Prokofiev's first major success breaking out of the composer-pianist mould was with his purely orchestral Scythian Suite, compiled from music originally composed for a ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes ; Diaghilev commissioned three further ballets from Prokofiev – Chout, Le pas d ' acier and The Prodigal Son – which at the time of their original production were all highly successful.

Diaghilev then commissioned Prokofiev to compose the ballet Chout ( The Fool, the original Russian-language full title was Сказка про шута, семерых шутов перешутившего ( Skazka pro shuta, semerykh shutov pereshutivshavo ), meaning " The Tale of the Buffoon who Outwits Seven Other Buffoons ").

Diaghilev commissioned ballet music from composers such as Nikolai Tcherepnin ( Narcisse et Echo, 1911 ), Claude Debussy ( Jeux, 1913 ), Maurice Ravel ( Daphnis et Chloé, 1912 ), Erik Satie ( Parade, 1917 ), Manuel de Falla ( El Sombrero de Tres Picos, 1917 ), Richard Strauss ( Josephslegende, 1914 ), Sergei Prokofiev ( Ala and Lolly, rejected by Diaghilev and turned into the Scythian Suite ; Chout, 1915 revised 1920 ; Le pas d ' acier, 1926 ; and The Prodigal Son, 1929 ), Ottorino Respighi ( La Boutique fantasque, 1918 ), Francis Poulenc ( Les biches, 1923 ) and others.

He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: The Firebird ( 1910 ), Petrushka ( 1911 ) and The Rite of Spring ( 1913 ).

Ravel began work with impresario Sergei Diaghilev during 1909 for the ballet Daphnis et Chloé commissioned by Diaghilev with the lead danced by the famous ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky.

Around 1920, Diaghilev commissioned Ravel to write La valse ( The Waltz ), originally named Wien ( Vienna ), which was to be used for a projected ballet.

* In 1974-75, Terence Rattigan was commissioned to write a play about Nijinsky and Diaghilev, as the BBC's Play of the Month.

Tailleferre wrote many of her most important works during the 1920s, including her 1st Piano Concerto, the Harp Concertino, the ballets Le marchand d ' oiseaux ( the most frequently performed ballet in the repertoire of the Ballets suédois during the 1920s ) and La nouvelle Cythère which was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev for the ill-fated 1929 season of the famous Ballets Russes, and Sous les ramparts d ' Athènes in collaboration with Paul Claudel, as well as several pioneering film scores, including B ' anda, in which she used African themes.

Sergei Diaghilev commissioned ballet music from Poulenc for Les biches.

In 1919, Bax was one of four British composers to be commissioned to write orchestral music to serve as interludes at Sergei Diaghilev ’ s Ballets Russes in London.

When Fokine's ballet premiered in Paris as part of Diaghilev's " Saison Russe " in 1909, Diaghilev commissioned re-orchestrations of all the dances, except for the Glazunov-orchestrated Waltz, by Anatoly Lyadov, Sergei Taneyev, Nikolai Tcherepnin and Igor Stravinsky.

His latest project is the orchestral full score of Satie's additional music for Gounod's opera Le médecin malgré lui ( commissioned by Diaghilev in 1923 ) from the surviving parts in the Library of Congress, Washington, and the vocal score used in Diaghilev's 1924 production ( supplied by Ornella Volta ).

In 1909 Sergei Diaghilev commissioned Lyadov to orchestrate a number for the Chopin-based ballet Les Sylphides, and on 4 September that year wrote to the composer asking for a new ballet score for the 1910 season of his Ballets Russes ; however, despite the much-repeated story that Lyadov was slow to start composing the work which eventually became The Firebird ( famously fulfilled by the then relatively inexperienced Igor Stravinsky ), there is no evidence that Lyadov ever accepted the commission.

It was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev.

In 1915 she started work on a series of designs — Six Winged Seraph, Angel, St. Andrew, St. Mark, Nativity, and others — for a ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev to be titled Liturgy.

The resulting piece was Le pas d ' acier (‘ The Steel Steps ’), Prokofiev's third ballet for Diaghilev, which premiered in Paris in the summer of 1927 .< ref > Dorothea Redepenning.

In 1913 — the year of Edmund Husserl's Ideas, Niels Bohr's quantized atom, Ezra Pound's founding of imagism, the Armory Show in New York, and, in Saint Petersburg, the " first futurist opera ," Victory Over the Sun — another Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, working in Paris for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, composed The Rite of Spring for a ballet, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, that depicted human sacrifice.

