Why Does Marius Petipa Matter?
Lecture first given at Houghton Library symposium “In Pursuit of Petipa”, Harvard University, in November 2018.
Or does Marius Petipa matter at all? He has become the most enigmatic and ambiguous choreographer in history.
Much of the choreography we now see that’s called Petipa is not Petipa. Many of us watched for decades something called the Le Corsaire pas de deux before we came to realise that a more authentic version of this was a pas de deux à trois. It then took another decade or two before we discovered that none of that was by Petipa anyway: it was added in 1915, five years after his death, by Samuil Andrianov.[1] In the case of Swan Lake’s Odile-Siegfried grand pas de deux - often erroneously called the Black Swan (she’s not a swan; Petipa never dressed her in black) - I’ve spent over forty-seven years years watching Odile’s choreography change out of recognition.[2] In the 1950s, Balanchine remarked that Siegfried’s solo in that pas de deux had been changed decades before.[3] It took ages before I found that one of the most crucial moments in the Odile adagio, its ending, had been edited away in the early 1940s.[4]
We have a few good souls, not least Doug Fullington and Alexei Ratmansky, trying to get back to Petipa where possible - but far too few. Today’s dance audience is continually watching whole acres of choreography still called “Petipa” that simply aren’t Petipa. But even Petipa’s audience was watching lots of Petipa that wasn’t by Petipa. In Paris, Marius Petipa was successfully prosecuted for plagiarism by Jules Perrot.[5] In St Petersburg, Mariinsky ballet master Christian Johansson would smile that Petipa came to watch his men’s classes to steal material from them for the male variations he was preparing to make in his next ballet; after Petipa left the studio, Johansson would wink and say, “The old man’s pinched some more.”[6] We have that tale from Nicolas Legat, who, in the same book, also tells us that he was one of the ballet masters whom Petipa permitted to make dances that “passed under Petipa’s name.”[7]
What’s more, Petipa devoted much of his work to Russian revisions of Western ballets (Giselle, Esmeralda, Le Corsaire, Coppélia); he was an editor and rearranger of other men’s work. La Bayadère is one of Petipa’s original ballets, but it drew from his brother Lucien Petipa’s 1858 ballet Sakountala and from imagery of Marie Taglioni in the 1830 opera-ballet Le Dieu et la Bayadère. I assume we’ll never know how much Marius Petipa was indebted to Perrot, to his brother Lucien, to Joseph Mazilier, to Arthur Saint-Leon and to others. Plagiarism may not be the worst crime in art – all choreographers are magpies - and it may have been more acceptable in the Russia of his day. Even so, the evidence suggests Marius Petipa owed yet more to other choreographers than many choreographers do.
He and his work, however, survived. He himself outlived all those illustrious contemporaries; he did his most important work in his seventies and eighties; it’s largely thanks to him that ballets begun by Perrot, Saint-Léon, and others survive in repertory today; and he lived to choreograph for many of the dancers who, in the twentieth century, became influential in Western ballet - Mathilde Kschessinskaya, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, Nicolas Legat, Anna Pavlova. Maybe he was a derivative conservative who contributed little new to ballet - we really know too little of the French ballet of his day, which may have cast a very long shadow over his work - but even if he copied all his choreography from others, it was his that lasted. The only other choreographer of his day whose work survives in sufficient quantity for us to identify its characteristics is the Danish choreographer August Bournonville. Here we have not only a remarkable compare-and-contrast case, we also have Bournonville’s account of their meeting in the mid-1870s. When Bournonville visited Russia in his early seventies, he saw performances of Esmeralda, La Fille du Pharaon, Don Quixote, Le Papillon, and Le Roi Candaule. He writes
“I… made it my business to forget – or at least to hide – the system which for more than forty years I have followed with respect to my own works….
“I sought in vain to discover plot, logical consistency, or anything which might remotely resemble sanity. And even if I were fortunate enough to come across a trace of it in Petipa’s Don Quixote, the impression was immediately effaced by an unending and monotonous host of feats of bravura, all of which were greeted with salvos of applause and curtain calls….
