Death Comes to the Ballets Russes Read online

  Death Comes to

  the Ballets Russes

  Titles in the series (listed in order of publication)

  Goodnight Sweet Prince

  Death and the Jubilee

  Death of an Old Master

  Death of a Chancellor

  Death Called to the Bar

  Death on the Nevskii Prospekt

  Death on the Holy Mountain

  Death of a Pilgrim

  Death of a Wine Merchant

  Death in a Scarlet Coat

  Death at the Jesus Hospital

  Death of an Elgin Marble

  Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

  Death Comes to the

  Ballets Russes

  DAVID DICKINSON

  CONSTABLE • LONDON

  CONSTABLE

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Constable Copyright © David Dickinson, 2015

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-47211-375-7 (hardback)

  ISBN 978-1-47211-379-5 (ebook)

  Constable

  is an imprint of

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DY

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.hachette.co.uk

  www.constablerobinson.com

  For Krystyna and for Jane

  1

  Demi-pointe

  Being on demi-pointe is like being on tiptoe. The ball of the foot is in contact with the floor, and is supporting the weight of the body. Sometimes this movement is referred to as three-quarter pointe. When a dancer is wearing pointe shoes, she can raise to en-pointe, where she is actually using the tip of her foot to support her weight on the floor.

  New Year is the season of hope or despair. For the young, the first day of January brings another chance of true love, the prospect of a new job with new horizons. For the middle-aged, it is the time when people start to look back as well as forward, the time when the first faint lines start to appear on what had been perfect skin, the time funerals start to replace weddings and christenings as the rite of passage. For the old, they know that the aches and pains that have grown into permanent fixtures are never going to go away now; they know that time is not going to run backwards to make them fit and healthy again; they know that each New Year might be the last and, more surely than ever, that death comes at the end.

  For the gilded aristocracy of Europe, New Year always begins with a ball. In the perfectly sprung ballrooms of the Habsburgs and the Romanovs, from the Hofburg in Vienna to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, aristocrats dress up and dance. Like the Roman god Janus, who gave his name to the month of January, the dukes and duchesses, the princes and princesses, the counts and countesses face both ways at once. They look back, secure in the knowledge that their family has left its mark on history across the centuries. They look forward, secure in the knowledge that their family will leave its mark on the centuries to come.

  Princess Marie Golitsyn thought she must have the largest collection of jewellery boxes in St Petersburg. All of them, large or small, were open on her dressing table, their contents spilling over the sides and rolling away across the floor. She had jewellery boxes made with different kinds of wood, walnut and rosewood and mahogany. There were silver ones, boxes inlaid with silver or platinum; even a box shaped rather like a heart in the Art Nouveau style. The Princess had gold and silver ornaments, she had rubies and sapphires and emeralds and pearls. She had bracelets and chatelaines and carcanets and a couple of diadems left to her by her favourite aunt. There was a diamond tiara made by Fabergé, a present from her husband a few years before. The Princess discovered later that it was one of a pair. The other one had gone to her husband’s mistress in Moscow.

  Princess Marie was one of a vast throng of aristocrats in the Russian capital preparing for a ball at the Winter Palace. She had been at her dressing table for an hour and a half and thought she would be ready quite soon. The carriage was waiting outside in the snow. She could hear her husband pacing up and down the hallway. She knew that if she didn’t finish her toilette soon he would be so drunk that it would be impossible for him to go to the palace at all. She decided on the triple ring of pearls and a dog-collar-style choker necklace. A series of diamonds encircled the top of her ornate dress from Worth in Paris. She added earrings and the Fabergé tiara, bracelets for her wrist and a sapphire star, the most valuable piece she possessed, pinned to her waist. Her fingers shone with the pure gold of a couple of rings believed to have been created in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century for a mistress of the Sun King. Princess Marie Golitsyn rose from the table and swept down the stairs. She left her jewels strewn all across her dressing table and the boxes lying around on the floor. The servants could pick them up later. That was what servants were for.

  Ten minutes later she was handing her cloak to one of the attendants outside the Winter Palace. Ahead she could see the white marble staircase that led up to the gigantic galleries, each one as tall as a cathedral. Baskets of orchids lined the walls, flanked by enormous mirrors where the ladies could inspect their adornments and make final adjustments to their décolletage. Cossack Life Guards in scarlet tunics stood to attention every fifty yards. But for Princess Golitsyn and her cousin Tatiana, who lived next door, and for Princess Nathalie, her neighbour on the other side of the Fontanka Quay, the important people that evening were not their husbands or the soldiers or the lovers they would dance with under the glittering chandeliers. The important people were their sons.

  The Russian capital St Petersburg had always been blessed with more than its fair share of dissolute and depraved young men, who spent money they did not have in the gambling clubs; young men who bought expensive presents on credit for the stars of the opera and the theatre; young men who spent lavishly on the pretty wives of their contemporaries they thought might be compliant. Most of these young men were bailed out by reluctant fathers and families. But as the New Year Ball of 1912 drew closer, two young men, Prince Alexis Kishkin and Prince Felix Peshkov, officers in the fashionable Preobrazhensky Guards, found that all the doors in front of them were shut. Their fathers and grandparents had closed ranks, refusing any further loans and insisting that the income the young men had inherited on coming of age be used to pay down their debts. The banks were under instruction not to lend the young men a single rouble. This was easier than it might have appeared, as Peshkov’s father owned one bank and had considerable shareholdings in two others.

