From Petipa to Balanchine

Classical Revival and the Modernisation of Ballet

Tim Scholl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134873074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

In this rich interdisciplinary study Tim Scholl provides a provocative and timely re-evaluation of the development of ballet from the 1880s to the middle of the twentieth century. In the light of a thoughtful re-appraisal of dance classicism he locates the roots of modern ballet in the works of Marius Petipa, rather than in the much-celebrated choreographic experiements of Diaghilev's Ballet Russe.
Not only is this the first book to present nineteenth- and twentieth-century ballet as a continuous rather than broken tradition, From Petipa to Balanchine places works such as Sleeping Beauty, Les Sylphides, Apollo and Jewells in their proper cultural and artistic context.
The only English-language study to be based on the original Russian soures, this book will be essential reading for all dance scholars. Written in an engaging and elegant style it will also appeal to anyone interested in the history of ballet generally.

1
RUSSIAN BALLET IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

IN Our Ballet, the first history of ballet in Russia, Aleksandr Pleshcheev traces the origins of Russian ballet to 1673, when, following a recitation of some German couplets, a ballet on the theme of Orpheus was presented to the court of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich: “the pas de trois of Orpheus and two pyramids was performed, and then Orpheus and the other participants—brilliantly dressed—executed several foreign national dances. The ballet performance greatly pleased Aleksei Mikhailovich” (Pleshcheev 1896, 29). The Orpheus ballet and the play Artokserksovo deistvo (a biblical drama based on the book of Esther presented in Aleksei Mikhailovich’s court one year earlier) mark the beginning of imperial patronage of Russian theater and dance, a constant that enabled the ballet to survive in Russia long after its viability as an art form in Western Europe had ceased.

Like popular theater, dance existed in Russia long before the tsars began to support the arts, but these were folk traditions; the importation and adaptation of Western theatrical forms represented something very different. As visiting European troupes acquainted Russian audiences with the principal Western theatrical genres in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Russian nobles began to train and maintain their own companies of entertainers. The orchestra assembled for the performance of Artakserksovo deistvo was composed of foreigners and the household serfs of the tsar’s favorite noble (ibid., 28).

The divergence from local amateur theatrical traditions was palpable: although the theatrical presentations of the skomorokhi (entertainers who acted, sang, and danced) held a place in the calendar of the Orthodox church already in the eleventh century, stagings of Western school dramas in the middle of the seventeenth century aroused the ire of Archpriest Avvakum, who denounced them as “Romanisms” (Hoover 1985, 470).

As in the West, where ballet evolved slowly from theatricalized social dancing in Renaissance courts, social dancing paved the way for the acceptance of stage dancing in Russia. Balls and assemblies assumed a primary socializing function in the court of Peter I. A 1718 decree required nobles to give and attend assemblies and outlined the rights and responsibilities of hosts and guests. Peter not only attended these assemblies, he also danced in them: “the sovereign himself took part in the dances and taught others to dance” (Pleshcheev 1896, 30). An eyewitness attested to his skill as a dancer: “the tsar performed cabrioles that would have made the best European ballet master of the day proud” (ibid.).

The public dancing initiated at Peter I’s behest continued in the reigns of Catherine I, Anna, and Elizabeth, and laid the groundwork for the establishment of Russia’s court ballet. The first imperial ballet school was organized during Anna’s reign, in 1738, by Jean-Baptiste Landé, a French ballet master who had come to St Petersburg four years earlier. In the 1740s Elizabeth employed three ballet masters simultaneously: Landé to stage tragic ballets, Rinaldi Fossano for comic works, and Thomas Lebrun for allegorical ballets (ibid., 36). Even so, the ballet’s continued presence in Russia was not assured: Pleshcheev writes that during Peter III’s short reign in 1762, no performances were given due to the mourning following the death of Elizabeth (ibid., 41).

