Crafting the Ballet Russes Book

This publication commemorates the exceptional anthology of musical manuscripts, housed at the Morgan Library, which ranks among the most prestigious in the world. Robert Owen Lehman’s superb collection of French and Russian ballet scores, includingFirebird, Petrushka, Afternoon of a Faun, Bolero, and many more, are shown here for the first time alongside the vivid stage designs and rarely seen choreographic notations for these ballets. Together they offer a fresh view into Serge Diaghilev’s famed Ballets Russes troupe and its revitalization of ballet that roiled Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century. These influential ballets and their creators—composers Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel, choreographers Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Bronislava Nijinska, and artists Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, and Natalia Goncharova—set a new agenda for European art. As the 1930s began, a new international era of modern ballet was underway.

• Director’s Foreword by Colin B. Bailey
• Prologue by Marie Rolf
• Diaghilev—Man of Music by Lynn Garafola
• Crafting the Ballets Russes by Robinson McClellan
• Checklist of the Exhibition
• Ballet Music Manuscripts in the Lehman and Morgan Library Collections
• Suggested Reading
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
  

Format: Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-913875-67-1
Pages: 144
27.9 x 21.6 cm
120 colour illustrations
In association with the Morgan Library & Museum, New York