Stravinsky's first period ( which excludes some of his early minor works ) began with Feu d ' artifice ( Fireworks ) and included the three ballets he composed for Diaghilev.

In the first years of the Ballets Russes Pavlova worked briefly for Sergei Diaghilev.

This ensured that the Diaghilev – Stravinsky collaboration would continue, in the first instance with Petrushka ( 1911 ) and then The Rite of Spring.

The illustrious orchestra revolted at the rehearsal for the first performance, refusing to play for Monteux ; only an intervention by Diaghilev restored the rehearsal, by the end of which Monteux was applauded and Stravinsky given an ovation.

Although his first reaction to the music was to tell Diaghilev, " I will never conduct music like that ", he worked with Stravinsky, giving practical advice to help the composer to achieve the orchestral balance and effects he sought.

The importance of rehearsal to Monteux was shown earlier when Diaghilev asked him to conduct Stravinsky's new Les Noces with no rehearsal, as the composer would already have conducted the first performance, Monteux following on from there.

Eventually, after aborting some other plans ( and some more intrigue ), Sergei Diaghilev's support was won, and the choreography was entrusted to Léonide Massine, who had recently become the first dancer of the Ballets Russes and lover of Diaghilev, replacing Vaslav Nijinsky who had left Paris shortly before the outbreak of the war.

* It was the first collaboration between Satie and Picasso, and also the first time either of them had worked on a ballet, thus making it the first time either collaborated with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.

The London premier, in the first season of the Diaghilev Ballets Russes, was at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

In February 1913 the theatre was used by Serge Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky for the first rehearsals of Le Sacre du Printemps before its controversial première in Paris later that year.

In 1924, Erik Satie introduced Sauguet to Serge Diaghilev, the flamboyant impresario of the Ballets Russes, and he wrote his first ballet, Les Roses ( Roses ) that year.

He played the lead roles in the ballets of George Balanchine and at the death of Diaghilev in 1929 he entered the Paris Opera Ballet and created his first ballet.

His close friends included the poet Mikhail Kuzmin and the impresario Serge Diaghilev, at whose invitation he came to Paris in 1906 for the Salon d ' Automne Exhibition, where his work was first shown abroad.

Russian choreographer Sergei Diaghilev persuaded Cocteau to write a scenario for a ballet, which resulted in Parade, in 1917.

In 1924, he designed ballet sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev and the famous Ballets Russes.

* 1872 – Sergei Diaghilev, Russian ballet impresario, founder of the Ballets Russes ( d. 1929 )

Under Diaghilev's guidance, Prokofiev chose his subject from a collection of folktales by the ethnographer Alexander Afanasyev ; the story, concerning a buffoon and a series of confidence tricks, had been previously suggested to Diaghilev by Igor Stravinsky as a possible subject for a ballet, and Diaghilev and his choreographer Léonide Massine helped Prokofiev to shape this into a ballet scenario.

However the Symphony appeared to prompt Diaghilev to commission Le pas d ' acier ( The Steel Step ), a ' modernist ' ballet score intended to portray the industrialisation of the Soviet Union.

During 1928 – 29 Prokofiev composed what was to be the last ballet for Diaghilev, The Prodigal Son, which was staged on 21 May 1929 in Paris with Serge Lifar in the title role.

Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev (;, Sergei Pavlovich Dyagilev, ; 19 August 1929 ), usually referred to outside of Russia as Serge, was a Russian art critic, patron, ballet impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes, from which many famous dancers and choreographers would arise.

In 1900 – 1901 Volkonsky entrusted Diaghilev with the staging of Léo Delibes ' ballet Sylvia, a favorite of Benois.

Diaghilev also worked with dancer and ballet master Léonide Massine.

Diaghilev insisted on calling the ballet The Sleeping Princess.

Diaghilev was a pioneer in adapting these new musical styles to modern ballet.

* August 19 – Sergei Diaghilev, Russian ballet impresario ( b. 1872 )

In February 1909, two orchestral works, the and ( Fireworks ) were performed at a concert in Saint Petersburg, where they were heard by Sergei Diaghilev, who was at that time involved in planning to present Russian opera and ballet in Paris.

Diaghilev was sufficiently impressed by Fireworks to commission Stravinsky to carry out some orchestrations and then to compose a full-length ballet score, The Firebird.