Catherine II’s interest in the theater and the steps she took to create a state theater monopoly virtually guaranteed the future of ballet in Russia. She established the imperial theater system in 1756, created the directorate of the imperial theaters ten years later, saw to the construction of St Petersburg’s Bolshoi Theater in 1773, and founded the imperial theater school (which trained actors, singers, and dancers) in 1779. By the end of the century, the ballet and its school were part of a well-organized imperial theater bureaucracy, and the list of European ballet masters associated with the Russian imperial ballet in its formative years includes several of the most important choreographers of the pre-romantic era.

Charles-Louis Didelot (1767–1837) worked in Russia from 1801 to 1811 and settled there permanently in 1816. Under Didelot, the imperial school and its syllabus began to assume its modern form and the Russian ballet enjoyed its first period of celebrity (his dances and his dancers were immortalized in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin). The titles of the works he staged in Russia (Apollo and Daphnis, Flore and Zephyre, Medea and Jason, Amour and Psyche, Acis and Galatea, to name but a few) reveal an eighteenth-century propensity for anacreontic plots drawn from Greek mythology, yet Didelot’s stagings of these works (which frequently used machinery to “fly” his ballerinas across the stage) anticipated the elaborate “grand” ballet staging that Marius Petipa developed in the last half of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, our knowledge of Didelot’s work is limited to secondary sources; like the greater share of ballets created before the age of film documentation, Didelot’s oeuvre is lost.

In the years following Didelot’s retirement in 1831, Europe’s most celebrated ballerinas toured Russia: Marie Taglioni (1837–1842), Lucille Grahn (1843), Fanny Elssler (1848–1851), Carlotta Grisi (1850–1853) and Fanny Cerrito (1855–56). These women danced in local productions of romantic ballet vehicles in Russia: staples of the new “international” repertory such as La Sylphide and Giselle.¹

In the 1850s and 1860s, Russia’s imperial ballet attracted three of the nineteenth century’s most talented ballet masters to St Petersburg. Jules Perrot worked in Russia from 1848 until 1859. Arthur Saint-Léon succeeded him in 1859 and choreographed for the imperial theaters until 1869. Marius Petipa, whose ballets define late nineteenthcentury Russian ballet style, was engaged as a dancer in the St Petersburg ballet in 1847. Although Perrot and Saint-Léon each choreographed a number of ballets in the West and in Russia, the questionable authorship of their surviving works (later restaged and revised by Petipa) precludes any definitive estimation of these choreographers’ lasting contributions to the Russian repertory.

Marius Petipa (1818–1910) had served as a dancer, assistant ballet master, and, from 1862, ballet master of the imperial ballet from the time of his engagement until Saint- Léon’s retirement in 1869. He also taught in the theater school. With Saint-Léon’s departure, his leadership went unchallenged.² The ballets he created in the 1860s and 1870s represent a choreographic response to nineteenth-century grand opera. The Petipa ballet grew into a multi-act spectacle, elaborately staged and performed by a complex hierarchy of dancers.

Petipa staged approximately 75 ballets for the Russian imperial theaters and arranged dances for 36 opera productions.³ But only six of the full-length ballets choreographed by Petipa are still performed. Three of these date from the last phase of Petipa’s career: Sleeping Beauty (1890), Swan Lake (1895),⁴ and Raymonda (1898). These ballets, to music of Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Aleksandr Glazunov, are Petipa’s best-known works. Standards of the international repertory, they have come down to us in reasonably authentic versions. The ballets that survive from the first decades of Petipa’s work in Russia—Le Corsaire (1863), Don Quixote (1869), and La Bayadère (1877)—have suffered infrequent, less faithful revivals.

The grand ballet

Le Corsaire, Don Quixote, and La Bayadère are each described as a “bol’shoi balet” in the Soviet catalogue of Petipa’s works (Slonimsky 1971, 377–388).⁵ A translation of the French ballet à grand spectacle, the term is used to describe ballets that resemble nineteenth-century grand operas in their length, the complexity of their narratives, and tendency toward visual spectacle. Because these works dominated the Petersburg stage from the 1860s through the 1890s, and because Russian ballet had no serious competitors in Europe by the 1870s, the Petipa “grand ballet” has come to represent the ballet style of the late nineteenth century.