  The young men relied on secret contributions from their mothers. ‘We couldn’t let Alexis starve.’ In the dying days of 1911, the impoverished young men had hatched a daring scheme to restore their fortunes. The season for great balls in St Petersburg was approaching. The young men had often seen their mothers preparing for these evenings. The most difficult choice was never what clothes to wear, but what jewels should adorn them. Few women in Europe loved their gems like the aristocratic women of St Petersburg. The young men knew that special boxes an
d caskets would be brought out. Various combinations would be tried. The final decision was usually left to the very last minute.

  As the carriages and the sledges sped across the snow to the New Year’s Ball in the Winter Palace, the young men made their move. Characteristically they took one big gamble. They gambled that their mothers would not have put their jewels away. They would still be littered across the dressing tables and the dressing-room floors. They put on their most splendid uniforms and charged into three of the grandest houses on Fontanka Quay, the Belgravia of St Petersburg, home to Princess Marie Golitsyn and her cousin Tatiana and her friend Princess Nathalie. They brought six of their soldiers to act as sentries and lookouts. ‘There’s been a robbery!’ they shouted as the butlers let them in. ‘Tell everyone to stay where they are and not to move!’ The young men sped upstairs and gathered pearls and diamonds, emeralds and sapphires, gold and silver, into three different saddlebags. Then they disappeared into the night.

  The following week they took a train to Moscow. They consulted a dealer. He said it would be impossible to sell the jewels in Russia, as the authorities probably had details of every single piece by now. He advised taking them to Antwerp or London and selling them there. Prince Felix Peshkov had a special friend in the corps de ballet in Diaghilev’s company the Ballets Russes. Peshkov knew the ballet was going to London after Monte Carlo and Paris. He knew his friend would take them if he asked her and sell them for a good price. Even regular dancers in the corps de ballet travel with enormous amounts of luggage, costumes, special outfits for particular roles, even scenery for the more exotic offerings. If anybody asked, the girl was going to say the jewels were fake and were needed for her part in The Firebird. Anastasia was a good girl. Prince Felix Peshkov knew she was a good girl. Didn’t she live in a pretty little house he provided? Didn’t she go to fashionable parties in the fashionable clothes he had bought her?

  The lights went out very slowly in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. The stage was dark at first. Balakirev’s music was filled with foreboding, a sad and tragic melody that set the mood for the ballet. As the curtain rose, a great room was revealed, with mauve and purple walls and a green ceiling. There was a fire with a dying glow and on a huge divan lay the sleeping figure of Thamar, Queen of Georgia, stirring uneasily in her sleep.

  The date was 12 June 1912, and this was the London premiere of the Ballets Russes’s Thamar, first performed in Paris. The year before, Diaghilev’s company had taken London by storm. They had danced in front of the King and Queen. They had danced on a specially constructed stage at Strawberry Hill and been invited to all the finest society houses. Rupert Brooke had come down from Grantchester fifteen times to see them. A more puritan figure perhaps, Leonard Woolf, former civil servant in Ceylon, had been entranced. Harvey Nichols cleared their windows of the white cream and lilac of summer fashion and replaced them with hangings in the style of Léon Bakst, the artistic director of the company.

  At the centre of the Ballets Russes was a pair of lovers. Sergei Diaghilev, thirty-nine years old, broad chested with a homburg hat tilted low over his eyes, a cane always in his hand, was the founder, impresario and inspiration behind the venture. His ballets were set to music by the finest Russian composers, from Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov to Stravinsky. His sets and costumes, designed by Léon Bakst, brought an air of the exotic and the erotic Orient to the more restrained capitals of Western Europe. Diaghilev had met Tolstoy and conversed with Oscar Wilde. He, like most of the company, spoke hardly any English. French, the lingua franca of the Russian intelligentsia in St Petersburg, was also the language of the dance. Large, and running to fat because of his love of food, Diaghilev was believed by Osbert Sitwell to have only three words of English, ‘more chocolate cake’.

  Diaghilev was the foremost impresario of his age. His career began in St Petersburg with the launch of a magazine called World of Art. He organized a major exhibition of Russian portrait paintings, travelling across the vast country in search of forgotten artists and lost masterpieces. He had no home of his own. He lived in hotels where he sometimes left without paying the bill. He was neurotic, superstitious, disorganized. Rehearsals were a form of controlled chaos that somehow managed to come right on the night. For several years now he had refused to send letters, preferring the more immediate telephone or cable, which lent themselves better to panic and hysteria. In spite of all this he managed to run the finances, the publicity, the choice of ballets. He teetered permanently on the fringe of bankruptcy.

