a fast tempo, and as for the mistakes, they were not his concern but my “ funeral.”

That orchestral “reading” became one of the worst musical tortures of my life. Scotto had never seen the score before and was beating the beat in double time as best he could.

The parts, because of my inexperience and the copyist’s carelessness, were a sea of mistakes. Diaghilev and I sat in the front row in the dark hall. Every time I wanted to jump up from my seat, the heavy hand of Diaghilev kept me back.

“Don’t disturb them. They haven’t much time.”

The piece we heard was a mass of inchoate rumblings and noises reminiscent of the tuning-up period of a school orchestra. At the end, I felt limp and beaten. Diaghilev turned to me and said, “You like that?” and without waiting for an answer got up and went out of the theater.

At the same time I began to realize that Diagh i lev’s earlier prediction was coming true: the “cart” named Ode, or what there was of the cart, was definitely being pulled in several directions. I did not know, nor did I see, what Tchelitchev was doing (he was guarding his work from any intrusions on my part), nor did I quite like or understand what Massine was doing with the choreography.

Only once was I permitted to attend the ritual of Tchelilchev’s experiments — he needed me to time some film shots he had made for Ode. I saw some extraordinary pictures of young men wearing fencing masks and tights, diving in slow motion through what seemed to me to be water. I could not understand what this had to do with my ballet but I was told by Kochno (Tchelitchev wouldn’t speak to me), who had, in default of Diaghilev, somehow assumed the responsibilities for the production of Ode, that this represented “the element of water.”

Much as I respected the “element,” I still could not understand what connection it had with my music and the whole conception of the ballet. All in all, when I left Monte Carlo the prospects of a successful production of Ode seemed hopelessly remote. Massine’s choreography was only half finished, Tchelitchev’s decor was a total mystery to me, but 1 knew that it was largely still in an experimental state and that Diaghilev had had several tantrums about it. Worst of all, so far as I was concerned, was my own orchestral ion (my first attempt at writing for a large orchestra), which in part did not “sound” at all and needed intense overhauling.

I left Monte Carlo filled with apprehension and dark forebodings.

18

I ARRIVED in Paris only a few weeks before the ballet season was to open. The press had already begun to print anticipatory articles about the new productions. I was pestered by so many social calls, interviews, and dinner engagements that my friends Sauguet and Desormière decided to hide me in the apartment of a musical friend, where I could quietly reorchestrate certain sections of Ode and correct its shamefully incorrect orchestral parts.

Finally, ten days before the start of the season, Diaghilev and the ballet troupe arrived in Paris and the rehearsals began again. Massine and I renewed our long morning sessions and in a few days he completed the choreography. But the Tchelitchev side of the project, so far as I knew, remained on the same equivocal plane as ever. This time I was shown some of the drawings of Tchelitchev for the sels and costumes. Kochno even showed me a complete little model of the stage, the opening scene of the ballet. Here, for the first time, I began to realize what Tchelitchev wanted to achieve.

The sets were all in blue tulle which when lit with a tiny flashlight became strangely alive and acquired an extraordinary mysterious and ephemeral beauty. I understood also that Tchelitchev’s whole project depended on many intangibles.

It required mechanical perfection and virtuosity in the use of lighting equipment (then still in its infancy), perfect coördination between light and movement, between camera (for many of the “light-sets” were achieved by means of motion picture projections) and music, between choreography and the changes of scenic effects.

To all this, up to the last two or three days before the first performance of Ode, Diaghilev remained completely indifferent. It seemed as though lie had abandoned all of us to disaster.

On the morning of the 2nd of June, 1928, the telephone rang very early despite the warning I had left the night before at the hotel desk not to disturb me until 10 A.M. I had returned late that night after a full day of rehearsals, an orchestral reading of Ode, and a grueling choral rehearsal. Diaghilev had come to the latter with Prokofiev but had left brusquely long before it ended.

At first I thought of letting the telephone exhaust itself, but the ringing persisted. I picked up the receiver and was about to bark a curse into it when to my utter surprise I heard the voice of Diaghilev barking at me.