That style has been berated in the post-Diaghilev era by dance writers who choose to see the history of dance as an evolutionary progression to the aesthetic of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. In his Complete Book of Ballets, Cyril Beaumont devotes nearly half his introduction of the Petipa ballets to an indictment of nineteenth-century Russian ballet production and performance practices (1941, 385–387). His main objections center around the primacy of dance in these productions in which, admittedly, music, scenery, and costumes were of secondary importance.⁶ Beaumont’s account includes a quote from Tamara Karsavina, the star of Diaghilev’s early European seasons:

Petipa had a remarkable command of mass on the stage and sometimes the form taken by his ballabiles showed considerable imagination. But his productions were all founded on the same formula. An inevitable divertissement brought his ballets to an ever happy conclusion; while such of his heroes, for whom anything but a tragic end was an historical impossibility, found themselves crowned in a final apotheosis. His ballets tended to be “féeries” In his later years he made some attempts to modernise his art to accord more nearly with the present time, but he never felt at ease when making these efforts and they were unsuccessful. His ballets, which even now have not disappeared from the repertory of the Maryinsky Theatre, were crowded with marches and processions which often interrupted, without any kind of logical excuse, long, continuous scenes of pantomime and beautifully composed dances.

(1941, 384–385)

Karsavina’s remarks, written in 1912, at the height of her involvement with the Diaghilev company, echo Beaumont’s objections to the Petipa ballet and repeat the historical inaccuracies he perpetuated. Beaumont privileges the so-called Diaghilev formula, in which music, design, and dancing are combined into a brief, wordless approximation of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk (the “total art work” Wagner hoped to achieve in the successful synthesis of the individual elements of an opera production). In fact, the shorter, one-act form made famous by the Ballets Russes had been used by Petipa throughout his career, especially in works for the court. Karsavina’s reappraisal of Petipa in her 1930 autobiography redresses earlier biases and suggests the extent to which Petipa’s works had begun to be appreciated in the West by that time:

In the history of our ballet [Petipa] will stand a providential figure of titanic strength. His genius was unquestioned during his lifetime, but the wealth of his inheritance could only have been appreciated retrospectively in connection with the new movement. The force of Petipa’s creations reached out far beyond his lifetime and is not yet entirely spent.

(1981, 198)

The romantic ballet prototype

Many of Petipa’s early works for the imperial stages were restagings of ballets originally produced in Paris from the 1830s to the 1850s, the height of ballet romanticism,⁷ and Petipa’s later, original works reveal thematic and structural debts to them. The basic themes, plot structure, and imagery of the ballets of the romantic period served as models for the ballets of the nineteenth century until the premise of narrative ballet was finally abandoned in the twentieth century.

Giselle (1841), the most durable and frequently staged ballet of the French romantic repertory, furnishes the best example.⁸ Like other heroines of the nineteenth-century lyric stage, Giselle selflessly “redeems” her unfaithful lover from beyond the grave. Martyred heroines were something of a commonplace of nineteenth-century opera, literature, and art,⁹ but the opera and ballet theaters, using the relatively new technology of gas lighting and old standbys like tulle and muslin, were particularly adept at bringing these morbid themes to life. The ballet of dead nuns in Meyerbeer’s 1831 opera, Robert le Diable, brought romantic themes and pseudo-gothic imagery to the lyric stage, inaugurating the brief but influential era of ballet romanticism.

The success of romantic ballets like Giselle and La Sylphide ensured their imitation; the martyred sylphs of the 1830s and 1840s are replicated endlessly in Petipa’s ballets. Aspichia, the heroine of Petipa’s first full-scale original work for the Maryinsky, Daughter of the Pharaoh (1862), drowns herself in the Nile rather than marry against her wishes. Nikia, the eponymous bayadère, is bitten by a poisonous snake. Aurora, the sleeping princess, loses a century to sleep. But like Giselle and the Sylphide, all return as spirits to dance the ballet’s subsequent act.

