to his aristocratic outlook, and to his nostalgia for the classical culture of eighteenth-century Petersburg. This retrospective aesthetic was shared by all the founders of the Ballets Russes: Benois, Dobuzhinsky, the critic Filosofov and Diaghilev. The ballets of Tchaikovsky were the incarnation of the classical ideal and, even though they never featured in the saison russe in Paris, where Tchaikovsky was the least appreciated of the Russian composers, they were an inspiration to the founders of the Ballets Russes. Tchaikovsky was the last of the great European court composers (he lived in the last of the great European eighteenth-century states). Staunchly monarchist, he was among the intimates of Tsar Alexander III. His music, which embodied the 'Imperial style', was preferred by the court to the 'Russian' harmonies of Musorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov.
The Imperial style was virtually defined by the polonaise. Imported into Russia by the Polish composer Jozek Kozlowski towards the end of the eighteenth century, the polonaise became the supreme courtly form and the most brilliant of all the ballroom genres. It came to symbolize the European brilliance of eighteenth-century Petersburg itself. In Eugene Onegin Pushkin (like Tchaikovsky) used the polonaise for the climactic entry of Tatiana at the ball in Petersburg. Tolstoy used the polonaise at the climax of the ball in War and Peace, where the Emperor makes his entrance and Natasha dances with Andrei. In The Sleeping Beauty (1889) and in his opera The Queen of Spades (1890) Tchaikovsky reconstructed the imperial grandeur of the eighteenth-century world. Set in the reign of Louis XIV, The Sleeping Beauty was a nostalgic tribute to the French influence on eighteenth-century Russian music and culture. The Queen of Spades, based on the story by Pushkin, evoked the bygone Petersburg of Catherine the Great, an era when the capital was fully integrated, and played a major role, in the culture of Europe. Tchaikovsky infused the opera with rococo elements (he himself described the ballroom scenes as a 'slavish imitation' of the eighteenth-century style).130 He used the story's layers of ghostly fantasy to conjure up a dream world of the past. The myth of Petersburg as an unreal city was thus used to travel back in time and recover its lost beauty and classical ideals.
On the evening of the premiere of The Queen of Spades Tchaikovsky left the Marinsky Theatre and wandered on his own through the streets
of Petersburg, convinced that his opera was a dismal failure. Suddenly he heard a group of people walking towards him singing one of the opera's best duets. He stopped them and asked them how they were acquainted with the music. Three young men introduced themselves: they were Benois, Filosofov and Diaghilev, the co-founders of the World of Art. From that moment on, according to Benois, the group was united by their love of Tchaikovsky and his classical ideal of Petersburg. 'Tchaikovsky's music', Benois wrote in his old age, 'was what I seemed to be waiting for since my earliest childhood.'131
In 1907 Benois staged a production of Nikolai Cherepnin's ballet Le Pavilion d'Armide (based on Gauthier's Omphale) at the Marinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. Like The Sleeping Beauty, it was set in the period of Louis XIV and was classical in style. The production made a deep impression on Diaghilev. Benois' own sumptuous designs, Fokine's modern choreography, the dazzling virtuosity of Nijinsky's dancing - all this, declared Diaghilev, 'must be shown to Europe'.132 Le Pavilion became the curtain-raiser to the 1909 season in Paris, alongside the Polovtsian dances from Borodin's Prince Igor (also choreographed by Fokine), in a mixed programme of Russian classical and nationalist works. The exotic 'otherness' of these mises-en-scene caused a sensation. The French loved 'our primitive wildness', Benois later wrote, 'our freshness and our spontaneity'.133 Diaghilev could see that there was money to be made from the export of more Russian ballets in this vein. And so it was, as he wrote to tell Lyadov, that they cooked up the libretto of The Firebird. Diaghilev and Benois and Fokine, with the fabulist Remizov, the painter Golovine, the poet Potemkin and the composer Cherepnin (of Le Pavilion fame) dreamt up the whole thing around the kitchen table in the true collective spirit of the Russian tradition. But in the end Lyadov did not want to write
the score. It was offered to Glazunov, and then Cherepnin, who turned
it down, and then, in a state of utter desperation, Diaghilev resorted to the young, and at that time still little known composer, Igor Stravinsky.
