The Business of Ballet

This book discusses how an internationally renowned ballet company sustained itself without financial support for years because of the energy and manipulations of its charismatic founder, Serge Diaghilev, while also reshaping modern ballet and music.

---

The Business of Ballet: Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes between Profit and the Avant-garde explores how a remarkable, internationally recognized ballet company, the Ballets Russes, was able to survive for twenty years without stable funding. Focusing on Ballets Russes's founder, Serge Diaghilev, and his talent for discovering monies through an uncanny ability to secure funds from aristocrats, industrialists, artists, and swindlers, Ira Nadel offers new insight into the financial life of modern ballet. Throughout the analysis, Nadel reveals that Diaghilev was able to attract not only financial support but also the most innovative artistic and musical talents and choreographers of the period, who collectively changed the nature of ballet from the conventional to the contemporary. Through it all, Diaghilev never sacrificed the essential Russianness of his enterprise, transforming Russian traditions by incorporating new and original musical and choreographic stagings. In doing so, Nadel argues, Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes revised the idea of ballet as an art form, causing audiences throughout Europe and North America to riot and artists to create revolutionary compositions in art and music.