“Why don’t you answer your phone? Why are you sleeping when you should be in the theater? Get up and get dressed right away and come to the theater. This mess can’t go on any longer. I have ordered a full stage rehearsal at ten, a full orchestra rehearsal at two, a full chorus rehearsal at live, and all evening we will rehearse the lights.” He hung up on me just as abruptly as he started shouting.

From that moment on and for the next three days, until the last curtain had fallen on a highly successful performance of Ode, I lived in a state of frenzy. Like everyone else connected with the production, I worked day and night, in an agony of sleeplessness and exhilaration the like of which I never experienced before or since.

Diaghilev had taken over in the fullest sense. From then on he gave the orders, he made the decisions and assumed the responsibilities. He was everywhere, his energy was limitless. He ran to the prefect of police to have him overrule the fire department’s decision forbidding the use of neon lights on stage, which Tchelitchev wanted to use in the last scene of the ballet (neon lights were a novelty at the time and were considered unsafe). He supervised the dyeing, cutting, and sewing of costumes. He was present at every orchestra and choral rehearsal and made the conductor Desormière, the soloists, and the chorus repeat sections of the music over and over again until they blended well with the choreographic motions and the light - play of Tchelitchey’s scenery. He encouraged the leisurely and sluggish stagehands of the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt by bribes and flattery. He helped all of ns paint the props and the scenery.

But above all else he spent two whole nights direeling the complicated lighting rehearsals, shouting at Teholilchov and at his technical aids when little delicate lighting machinery went wrong, at me when my piano playing slackened and became uneven, and at Filar when his slops ceased following the rhythm of the music and the changes of light ing.

On June 6, the day of the opening, I was exhausted, stunned and shaking with the kind of precarious excitement which comes after long exertion and sleepless travel. But when, fifteen minutes before the curtain wenl up, I saw Diaghilev come in through the backstage door, in full dress, bemonocled, his famous rose pearl shining on a snow-white shirt, I knew that it had been only thanks to this man’s incredible drixe and energy that Ode had been pieced together and that the curtain would rise at all.

Until the last minute I had been painting the scenery, and had seen Diaghilev leave the theater an hour before the performance was to begin. He had looked worn, gray, and sallow as he crossed the stage; his face was covered with a two-day beard. Now he was his usual self again, calm, confident, and resplendent.

He stopped in front of me and told me to go into the theater. I mumbled something to the effect that I hoped all would go well and that the performance would be a success.

“Well ...” answered Diaghilev nonchalantly, his face changing to a charming affectionate smile, “it’s up to you,” and he opened his arms and moved them backwards in the suave and deliberate gesture of virtuoso conductors, by which in apparent modesty they raise the orchestra musicians to their feet and make them acknowledge the public’s applause.

19

I SAW Diaghilev for the last time in July, 1929, a little more than a year after Ode’s first performance. We met briefly at the Baden-Baden music festival. He was in the company of his old friend the Princesse de Polignae (Paris’s greatest music patron of the time) and his new youthful “composer foundling,” the birdlike and brittle Igor Markevich.

Diaghilev did not look well; his face was puffy with the glazed, yellow quality of diabetics, during or after an attack. He had come to Baden-Baden to hear a new work of Hindemith, “his” new composer collaborator. After the performance of this work I walked him back to his hotel. Despite his appearance his mood seemed happy. He talked gaily about his plans for the rest of (he summer and for his autumn season. ”1 am going to take Markevich for a visit to Richard Strauss and also to a few Wagner performances at the Munich Opera,” he said; “then I’m going as usual to the Lido. Why don’t you come with us and visit the funny old German in his villa in Garmisch?”

But much as I would have liked to go, I was bound for Berlin on the morning train.

I asked Diaghilev how Hindemith’s ballet was progressing, lie answered that ho had spent a day with Hindemith in Berlin and that very little of the ballet music was actually on paper. “But I’m not worrying,” he said, “I know what an extraordinary craftsman he is and how fast he works.

