“Etonne-moi,” he would tell his collaborators. And they certainly astonished him and us. They still do. The very name Diaghilev has become synonymous with cultural patronage on an imperial scale and, more than that, patronage with unequalled taste and a rare appetite for the new. Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy, Prokofiev, Satie and Poulenc all wrote for his dancers. Benois, Bakst, Larionov, Goncharova, Picasso, Matisse, Derain and Braque all designed for him. Diaghilev created an art form in which, for the very first time, dance and design and music met as equals.

Yet Sergey Pavlovich Diaghilev never made anything himself. He was an enabler of other people’s gifts and he turned them into other people’s tastes. When the Ballets Russes first conquered the west in the early 1900s, smart Parisians redesigned their salons in Bakst’s thrilling primitive colours from the east and bought new wardrobes for their wives.

It was a search for novelty that led Diaghilev to his greatest composer, Igor Stravinsky, who’d scarcely cut his musical teeth when he was asked to write The Firebird in 1910. A year later came Petrushka and then the notorious Rite of Spring. A scandal, with fisticuffs in the stalls. Diaghilev’s comment afterwards? “Just what I wanted.” It was good for art and good for business.

In his first scores for Diaghilev Stravinsky helped to move classical dance in an entirely new direction. This was music that demanded a new kind of choreography. Mikhail Fokine laid the foundations of the Diaghilev style and, when he was dismissed, Nijinsky took his place. He had already shocked stuffy Paris with his first dance, to Debussy’s Prélude à L’après-midi d’un faune. It wasn’t the stark gestures of the dancers or the influence of Greek sculpture that upset the audience, but the faune making very obvious love to a nymph’s scarf.

Nijinsky was the first of Diaghilev’s favourites and the great impresario’s preference for male lovers, who were also dancers, finally gave the male classical dancer more than a supporting role. After Nijinsky came Massine and Lifar.

But while Nijinsky is still remembered as the most luminous of Diaghilev’s boys, it was his sister Bronislava who created the more enduring choreography, in her two 1920s masterpieces, Renard and Les noces, to scores by Stravinsky. And, with singers in the pit as well as musicians, both continued to break the mould of what classical dance was supposed to be.

As a young man, Diaghilev wrote to his stepmother: “I am first a great charlatan, but with brio, secondly a great charmeur, thirdly, I have any amount of cheek, fourthly, I am a man with a great quantity of logic, but very few principles, fifthly, I think I have no real gifts. All the same, I have just found my true vocation – being a Maecenas. I have all that is necessary, save the money – mais ça viendra.” Luckily it did, and we’re all the richer for it.

Who was Serge Diaghilev?

The great impresario belonged to the Russian nobility and was born in Russia March 19, 1872. At University he was supposed to study law, but soon discovered that he only wanted to study the arts. He edited a review The World of Art and then joined the administration of the Imperial Theatres.

He decided that ballet needed revitalising but his unconventional ideas were not appreciated in Russia and he was obliged to go to France to mount the new ballets which fired his imagination. In 1909 he took Russian dancers and singers to Paris, the first step in 20 years of ballet presentation. Les Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev then appeared often in Paris, London and other European cities, and later America.

Any well-trained dancer was immediately recruited by Diaghilev, whose break with Russia was made final by the Great War. New dancers and choreographers included Nijinsky, Massine and Balanchine, and all the leading European composers and artists of the period were commissioned by him to take part in new ballets. In 1911 Diaghilev formed his own company. This toured throughout the year, but took a break in the summer months, when Diaghilev always went to Venice with his entourage. In the 1920s, his companions included the glamorous young Serge Lifar, the last star of the Diaghilev Ballet and his last protégé. Throughout his life Diaghilev had been afraid to cross the sea, as a fortuneteller had told him that he would die by water. On the occasions that he had to cross the English Channel, his servant was ordered to pray for him throughout the crossing. But it was beside the sea, in Venice, that Diaghilev died in 1929, with Lifar at his bedside. And his last journey was over the water, across the Lido to the cemetery of San Michele, where he is buried beside another of his great protégés, the composer Igor Stravinsky.

Diaghilev died in Venice on August 19, 1929.