“I could not possibly suppress these and similar observations during my conversations with Johansson and Balletmaster Petipa. They admitted that I was perfectly right, confessed that they privately loathed and despised this whole development, explained with a shrug of the shoulders that they were obliged to follow the current of the times, which they charged to the blasé taste of the public and the specific wishes of the high authorities.” [8]
Since the Second World War, Bournonville’s dances have become widely loved across the dance world; I’ve seen them performed by companies from Moscow to Arizona. In January 2015, New York had a week when the Royal Danes danced Bournonville at the Joyce to taped music while the Mariinsky danced the Petipa-Ivanov Swan Lake to Valery Gergiev’s conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra. This sounds as if Petipa and Ivanov were in better condition; but in performance (at least in the opinion of the chief dance critic of the New York Times at that time[9], Bournonville was alive, whereas Petipa and Ivanov were dead. Somehow the Royal Danes have maintained a tradition of keeping the inner breath of Bournonville alive, whereas both the Mariinsky and the Bolshoi have been turning Petipa and Ivanov into studies in taxidermy.
When Bournonville and Petipa met, they were both using minor composers. Petipa had made a whole series to music by Cesare Pugni and Ludwig Minkus; I prefer the scores commissioned by Bournonville from Herman Løwensjkold, Niels Gade, Johan Hartmann, and others. The big difference, however, is the way that Bournonville brings the rhythms and suspense of his scores to life. It’s possible that Petipa knew some of Bournonville’s tricks of rhythm and phrasing – Ratmansky’s stagings have begun to suggest this – but so far the evidence for this remains thin, because Petipa’s dance texts and their phrasing have been coarsened since his death.
As we know, Petipa was lucky that, after he’d reached the age of seventy, he got to work with Tchaikovsky and Glazounov. My question has long been: Was Petipa up to the challenge? How can a choreographer who has been doing his best work for thirty years to the scores of Pugni and Minkus find the much greater rhythmic subtlety that’s required for Tchaikovsky? Legat records how this was indeed a dilemma for Petipa: “More accustomed to the orthodox forms of Pugni and Minkus, Petipa at first found it difficult to adapt himself to the famous Russian composer’s novel arrangements, and constantly demanded that tempos should be altered and cuts and additions made, with all of which demands Tchaikovsky obligingly obeyed.”[10] We know that when the Mariinsky régisseur Nicholas Sergueyev staged the Mariinsky classics at Sadler’s Wells, Ninette de Valois found his way with Tchaikovsky’s scores “unmusical to a degree bordering on eccentricity.”[11] This may well have derived from Petipa’s own way with the music. Sure, we now find refined choreographic musicality in some traditions of dancing The Sleeping Beauty, but was that musicality Petipa’s? Or was it the work of Diaghilev, Nijinska, de Valois, Ashton in the West, and various later ballet masters in Russia?
I don’t have a simple answer here. Ratmansky has done more than anyone to recapture the musical life of Petipa’s choreography in The Sleeping Beauty; in particular, he has spoken of the rhythmic brilliance in Petipa’s Jewels pas de quatre in Act Three.[12] Still, although I’ve praised the Ratmansky production of Sleeping Beauty more than most, it hasn’t persuaded me that Petipa could handle the adagio drama of its four great pas d’action. Only a few productions, especially some in the West, have risen to Tchaikovsky’s level in those adagios; I suspect they weren’t following Petipa but improving upon him, constructing a musicality of phrasing he himself lacked. (The details of phrasing in Petipa’s Rose Adagio differ considerably from those in Tchaikovsky’s. If Margot Fonteyn made them dazzling, was she not drawing more on the tuition of Constant Lambert and Frederick Ashton - and they on the examples of Diaghilev’s Auroras - than on the inherent qualities of Petipa’s own choreography?)
