The Rite of Spring 1908). In 1909 "Feu d'artifice" was performed at a concert in St. Petersburg. Among those in the audience was the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who at that time was planning to introduce Russian music and art to western audiences. Like Stravinsky, Diaghilev had initially studied law, but had gravitated via journalism into the theatrical world. In 1907 he began his theatrical career by presenting five concerts in Paris; in the following year he introduced Mussorgsky's opera "Boris Godunov". In 1909, still in Paris, he launched the Ballets Russes, initially with Borodin's Polovtsian Dances from "Prince Igor" and Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade". To present
The Rite of Spring opening Paris run and the London performances, events conspired to prevent further stagings of the ballet. Nijinsky's choreography, which Kelly describes as "so striking, so outrageous, so frail as to its preservation", did not appear again until attempts were made to reconstruct it in the 1980s. On 19 September 1913 Nijinsky married Romola de Pulszky while the Ballets Russes was on tour without Diaghilev in South America. When Diaghilev found out he was distraught and furious that his lover had married, and dismissed Nijinsky. Diaghilev was then obliged to re-hire Fokine, who had resigned in 1912 because Nijinsky had been