Rudolf Khametovich Nureyev (17 March 1938 – 6 January 1993) was a Soviet-born ballet dancer and choreographer. Nureyev is widely regarded as the preeminent male ballet dancer of the 20th century, as well as one of the greatest ballet dancers of all time. Nureyev was born on a Trans-Siberian train near Lake Baikal, in Siberia, Soviet Union.[8] He began his career in Leningrad with the company that in the Soviet era was called the Kirov Ballet. In 1961, he defected to the West, despite KGB efforts to stop him.[9] This was the first defection of a Soviet artist during the Cold War, and it created an international sensation.
He went on to dance with The Royal Ballet in London and became a global star. Known for his charisma, technical brilliance, and intense stage presence, Nureyev helped elevate the role of the male dancer in ballet. From 1983 to 1989, he directed the Paris Opera Ballet and became its chief choreographer. He also produced his own interpretations of numerous classical works, including Swan Lake, Giselle, and La Bayadère. Nureyev's grandfather, Nurakhmet Fazlievich Fazliev, and his father, Khamit Fazleevich Nureyev (1903–1985), were from Asanovo in the Sharipov volost of the Ufa District of the Ufa Governorate (now the Ufa District of the Republic of Bashkortostan). His mother, Farida Agliullovna Nureyeva (Agliullova) (1907–1987), was born in the village of Tatarskoye Tyugulbaevo, Kuznechikhinsky volost, Kazan Governorate (now Alkeyevsky District of the Republic of Tatarstan).
Nureyev was born on a Trans-Siberian train near Lake Baikal,[8] in Siberia, while his mother Farida was travelling to Vladivostok, where his father Khamet, a Red Army political commissar, was stationed.[8] He was raised as the only son with three older sisters in a Tatar Muslim family.[8][12][13][14][failed verification] In his autobiography, Nureyev noted about his Tatar heritage: "My mother was born in the beautiful ancient city of Kazan. We are Muslims. Father was born in a small village near Ufa, the capital of the Republic of Bashkiria. Thus, on both sides our relatives are Tatars and Bashkirs. I cannot define exactly what it means to me to be a Tatar, and not a Russian, but I feel this difference in myself. Our Tatar blood flows somehow faster and is always ready to boil".[15]
Education at Vaganova Academy
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When his mother took Nureyev and his sisters to a performance of the ballet Song of the Cranes, he fell in love with dance.[16] As a child, he was encouraged to dance in Bashkir folk performances and his precocity was soon noticed by teachers who encouraged him to train in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). On a tour stop in Moscow with a local ballet company, Nureyev auditioned for the Bolshoi ballet company and was accepted. However, he felt that the Mariinsky Ballet school was the best, so he left the local touring company and bought a ticket to Leningrad.[17]
Owing to the disruption of Soviet cultural life caused by World War II, Nureyev was unable to enroll in a major ballet school until 1955, aged 17, when he was accepted by the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet of Leningrad, the associate school of the Mariinsky Ballet. The ballet master Alexander Ivanovich Pushkin took an interest in him professionally and allowed Nureyev to live with him and his wife. The Kirov Ballet
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Upon his graduation in 1958, Nureyev joined the Kirov Ballet (now Mariinsky).[19] He moved immediately beyond the corps level, and was given solo roles as a principal dancer from the outset.[2] Nureyev regularly partnered with Natalia Dudinskaya, the company's senior ballerina and wife of its director, Konstantin Sergeyev. Dudinskaya, who was 26 years his senior, first chose him as her partner in the ballet Laurencia.[18]
Before long, Nureyev became one of the Soviet Union's best-known dancers. From 1958 to 1961, in his three years with the Kirov, he danced 15 roles, usually opposite his partner, Ninel Kurgapkina, with whom he was very well paired, although she was almost a decade older than he was.[20] Nureyev and Kurgapkina were invited to dance at a gathering at Khrushchev's dacha,[18] and in 1959 they were allowed to travel outside the Soviet Union, dancing in Vienna at the International Youth Festival. Not long after, he was told by the Ministry of Culture that he would not be allowed to go abroad again.[21] In one memorable incident, Nureyev interrupted a performance of Don Quixote for 40 minutes, insisting on dancing in tights and not in the customary trousers. He relented in the end, but his preferred dress code was adopted in later performances. By the late 1950s, Nureyev had become a sensation in the Soviet Union. Though Nureyev's rebellious character and non-conformist attitude made him an unlikely candidate for the tour with the Kirov Ballet, it became more essential he join the tour which the Soviet government considered crucial to its ambitions to demonstrate its "cultural supremacy" over the West.[citation needed]
