Important Autograph Letter naming Serge Lifar as First Artist of the Ballets Russes

Autograph letter from the important ballet impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes, signed "Serge Diaghilev." Single page folio, "Direction des Ballets russes de Serge de Diaghilew" letterhead, Paris, November 1928. Red stamp "Compagnie Ballet Russes. S de D." Translated, in part, from the Russian: “The direction of S.D Diaghilev's ballet certifies that Sergueï Mikhaïlovitch Lifar is the first artist of this ballet...” Purple and red ownership stamps of Serge Lifar, originally obtained at the sale of his library. 

Born in 1905, Russian-born, Serge Lifar was introduced to dance in 1920 by Bronislava Nijinska, under whom he began to study. Brought to France to join Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lifar studied with Cecchetti and became premier danseur of the company and created the title roles in a number of George Balanchine’s early ballets, including The Prodigal Son. He later became director of the Paris Opera Ballet (1929) and there created over 50 ballets, including the path-breaking Icare (1935), which was written to be danced without music.

"Sergei Pavlovitch Diaghilev, who then ruled the original of the original Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo like an eighteenth-century Russian potentate, would never have permitted him to misbehave. In fact, in 1928, when Lifar danced in my first ballet, Ode, he was the obliging, smiling, and somewhat childish young man who acted as the obedient show dog of Balanchine and Massine, the choreographers, Grigoriev, the stage director, Boris Kochno, Diaghilev’s secretary, Valitchka Nouvel, Diaghilev’s friend and factotum, and, of course, Diaghilev himself. Lifar trotted in awe after all the ballet old-timers, and loved to listen to their wonderful myth-making stories — especially stories about Nijinsky, for Lifar, having acquired a splendid technical skill as a corps de ballet dancer, had quickly risen to the position of a star, and thus had become a faute de mieux successor of Nijinsky.  I suspect that from Lifar’s earliest days he thought of himself as a kind of Adonisian re-embodiment of Nijinsky. There was no greater pleasure for him than to dance L’ Après-midi d’un Fauna and Le Spectre de la Ruse, ballets which, as the critic Levinson suggested, could just as well be called L’ Aprè’s-midi de Nijinsky and Le Spectre de Nijinsky. After Diaghilev’s death, Lifar danced them wherever and whenever he could, going so far as to wear bathing trunks under his evening clothes at private parties. After a little coaxing, he would strip off his clothes and lie down on the piano with his thumb in his mouth, fingers upraised in the drinking gesture that begins that erotic little number, L’Après-midi d’un Faune." (Nicolas Nabokov) (21301)

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Autograph Letter

Dance

$6,500.00

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