When we go back to Petipa’s original work, we often notice that some of his choreographic solutions are less satisfactory than certain twentieth-century emendations of them. I’m not talking here of the well-known anachronisms of the Rose Adagio balances (developed by Margot Fonteyn in the 1940s) and the Wedding fish dives (devised for Olga Spessivtseva in or before 1921). What matter more, in The Sleeping Beauty, are the concluding images of the Prologue, Act One, and Act Three. Think of the glorious diagonal line of arabesques directed toward Aurora’s cradle at the end of the Christening: Petipa never choreographed that. Or the way that Aurora ends her Wedding with a supported arabesque (descending to penchée: she rises again to vertical, and then opens her upper body to include the stage world and audience): an image that’s the centrepiece of a unison grand port de bras reverence from everyone else onstage – a stunningly poetic image that isn’t by Petipa. These masterstrokes, which I’ve seen and loved hundreds of times in live performance, are adjustments made (probably by Ashton) in several influential productions in the twentieth century to give Petipa’s work more dance-centred emphasis – whereas Petipa himself employed more pedestrian tableaux. Those revised versions profoundly suit the dance spirit that Petipa honours elsewhere. It’s worth stressing that, once we start to prefer post-Petipa stagings to Petipa ones, post-Shakespeare to Shakespeare, Romanticised Mozart to faithfully stylish Mozart, we’re on shaky ground.
Yet however much we take from Petipa’s reputation, much remains – much of which Bournonville was incapable. Even if we speculate that Petipa was not a great enough choreographer to fulfil all the diversity in Tchaikovsky’s scores, we should also recognise that the greatness of Tchaikovsky’s scores for The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker derive in large part from the grand plans that Petipa gave his composer. Petipa was a grand visionary, a master-architect. Nicolas Legat writes of Petipa at work preparing his floor schemes like a player arranging his chess pawns on the board[13]; we could have guessed that from the sheer spatial geometry of much of his surviving choreography. Those Shades come down the ramp in Bayadère - and everything that follows builds in space and time from there. Look at the plans that Petipa sent to Tchaikovsky and Glazunov: you see how he shaped the whole timespan and stylistic drama of each act and the whole ballet.[14] The two most wonderfully colossal moments in the score for Nutcracker are the rise of the Christmas tree in Act One and the pas d’action in Act Two: Tchaikovsky wrote ascending music for the first and descending music for the latter. One is to do with scenery and the other to do with dancing. But they have a parallel importance in the score because of Petipa. He gave parallel ideas to Tchaikovsky in his notes: he requested that the Christmas tree and the Sugarplum pas d’action have the same number of bars, forty-eight in each case[15] and in both cases he requested overwhelming sound (“fantastic music with a grandiose crescendo” for the tree, “intended to produce a colossal impression” for the Sugarplum adagio). Tchaikovsky obliged.
We can easily say that Tchaikovsky’s music for The Sleeping Beauty is greater than Petipa’s staging - but actually that’s missing the point. Part of what’s valuable about the Petipa-Tchaikovsky collaboration is the difference between action and sound. If you sing along as you watch, you realise that Petipa answers Tchaikovsky’s melodies with different physical melodies, metrically different but interlocking. (Try it with Aurora’s first-act violin variation in The Sleeping Beauty: the music is a legato solo violin melody in iambic rhythm over a pizzicato accompaniment of three beats in the bar, but Petipa’s rhythm and melody - with a glissade leading into a piquée arabesque followed by an off-pointe pose, and so on - are quite different in rhythm and stress. (The piquées arabesques alternate with relevés in attitude back.) Petipa also answers the music architecturally. Aurora’s phrases there advance, in one of Petipa’s slow zigzags, from front to centrestage: he takes dancers’ bodies on geometrical paths through space.
And of course he treats the body itself as architecture, too. Moment by moment, he changes its shape. Again and again, he shows us the central miracle of ballet, whereby a mortal human being becomes a work of ideal geometry: ballet not merely changes the body’s shape, but also keeps changing its angle, as if holding up a jewel to the light. It is a Petipa signature effect to alternate a front-facing position with a back-stretching one; or to take a pulled-up vertical position and turn it on this diagonal and then the opposite one. The jewel effect is pronounced: it makes the audience feel how light is refracted by the dancing body back into the auditorium.