Furthermore, tensions were growing between Nureyev and the Kirov's artistic director Konstantin Sergeyev, who was also the husband of Nureyev's former dance partner Natalia Dudinskaya.[22] After a representative of the French tour organisers saw Nureyev dance in Leningrad in 1960, the French organisers urged Soviet authorities to let him dance in Paris, and he was allowed to go.[18] In Paris, his performances electrified audiences and critics.[23]
Nureyev was seen to have broken the rules about mingling with foreigners and reportedly frequented gay bars in Paris, which alarmed the Kirov's management[24] and the KGB agents observing him. The KGB wanted to send him back to the Soviet Union. On 16 June 1961, when the Kirov company gathered at Le Bourget Airport in Paris to fly to London, Sergeyev took Nureyev aside and told him that he must return to Moscow for a special performance in the Kremlin, rather than go on to London with the rest of the company. Nureyev became suspicious and refused. Next he was told that his mother had fallen severely ill and he needed to go home immediately to see her.[25] Nureyev refused again, believing that on return to the USSR he was likely to be imprisoned. With the help of French police and a Parisian socialite friend, Clara Saint, who had been engaged to Vincent Malraux, the son of the French Minister of Culture, André Malraux, Nureyev escaped his KGB minders and asked for asylum.[26] Sergeyev and the KGB tried to dissuade him, but he chose to stay in Paris.[27] Soviet authorities made Nureyev's father, mother, and dance teacher Pushkin write letters to him, urging him to return, without effect.[18]
Within a week, he was signed by the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas and performed The Sleeping Beauty with Nina Vyroubova. On a tour of Denmark, he met Erik Bruhn, soloist at the Royal Danish Ballet,[28] who became his lover.[29]
In October 1961, Nureyev was secretly invited to make his London debut at the annual gala organised by prima ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn for the Royal Academy of Dance.[30] Nureyev danced Poème Tragique, a solo choreographed by Frederick Ashton, and the Black Swan pas de deux from Swan Lake with Rosella Hightower.[30] During this time, he met Dame Ninette de Valois, director of The Royal Ballet, who invited him to dance with Fonteyn the next season. After the gala, he danced in the South of France and in New York before returning to London.[30]
The Royal Ballet
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As a guest performer of The Royal Ballet, Nureyev first danced with Fonteyn on 21 February 1962.[31][32] Nureyev received such a warm reception that he was given a contract to stay with the Royal Ballet for several more months and became a principal dancer.[33] He quickly became a favourite dancer among the British and gained a following of young admirers.[34] London critics called him the "Russian version of James Dean."[34] Ballet critic Richard Buckle wrote for The Sunday Times: "A pop dancer—that's what we've got—a pop dancer at last. What the telly did for art, what Billy Graham did for religion and what the Duke of Bedford did for architecture, Nureyev has done for ballet."[34]
In November 1961, their Pas de deux from Le Corsaire at the Royal Opera House was met with rave reviews.[35] The Sunday Observer hailed Nureyev as a "Nijinsky reborn" and predicted the pair would go down in ballet history.[35] The Daily Express called Nureyev's performance "incredibly breathtaking" and added that Fonteyn, who was 19 years his senior, "shed half her years to match him with contrasting grace and sparkle."[35] Fonteyn and Nureyev were so well received that they proceeded to form a partnership that endured for many years. They premiered Romeo and Juliet for the company in 1965.[36][37] Fans of the duo would tear up their programmes to make confetti to throw at the dancers. Nureyev and Fonteyn sometimes did more than 20 curtain calls.[32][38] A film of this performance was made in 1966 and is available on DVD.
On 11 July 1967, Fonteyn and Nureyev, after performing in San Francisco, were arrested on nearby roofs, having fled during a police raid on a home in the Haight-Ashbury district. They were bailed out, and charges of disturbing the peace and visiting a place where marijuana was used were dropped later that day for lack of sufficient evidence.[39]
Nureyev stayed with the Royal Ballet until 1970, when he was promoted to Principal Guest Artist, enabling him to concentrate on his increasing schedule of international guest appearances and tours. He continued to perform regularly with The Royal Ballet until committing his future to the Paris Opera Ballet in the 1980s. Nuryev made his New York stage debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York on 10 March 1962, dancing the Don Quixote pas de deux with Sonia Arova.[40]
In October 1962, he had a major showing as soloist with the Chicago Lyric Opera and the Chicago Opera Ballet.[41]
Nuryev and his partner Braun appeared as guest dancers with the newly formed Australian Ballet at Her Majesty's Theatre, Sydney in December 1962.
