Saturday, December 25, 2010

Sergei Diaghilev: Opera to Impresario


"Diaghilev at twenty-one had never had anything to do with ballet. He was not even a balletomane. He was a serious musician, an opera-lover who had trained to be a singer, a self-taught art historian, and a theater aesthete whose certitudes were rooted in the principle of the Gesamtkunstwerk as promulgated by Wagner."

Read more in a review of Diaghilev: A Life by Sjeng Scheijen.