When Diaghilev staged The Sleeping Princess (The Sleeping Beauty by another name) in 1921, Stravinsky was already well acquainted with Tchaikovsky’s music. He’d been playing it in piano duet form with Diaghilev, and he’d arranged it for this London production. Yet the music hadn’t prepared him for what was to be one of the great aesthetic revelations of his life. In his 1930 autobiography, it was Petipa’s choreography he hailed this way, for its demonstration of classical ballet as “the triumph of studied conception over vagueness, of the rule over the arbitrary, of order over the haphazard,” and called it “the perfect expression of the Apollonian principle.”[16]
There are other things that Petipa brought to ballet that Tchaikovsky could not: above all, the drama of chivalry. One of the foundation stones of ballet is what I dare to call its beautiful sexism: the woman goes on point, the man partners her, the positions may not be reversed.
This can be insufferable - inexcusable - when it’s allowed to become a cliché. But for Petipa it really was crucial. This is why he made the supported classical adagio (often a pas d’action) the centrepiece of so many acts in his ballets, why he made the adagio a dramatic scene in which men showed their chivalry to women, and why that chivalry showed itself in men supporting women as they went on point. We’re shown heterosexuality as ceremony. And Petipa makes us see and feel the glory of opposite-sex partnering - makes us feel it even in this twenty-first century when we know that, in real life and some modern choreography, women support men and that there are also same-sex unions onstage and off.
Tchaikovsky’s music makes this drama marvellous, picturesque, important, momentous. But it is Petipa’s stage drama that actually shows us what’s at stake - a society in which men honour women, support women, frame women. He makes it look the cornerstone not only of ballet but of psychology and civilisation too. He shows us supported adagio as something that transports a hero when he envisions it (Don Quixote, La Bayadère, The Sleeping Beauty), something a heroine dreams about (Raymonda) as her shining hope, something children are shown as a peak of wonderland (The Nutcracker), something that happens to men and women, in both courts and villages. Upon the foundation of that male-female pas d’action and/or supported adagio, Petipa constructs the rest of almost every act: the central suite of classical dances with their solo variations, and coda, the other ensembles in various styles, the mime scenes, and more.
It would be wrong to make Petipa out to be a formulaic choreographer. The long opening scenes of his Mariinsky Nutcracker, Swan Lake and Raymonda have no supported adagio. He worked as a dramatist, not as an exponent of some heterosexualist agenda. Act One of The Nutcracker is an amazing construction, and it was he who planned it: its central characters are children, its only ballerina who gets partnered on point is a doll (Columbine), and its counterpart to any pas d’action is the astounding music for the Christmas tree. Even so, the glory that finally materialises in the Sugarplum pas de deux in Act Two, beginning with the adagio and its “colossal effects”, is all the greater.[17]
I’d like to speak of the way Petipa shapes his female variations. Legat recalls these as the genre in which Petipa’s mastery was considered absolute at the time. Give Petipa a suite of six different female solos in the Prologue of Sleeping Beauty and he gives each one a different physical geography, a new series of flightpaths. Each variation traces a new map of the stage. They show that he’s not only seeking spatial variety, he’s relating each woman to the larger stage area around her. As he makes her enter down the centre line, or down the diagonal from stage left to stage right, or along a grandly advancing zigzag, he immediately shows her commanding the space about her. The spatial lines that follow are different in each case - horizontals, retreating diagonals or verticals, advancing new diagonals - and each line is related to a new phrase in the music.
Even when you know the choreography of George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton - the two twentieth-century master-choreographers who learnt most from Petipa and who built most of his legacy - the spatial dominion of Petipa’s solo women is exceptional. (Their way of fitting the dance to its stage area shows a virtue required by the dancing masters of the Renaissance.) And this command of space takes off yet further when he choreographs for a prima ballerina. My favourite is for Aurora in Act Three of The Sleeping Beauty. She starts with one phrase on the spot centre-stage: seven phrases follow, each crossing the stage between front and back and from side to side in a different way, each following a new sequence in the music. Her authority only deepens as she travels.