Il’ asked me what I was writing and when I told him that I was in the middle of my first symphony he grow interested and wanted to know all about it

what it was like, whether il was going to be as lyrical and romantic as Ode, how many movements there would be, and hoxv soon it was going to be ready. “Splendid!” he exclaimed. “As soon as I’m back in Paris you will play it for me, won t you? I also want you to look carefully at the music of young Markevich. It’s xery exceptional stuffœ still very green, but enormously gifted.”

The next morning to my surprise Diaghilex’ met me at the tiny suburban station of Baden-Ost, where the through trains from Switzerland to Berlin stop.

“You see, I’ve come to see you off,” he said, coming towards me, “or rather partly you, partly those people,” and he pointed at a foreign-looking couple surrounded by many pieces of elegant luggage.

It was then that I took the last picture of Diaghilev ever taken. Although taken against the light, it clearly shows Diaghilev’s big, black figure standing against the low picket fence, and the field surrounding the railroad station of Baden-Ost.

Three weeks later I was returning from Berlin to my summer home in Alsace. As usual I took the night train, which left Berlin at 6 or 7 P.M. Around ten o’clock the train stopped at Halle. I went out and bought the Halle evening paper. I couldn’t read in the compartment, the lighls were down and the five-odd Germans were asleep. I went to the men’s room. There in the dim light of its 25-watt bulb I glanced at the front page of the paper. At the top, in the right-hand corner I saw a two-line message from Venice. It was dated August 19 and read: “This morning at 5 A.M. the famous Russian dancer Diaghilev died here.”

From then on at every stop of the train I was on the lookout for fresh papers. But either the newspaper booths were closed or the papers carried the same garbled message. Yet because it was garbled a glimmer of hope remained. Maybe it wasn’t he that had died? Maybe it was a dancer of his company and the German press had made a message like “a dancer of the famous Diaghilev Company” read “the famous dancer Diaghilev.”

Even the early morning edition of the Frankfurter Zeitung carried the same message, this time with an old 1906 photograph of Diaghilev. Once the train had crossed the Rhine and stopped at the rainy platform of the Strasbourg station there could be no doubt. Here were the Paris papers, his face looking at me from every one.

The shock, the loss, the feeling of emptiness and profound désarroi were overwhelming. How did it happen? Why did he have to die? What will happen now to his work? And what will happen to all of us, his friends, his young artist collaborators, his troupe of dancers? I went to the post office and sent incoherent telegrams to Kochno, to Missia Sert, to George Balanchine, to Prokofiev.

Several days later a letter from Prokofiev arrived. He was in the Savoy, near the Annecy Lake, not far from the place where Stravinsky was spending the summer, Prokofiev wrote: “First, when I read the news I couldn’t believe it. It sounded unreal and absurd. It is an awful blow. I went to visit Stravinsky and he too was profoundly shocked. What will happen now? What will happen to his company?”

These questions were on everybody’s lips, in everybody’s mind. Rarely had so many artists of so many nationalities, cultures, and ages felt a loss that united them in a mutual sense of profound impoverishment.

Gradually the circumstances of his death became known to me. He died from an attack of diabetes, his old neglected illness. He suffered a great deal, physically and morally. All his life he had been afraid of sickness, of loss of power and of consciousness. Since the attack had begun he must have known, although he would never have admitted it, that his days, his hours were counted. Near him were two close friends, Lifer and Kochno. Later, during the last few days of his life, two other faithful friends arrived, Missia Sert and the Baroness d’Erlanger.

He died at dawn on August 19 at the age of fiftyseven after a long, tormented agony. He died as he had lived all his life, in a modest hotel room, a homeless adventurer, a great exile, and a prince of the arts. And just as his life had been a strange and exotic pageant, so was his death. On the morning of the 21st of August a procession of four gondolas took his body to the Russian cemetery on the tiny S. Marco Island. The coffin was covered with tuberoses, tea roses, and carnations. A Russian priest and the small choir of S. Giorgio dei Greci sang in ill-accorded voices the doleful chant of the Slavic funeral service while the procession moved to the cemetery through the still waters of the Venetian lagoon.

(The End)