To Diaghilev's season again yesterday. The first item was Le Chant du rossignol - slow and boring. There followed the premiere of Matelots. These sailors are delineated in the simplest outline, and it is obvious that Auric was in a terrible rush when composing the score. The music is 'nautical', which is to say rollicking but à la française, which is further to say that it is gay and tuneful in a chansonnier sort of way. Some of the material is quite attractive but some of it is unbearable, for instance the tune we had been discussing at the rehearsal the day before yesterday. The settings, by the young artist Pruna, a follower of Picasso, are simple and pleasing. Massine's staging of the ballet was ebullient and good-humoured; in general freshness and good humour were the dominant qualities of both the music and of the whole production, and account for its vociferous success. These very qualities were in sharp contrast to the viscid tugidity of the Nightingale, which had it followed Matelots would have been completely unlistenable to in spite of all Auric's deplorable lapses of taste. 'Whenever I hear this, I get a stomach ache,' Diaghilev once commented about one of the Nightingale themes.