Music: For the Ballet

Girandoles and red plush, champagne and rich grey caviar, pretty Moscow women and gay music—it is a long way from all that to a lonely flat in Cleveland, Ohio. So it seemed to Nikolai Semenoff. Born in Russia some 50 years ago. he had entered the Imperial Ballet School at 8. In the Imperial Ballet, and in the triumphally trouping Sergei Diaghilev Ballet Russe—with its décors by Bakst, Picasso, Derain; its music by Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky; its surging choreography—Dancer Semenoff had taken part, close friend and assistant of Director Michel Fokine. When...