Ballets By Léonide Massine - Biography

Biography

Léonide Massine was born in Moscow and was a ballet student at the Imperial Theater School in that city. From 1915 to 1921 he was the principal choreographer of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Following the departure of Vaslav Nijinsky, the company's first male star, Massine became the preeminent male star and took over Nijinsky's roles. His first ballet, in 1915, called Le Soleil de Nuit, used Russian folklore as elements. In 1917, Massine collaborated with composer, Erik Satie and artists Picasso to create the ballet, Parade. One of his most famous ballets, Le Tricorne, in 1919, displayed his talent in character dances. His collaborators, all Spanish, helped to make this ballet more authentic to its subject matter. Picasso worked on sets and costumes again, composer, Manuel de Falla, wrote the music and the story was based on Pedro Antonio Alarcon's novel, El Sombrero de trespicos. Massine spent a lot of time in Spain doing anthropological research for Le Tricorne, in order to understand authentic Spanish dances and their style. After the death of Diaghilev in 1929 and the disbanding of his company, Massine became the choreographer and male lead dancer of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, one of the companies that succeeded the original Ballets Russes.

Massine created the world's first symphonic ballet, Les Présages, in 1933 using Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5. This caused a furore amongst musical purists, who objected to a serious symphonic work being used as the basis of a ballet. Undeterred, Massine continued work on Choreartium, set to Brahms's Fourth Symphony, which had its premiere on 24 October 1933 at the Alhambra Theatre in London. He also choreographed a ballet to Hector Berlioz's 1830 Symphonie Fantastique and danced the role of the Young Musician with Tamara Toumanova as the Beloved at its premiere at Covent Garden, London, on 24 July 1936 with Colonel W. de Basil's Ballets Russes. Two years later he produced Seventh Symphony, to Beethoven's great score. It premiered on 5 May 1938 in Monte Carlo, with Alicia Markova, Nini Theilade, Frederic Franklin, and Igor Youskevitch as the principal dancers.

Besides his "symphonic ballets," Massine choreographed many other popular works during his long career, some of which were serious and dramatic and others lighthearted and romantic. He created some of his most famous roles in his own comic works, among them the Can-Can Dancer in La Boutique Fantasque, the Hussar in Le Beau Danube, and, perhaps best known of all, the Peruvian in Gaîté Parisienne.

Massine appeared in two films by the British directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger: The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951); and in a cameo in Powell's later Honeymoon (1959). He also starred in several ballet short subjects. For Warner Brothers, he starred with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in short Technicolor films of his ballets Gaîté Parisienne and Capriccio Espagnol titled, respectively, The Gay Parisian (1941) and Spanish Fiesta (1942). He choreographed and danced in the 1947 20th Century Fox color film Carnival In Costa Rica, and also choreographed and appeared as Punchinello in the film Carosello Napoletano.

In his youth, Massine was the protégé and lover of Diaghilev, although he was not homosexual. In later life he enjoyed numerous love affairs with beautiful women and had four wives. His first two wives, Vera Savina (née Vera Clark) and Eugenia Delarova, were both ballet dancers. With his third wife, Tatiana Orlova, he had two children, a son, Lorca, and a daughter, Tatiania. He and Orlova divorced in 1968. He subsequently married Hannelore Holtwick, with whom he had two sons, Peter and Theodor, and made his home in Borken, Germany, where he died on 15 March 1979.

Massine was inducted into the National Museum of Dance's Mr. & Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Hall of Fame in 2002.