Les Sylphides

Michel Fokine, the son of a prosperous merchant, was born on 23 April 1880 in the Russian capital, St. Petersburg, where, at 9, he joined the Imperial Ballet School. He made his debut with the Imperial Ballet on his 18th birthday in 1898, in Petipa’s Paquita at the Mariinsky Theatre, and besides dancing with the company, was appointed in 1902 to teach at the school, numbering Nijinsky and his sister Bronislava among his students.

Fokine encountered problems arising from his determination to innovate

beyond the sometimes-stultifying traditions of the Imperial Ballet, wanting to experiment with barefoot dancing or dispense with artificial mime techniques, meaningless virtuoso displays, and inappropriate or outdated costumes. After choreographing such early works as Acis & Galatea (1905), in which a youthful Nijinsky appeared in a dance for young boys, The Dying Swan solo for Pavlova and Chopiniana/Les Syphides (both 1907), Fokine’s chance came in 1909 with Diaghilev’s invitation to become choreographer to The Ballets Russes.

In a few years, Fokine created a series of important ballets collaborating with leading designers and composers (notably Bakst, Stravinsky, and Ravel) as well as setting existing music by Debussy, Chopin, Weber, Saint-Saëns, Rimsky-Korsakov, and others. These ballets included Cléopatre, Le Pavillon d’Armide, Carnaval, Scheherazade and The Firebird (all 1910), Le Spectre de la Rose (1911), Daphnis & Chloe and Petrushka (both 1912), many of them showcasing the extraordinary dancing of Nijinsky and Karsavina. Fokine also staged dances in operas such as Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel in Paris (1914). This fruitful period ended in 1912 when Fokine left The Ballets Russes, angered at Diaghilev’s promoting Nijinsky as a choreographer.

After the Russian Revolution, Fokine moved with his family to Sweden and New York, where he and his wife Vera opened a ballet school. Fokine became a US citizen in 1932 and continued teaching and staging his many ballets in Europe and the USA. He died in New York on 22 August 1942.

Many of Fokine’s ballets are in constant performance worldwide, and the Mariinsky (Kirov) Ballet mounted a retrospective season at London’s Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in July 2011.

To posterity, Chopin feels French, but he was born of mixed French-Polish parentage in 1810, when Poland was first a Napoleonic “Duchy of Warsaw” and then a province of Russia. From 1826 he studied at the Warsaw Conservatory, where his gifts were recognized (“remarkable talent”, “musical genius”) before fleeing his native country for Austria, Germany and France, following the brutal suppression of the 1830 Polish uprising, which inspired his Scherzo in B minor and Revolutionary Etude.

Hailed by Schumann (“Hats off, gentlemen! A genius”), the young composer and pianist was taken up by the wealthy Rothschilds, who introduced him to Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Liszt, Bellini, Heine and Delacroix, along with lucrative patronage offers, despite which, Chopin never became a lionised virtuoso, gave only rare concerts, travelled widely and devoted his energies to composition. “As a pianist”, a contemporary recorded, “Chopin was unique in acquiring a reputation of the highest order on the basis of… less than 30 concerts in his lifetime”.

Chopin’s 1836 secret engagement to Maria Wodzinski (which inspired major compositions) was followed by an affair with the Polish Countess Potocka and a series of successful concerts and compositions, before his meeting and relationship with the French writer Georges Sand, the lover of his friend Liszt. In his final years, Chopin’s popularity as a virtuoso waned and he left Paris for London, where his final concert was given in 1848 for the benefit of the Polish Revolutionary refugees

Chopin died in Paris in 1849 and is buried in Warsaw.

Born in St Petersburg in 1870 to a distinguished family of artists and intellectuals – his father and a brother were successful architects – Benois trained in law, but after an 1897 exhibition of his Versailles-inspired watercolors attracted the attention of Sergei Diaghilev and Léon Bakst, he founded, with the two men, an art magazine to promote art nouveau in Russia. In 1901, Benois was appointed scene director at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre, where he created his first ballet designs, while continuing to publish the magazine, and illustrations for a 1903 edition of Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman.

Moving to Paris in 1905, Benois concentrated on stage design for many leading European theatres, including Moscow Arts Theatre and, most influentially, for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Among his finest Ballets Russes designs were Les Sylphides (1909), Giselle (1910) and Petrushka (1911). After the Russian Revolution, Benois was appointed by Lenin to curate the art gallery of the former Imperial Hermitage Palace (1918-1926) during which time he acquired his brother’s heirloom, Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna, for the collection. In 1927 he left Russia for good and settled in France. He published his memoirs in 1955 and died in Paris in 1960.