The prevalence of theatricalized female sacrifice in Petipa’s works gave rise to a standardized plot structure. The typical Petipa work has a mad scene, a vision scene, and a scene of reconciliation in which the male protagonist and heroine are rejoined—with each scene slightly adapted to the new narrative exigencies. In Sleeping Beauty, for example, Aurora’s madness is not literal, but the prick with the evil fairy’s spindle satisfies a similar structural demand: it brings the realistic scene to its close and necessitates the fantastic scene that follows, in which Aurora appears as a vision during her hundred-year sleep. Likewise, Aspichia appears underwater after drowning in Daughter of the Pharaoh, and Nikia is next seen in La Bayadère’s Kingdom of the Shades.

In Giselle, the two lovers are reunited in a final pas de deux before the light of dawn signals his freedom and her return to the grave. In the Petipa ballet, this resolution expands to occupy an entire scene (Daughter of the Pharaoh and Sleeping Beauty end in wedding celebrations). Where reconciliation was impossible, the final scene offered resolution. In Bayadère, the dead Nikia cannot return to earth; instead, she causes a storm which collapses the palace, killing her philandering lover, her rival, and the remainder of the ballet’s on-stage personnel.

Ultimately, the structure, rather than the themes of the romantic ballet proved most important for Petipa, as the literal or metaphoric death of the heroine became less significant than the narrative structure it determined. The fantastic scene of the romantic ballet, the ballet blanc, or “white act” divertissement for the female corps de ballet and soloists, became a standard feature of Petipa’s full-length ballets, present even in comic works like Don Quixote (1869). In that ballet, the Don’s dream of Dulcinea takes the form of a ballet blanc in which Dulcinea is joined by Kitri, the ballet’s heroine, and a corps de ballet of dryads. When Petipa restaged Le Corsaire in 1868, he added a similar white scene to the work—this time, a jardin animé.

Expansion of this sort typified the Petipa ballet. Where the romantic ballet’s structure was essentially dual, juxtaposing day and night, reality and fantasy, the grand ballet grew to an average of four acts with upwards of nine scenes. This was accomplished primarily by extending and complicating the narrative while retaining the basic structure of the romantic ballet: the ballet blanc for the female corps followed the first, narrative sequences; the final act took the form of a grand divertissement, with an assortment of national and/or character dances.

Staging the grand ballet

The structural expansion of Petipa’s ballets found its analog in the increasingly elaborate productions these works received. Daughter of the Pharaoh (1862) was the first of Petipa’s grand ballets, and remained the most ambitious, with three acts and nine scenes, including an epilog and prolog.¹⁰ The action takes place in ancient Egypt. After the ballet’s hero, the English Egyptologist Lord Wilson, smokes opium, he dreams that he and his servant (John Bull) have entered the world of the mummified Egyptians they have discovered. Lord Wilson wishes to marry the Pharaoh’s daughter, Aspichia, who is also claimed by the King of Nubia. When forcibly taken by the King, Aspichia jumps to her death in the Nile. The King of the Nile eventually returns Aspichia to the earth, where she marries Wilson in the ballet’s final act.

The ballet’s most spectacular dance sequence takes place under the Nile, where dancers representing the rivers Guadalquivir, Thames, Rhine, Congo, Tiber, and Neva (and the Moscow river in that city’s production), together with lesser soloists representing their respective tributaries and streams, dance in honor of Aspichia. This fantastic scene is analogous to the romantic ballet blanc: its extended divertissement follows the opening narrative scenes, furnishing another level of fantasy in a work already framed by a dream sequence.¹¹

The entire production could only be described as grandiose. Two apotheosis scenes precede the ballet’s final one. The first of these occurs in the prolog, when the mummified Aspichia comes to life as a ray of light falls upon her. The second closes the underwater scene as a jet of water from an on-stage fountain appears to raise Aspichia back to earth. The final apotheosis shows Lord Wilson still asleep while Egyptians celebrate t...