Léonide Massine
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Leonid Fyodorovich Myasin (Russian: Леонид Фёдорович Мясин), better known in the West by the French transliteration as Léonide Massine (9 August [O.S. 28 July] 1896 – 15 March 1979) was a Russian choreographer and ballet dancer.
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[edit] Biography
Léonide Massine was born in Moscow and was a ballet student at the Imperial Theater School in that city.[1] 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.[2] 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.[3]
Massine created the world's first symphonic ballet, Les Présages, in 1933 using Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5.[4] 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.[5] 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.[6] 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 and made his home in Borken, Germany, where he died on 15 March 1979.[7]
Massine was inducted into the National Museum of Dance C.V. Whitney Hall of Fame in 2002.
[edit] Major Works
- 1916: Las Meninas (music, Fauré)
- 1917: Les Femmes de Bonne Humeur (music, Scarlatti, arr. Tommasini)
- 1917: Parade (music, Satie)
- 1919: La Boutique Fantasque (music, Rossini, arr. Respighi)
- 1919: Le Tricorne (music, de Falla)
- 1924: Le Beau Danube (music, Strauss)
- 1930: Le Sacre du Printemps (music, Stravinsky)
- 1933: Les Présages (music, Tchaikovsky)
- 1933: Choreartium (music, Brahms)
- 1936: Symphonie Fantastique (music, Berlioz)
- 1938: Gaîté Parisienne (music, Offenbach)
- 1938: Seventh Symphony (music, Beethoven)
- 1938: Nobilissima Visione (music, Hindemith)
- 1939: Capriccio Espagnol (music, Rimsky-Korsakov)
- 1942: Aleko (music, Tchaikovsky)
- 1943: Mam'zelle Angot (music, Lecocq)
- 1948: Capriccio (music, Stravinsky)
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Vicente García-Márques, Massine: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995).
- ^ Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
- ^ Jack Anderson, The One and Only: The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (New York: Dance Horizons, 1981).
- ^ Léonide Massine, My Life in Ballet (London: Macmillan, 1968).
- ^ Vicente García-Márques, The Ballets Russes: Colonel de Basil's Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, 1932-1952 (New York: Knopf, 1990).
- ^ Janet Sinclair, "Massine, Léonide," in International Dictionary of Ballet, edited by Martha Bremser (Detroit: St. James Press, 1993), vol. 2, pp. 918–22. Includes biographical facts, an interpretive essay, and extensive chronologies of roles performed and works created.
- ^ García-Márquez, Massine (1995), p. 381.
[edit] External links
- 1896 births
- 1979 deaths
- People from Moscow
- Ballets Russes dancers
- Ballets Russes choreographers
- Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo choreographers
- Disease-related deaths in Germany
- Russian ballet dancers
- National Museum of Dance Hall of Fame inductees
- Choreographers of American Ballet Theatre
- Ballets by Léonide Massine
