Crafting the Ballets Russes

A fresh look at the ground-breaking artistic collaborations of the Ballets Russes, illuminated by a rich trove of visual material including music manuscripts, dance notations, stage and costume designs, and photographs of performers.

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This book celebrates one of the world’s finest private gathering of music manuscripts, held on deposit at the Morgan Library. Robert Owen Lehman’s superb collection of French and Russian ballet scores, including Firebird, Petrushka, Afternoon of a Faun, Bolero, and many more, are shown here for the first time alongside the vivid stage designs and rarely seen choreographic notations for these ballets. Together they offer a fresh view into Serge Diaghilev’s famed Ballets Russes troupe and its revitalization of ballet that roiled Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century. These influential ballets and their creators—composers Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel, choreographers Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Bronislava Nijinska, and artists Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, and Natalia Goncharova—set a new agenda for European art. As the 1930s began, a new international era of modern ballet was underway.