9 - The Astonishing Years

Summary

On a winter night in the Place de la Concorde, Jean Cocteau walked along with Diaghilev, seeking praise for his work, looking for a sign that the Russian was impressed with his flamboyant writings. Diaghilev issued his renowned directive, “Young man, astonish me!” With these words, the impresario summed up the essence of art, the irreducible elements that made it function: surprise, wonderment. “That phrase,” Cocteau would later recall, “saved me from a flashy career… . I owe [the break with spiritual frivolity] to the desire to astound that Russian prince to whom life was tolerable only to the extent to which he could summon up marvels.” Ever since the days of The World of Art, Diaghilev's great gift had always been his ability to create works and realize spectacles that had never been seen, heard, or imagined before.

But such marvels could not reach their intended audiences without material support. If the colorful spectacles of Diaghilev's first Paris years left the Princesse de Polignac less than astonished, what the impresario summoned up in 1910 finally converted her from a somewhat detached admirer of Diaghilev's ideas and works into an active, public supporter of the Ballets Russes. The marvel was a musician, Igor Stravinsky.

Diaghilev's ability to astonish was not based solely on inspiration: he kept a weather eye on his audience—the aristocracy and the new moneyed class—and on the press, all of whom still gathered on a regular basis in the private salons. He took seriously the critical admonitions that music “of a more personal character” by young composers was needed if the Ballets Russes were indeed to represent the vanguard of modern synthetic art works. The impresario immediately went on a search for young composers whose music had the power to rival the décors of Bakst and Benois, the choreography of Fokine, and the virtuoso dancing of Nijinsky and Karsavina. Diaghilev sought out the French composers with the greatest standing in the musical salons—Hahn, Debussy, Fauré, and Ravel—to produce new ballet scores.3 Debussy and Fauré declined the commissions, but Ravel accepted, and began work on a Fokine/Bakst production, Daphnis et Chloé, while Hahn agreed to collaborate on an Orientalist work, Le Dieu bleu, with a librettist who represented his aesthetic antithesis: Jean Cocteau.