  Diaghilev’s favourite place in the world was Venice. Something about the watery city soothed his troubled spirit. Here, after all, his great hero Richard Wagner had composed the second act of Tristan und Isolde in the Palazzo Giustinian and died in the Ca’ Vendramin Calergi on the Grand Canal. Like Diaghilev, Wagner’s life was characterized by political exile, turbulent love affairs and repeated flights from his creditors.

  Diaghilev loved the shimmering waters of the Grand Canal, the palazzos in their Gothic glory, the pompous grandeur and self-importance of the Doge’s Palace, the sense that the entire place was a stage set waiting for one more performance, that opera singers or ballet dancers might suddenly drift out from behind the Hotel Danieli on the waterfront and perform in the great drawing room of St Mark’s Square. His favourite hotel was the Grand Hotel des Bains on the lido, built at the turn of the century for Europe’s rich, in flight from harsher winter climes. Diaghilev was consumed by the desire for artistic perfection. He was supremely Russian but now lived mainly abroad. To his great regret, he had never been able to take his Ballets Russes to St Petersburg. He had problems with the administration of the Imperial Theatre. He had enemies in the Imperial Court.

  One of his famous ballerinas was very young when she joined the Ballets Russes and would later say that she always called Diaghilev ‘Sergypops’. Diaghilev’s paramour was the young dancer from the Imperial Ballet, Vaslav Nijinsky. He was already the most famous dancer in the world, apparently able to hang in the air and perform impossible leaps. He drew audiences into theatres like a human magnet.

  When Thamar, Queen of Georgia, wakes, she waves a scarf through her window to entice a passing suitor into her castle. When the Prince arrives in his astrakhan cap and huge black cloak, she initially rejects his advances, but fervent dancing follows and the pair kiss. There is a wild Caucasian dance, a kaleidoscope of tossing sleeves and flashing boots where real daggers thud into the floor. The lovers embrace, then they leave the room and the Queen’s followers continue dancing wildly. When the Queen and Prince re-enter, she suddenly stabs him and he falls through a secret panel into the river below. The Queen returns to the window to signal to a new victim with her scarf.

  The Covent Garden audience gave the performance a standing ovation. The ballet wasn’t long, but it was like no other ballet the audience had seen before. It was followed by another Diaghilev special, full of Eastern promise, called Scheherazade. When the stars and the corps de ballet came on stage for the final curtain call, there was one notable absentee. Originally it had been Adolph Bolm cast in the role of the Prince in Thamar, but he had been indisposed so an understudy had taken the role instead. The understudy did not appear to take his bow; his body was found below the trapdoor where the Queen had thrown him after she had stabbed him. But this was no mere Russian version of the ancient myth of The King Must Die. The understudy really was dead, stabbed through the heart with one of the daggers used in the dance, as he had been on the stage.

  It was hours after the performance before they found the corpse. Sergei Grigoriev, the régisseur who was in charge of all administrative matters, found Diaghilev taking a late supper at the Savoy Hotel with Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina, the ballerina who had danced the title role in Thamar. They were on the second bottle of champagne.

  ‘Sergei Pavlovich,’ said Grigoriev, ‘you must come back to the theatre at once! Something terrible has happened.’

  ‘What is it? Can’t you see I’m h
aving my supper?’ The other diners turned to watch the animated conversation in Russian.

  ‘It’s Taneyev, the understudy who took Bolm’s place in Thamar this evening.’

  ‘He’s a promising boy, that Alexander Taneyev,’ said Diaghilev. ‘I promoted him to understudy Bolm myself.’

  ‘Well, he won’t be doing any more work as an understudy,’ Sergei Grigoriev crossed himself three times as fast as he could, ‘not now, he won’t. He’s dead. Stabbed through the heart with one of the daggers used in the ballet. We found him lying in a pool of his own blood.’

  ‘My God, this is frightful. What an inconsiderate time to die, right at the beginning of a new season. This could ruin everything. Stupid English policemen tramping round the sets of The Firebird and Le Spectre de la Rose in their great boots. God in heaven, it doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  Diaghilev stopped for a moment to comfort Tamara Karsavina, who was crying quietly into her oysters. ‘Calm down, child, calm down. You mustn’t ruin your looks.’

  Even his critics admitted Diaghilev was a good man in a crisis. By now he had lived through so many of them.

  ‘Have you told anybody about this, Grigoriev?’

  ‘What do you mean, told anybody about this? It’s a quarter to one in the morning, for God’s sake! There was only Misha, the stagehand, and myself in the opera house looking for Alexander. Everyone else has gone back to their hotels. Misha is waiting for me to come back.’

  ‘So the authorities at the opera house know nothing about this? The English police have not been informed?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Diaghilev, taking out his monocle and polishing it on one of the Savoy’s finest napkins. ‘This is the best I can think of for the moment. Go back to the opera house. Find a big trunk – I’ve seen plenty of them lying about at the back of the dressing rooms – and put Alexander in it. Close the lid. Lock it if you can find a key. Take it to that great storeroom in the basement that’s full of bits of old stage sets and other junk. Nobody’s going to find it in there, not for a while, at any rate. Then leave as quietly as you can.’