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The Ballets Russes Revolution: Diaghilev brought fire and controversy to ballet, but what remains of his legacy?

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You had to be here. You and almost every art-loving Parisian with money to spend absolutely had to be sitting in the miraculously renovated Theatre du Chatelet on May 19, 1909, for the opening night of Serge Diaghilev's Les Ballets Russes. You'd attended concerts of Russian music that this visionary impresario had presented in Paris in 1907, and been thrilled in 1908 by the great Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin in Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov at the Paris Opera--another step in Diaghilev's mission to acquaint western Europe with Russian culture. Now he's brought Russian ballet to your city.

The theater is packed. Composers, sculptors, writers, actors, singers, and members of the French aristocracy swell the crowd. You crane your neck to see the glamorous actresses and dancers that clever Diaghilev has seated in the front row of the dress circle, the outrageous American Isadora Duncan among them. You've read the many newspaper articles heralding a new sort of ballet, but you're about to realize that nothing could have fully prepared you for tonight.

In 2009, as ballet companies celebrate the centennial of the first legendary season of the Ballets Russes, we can still sense the excitement felt in Paris that night. The curtain rose on Le Pavilion d'Armide with Alexandre Benois' marvelous set. Nikolai Tcherpnine's music floated from the pit. There were murmurs of delight when the simulated Gobelin tapestry rose to show the dreamed-of world behind it, with living dancers replacing the painted ones. Mon Dieu, those dancers! Standards at the Paris Opera Ballet had declined over the last part of the 19th century, and spectators were...

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