Among many appearances in North America, Nureyev developed a long-lasting connection with the National Ballet of Canada, appearing as a guest artist on many occasions. In 1972, he staged a spectacular new production of Sleeping Beauty for the company, with his own additional choreography augmenting that of Petipa. The production toured widely in the U.S. and Canada after its initial run in Toronto, one performance of which was televised live and subsequently issued on video.
Among the National Ballet's ballerinas, Nureyev most frequently partnered with Veronica Tennant and Karen Kain. In 1975 Nureyev worked extensively with American Ballet Theatre resurrecting Le Corsaire with Gelsey Kirkland. He recreated Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and Ramonda with Cynthia Gregory. Gregory and Brun joined Nureyev in a pas des trois from the little-known August Bournonville ballet La Ventana.[42]
The Paris Opera Ballet
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In January 1982, Austria granted Nureyev citizenship, ending more than 21 years of statelessness.[43] He had been travelling on a United Nations Geneva Convention passport.[43]
In 1983, he was appointed director of the Paris Opera Ballet, where, as well as directing, he continued to dance and to promote younger dancers. He remained there as a dancer and chief choreographer until 1989. Among the dancers he mentored were Sylvie Guillem, Isabelle Guérin, Manuel Legris, Elisabeth Maurin, Élisabeth Platel, Charles Jude, and Monique Loudières.
His artistic directorship of the Paris Opera Ballet was a great success, lifting the company out of a dark period. His version of Sleeping Beauty remains in the repertoire and was revived and filmed with his protégé Manuel Legris in the male lead.
Despite advancing illness towards the end of his tenure, he worked tirelessly, staging new versions of old standbys and commissioning some of the most ground-breaking choreographic works of his time. His own Romeo and Juliet was a popular success. When he was sick towards the end of his life, he worked on a final production of La Bayadère which closely follows the Mariinsky Ballet version he danced as a young man. Nureyev tested positive for HIV in 1984, but for several years he denied that anything was wrong with his health. However, by the late 1980s his diminished capabilities were becoming obvious.[44]
Although he petitioned the Soviet government for many years to be allowed to visit his mother, he was not allowed to do so until 1987, when his mother was dying and Mikhail Gorbachev consented to the visit.[19]
In 1989, he was invited to dance the role of James in La Sylphide with the Mariinsky Ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre in Leningrad.[45] The visit gave him the opportunity to see many of the teachers and colleagues he had not seen since his defection.[46]
Nureyev began a marked decline in the summer of 1991 and entered the final phase of the disease in the spring of 1992.[47] In March 1992, living with advanced AIDS, he visited Kazan and appeared as a conductor in front of the audience at Musa Cälil Tatar Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, which now presents the Rudolf Nureyev Festival in Tatarstan.[48][49] Returning to Paris, with a high fever, he was admitted to the Notre Dame du Perpétuel Secours hospital in Levallois-Perret, a suburb northwest of Paris, and was operated on for pericarditis, an inflammation of the membranous sac around the heart. He was determined to recover so that he could fulfill an invitation to conduct Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet at an American Ballet Theatre benefit on 6 May 1992 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. He did so and was elated at the reception.[47]
In July 1992, Nureyev showed renewed signs of pericarditis but declined further treatment. His last public appearance was on 8 October 1992, at the premiere at Palais Garnier of a new production of La Bayadère that he choreographed after Marius Petipa for the Paris Opera Ballet. Nureyev had managed to obtain a photocopy of Ludwig Minkus' original score when in Russia in 1989.[50] The ballet was a personal triumph although the gravity of his condition was evident. The French Culture Minister, Jack Lang, presented him that evening on stage with France's highest cultural award, the Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Nureyev re-entered the Notre Dame du Perpétuel Secours hospital in Levallois-Perret on 20 November 1992, and remained there until he died on 6 January 1993, at the age of 54, from AIDS complication; his diagnosis was not made public until the morning of his death.[51]
His funeral was held in the marble foyer of the Palais Garnier Opera House. Many paid tribute to his brilliance as a dancer. One such tribute came from Oleg Vinogradov of the Mariinsky Ballet, stating: "What Nureyev did in the West, he could never have done here."[52]
Nureyev's grave, at the Russian cemetery in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois near Paris, features a tomb draped in a mosaic of an Oriental carpet, a kilim.[53] Nureyev was an avid collector of beautiful carpets and antique textiles.[47][48] As his coffin was lowered into the ground, music from the last act of Giselle was played and his ballet shoes were cast into the grave along with white lilies.