As I’ve said, Petipa choreography today can be dead in performance. It has a schematic quality, as Bournonville choreography does not. The nature of a Bournonville phrase is such that you can’t predict what step will follow the last; the nature of a Petipa one is that you can. Yet Petipa can turn repetition into something transcendent. Several of his variations for prima ballerinas demonstrate a particularly simple device that can become the poetic highlight of the variation - indeed of the whole ballet. As the music returns to its original melody, he has the ballerina do the same basic step on point, again and again, in a full diagonal of the stage. Yes, in a bad performance it’s unremarkable, even deadly. I hope you’ll believe me when I say that, in a good or great performance, the opposite is true; and that what Petipa allows is the emergence of each ballerina’s individuality. I’ll just give you two examples:-
In Act Three of Coppélia, as the music returns to a variant of her variation’s original melody, the heroine, Swanilda, steps backwards along the stage diagonal - as if she’s suspending time. On point, she keeps stepping into fifth position, then switching the front foot to the back. Here’s Petipa the jeweller showing us the dovetailing of the feet one way, then other; he does so to the music, allowing the ballerina’s upper body to stay almost motionless as if she’s conducting her lower body’s magic. There’s a film of Alexandra Danilova performing this at Jacob’s Pillow in a high tutu, whereas Swanilda is usually dressed in a dress descending to near knee-level; but for Danilova no tutu can be high enough here. With her fabulously stretched legs – they were known for their wit - and pulled-up knees, she pulls the edge of her tutu even higher so that the audience can see yet more inches of her upper thigh. It ought to be outrageous; but the sparkle of her rhythm makes it irresistible.
In Act Three of The Sleeping Beauty, as the music’s melody returns with a solo violin, Aurora III takes the same diagonal, but this time forwards. She advances with a small, small step - a petit développé leading into a piqué and fifth position - sixteen times. (It’s possible that the notation records a slightly different step. I describe the step that has been passed down by performance tradition going back to at least Vera Trefilova in the 1921 Diaghilev production, and that, since Trefilova was born in 1875 and became a soloist in 1901, probably takes us back to Petipa’s day.[18]) This diagonal is normally a bore as we see it today - but I testify that this can be the very material where a ballerina casts her greater spell. The magic lies not in the upper body so much as in the coordination of the whole body: eyes, head, shoulders, arms, back, feet, legs.
When Alexandra Danilova, who had begun her career at the Mariinsky, coached Petipa variations in New York, she spoke of perfume. This Aurora diagonal is total perfume, and each ballerina can conjure it her own very specific poetic image. When Antoinette Sibley danced it with the Royal Ballet in the 1960s and 1970s, Nancy Goldner compared it to making lace.[19] When Margot Fonteyn danced it from the 1940s to the 1960s, Dale Harris wrote of how “she would drew the rhythm taut by raising her eyes a fraction later than her arms.”[20] When the young Lesley Collier danced it in 1977, she made it about growing from childhood into maturity.[21] When the mature Lynn Seymour (the greatest Aurora of my experience) danced it the same year, she made it about the overwhelming dawn of sensual awareness.
So the diagonal is not just a repetition but a crescendo. Although each important ballerina takes it in her own imaginative direction, Petipa has given her the framework. By repeating and repeating the same step, she claims the space in that diagonal, she gets the step under our skin; she leads the audience back into her melody; and she allows her upper body to build castles in the air.
Stravinsky said that Petipa’s choreography was the perfect realization of the Apollonian principle. We should also say that it’s the perfect realisation of the Platonic principle, of the ideal theory that’s at the heart of Plato’s Republic. In his choreography, Petipa believes, like Plato, that the world is composed of different layers of being. He organizes each act of his ballets so as to make classical choreography show us human behaviour at its most refined and ideal.
The pas d’action, the supported adagio, is the cornerstone, the vision of male-female chivalry - but the poetic heart is the female variation. Here a lone ballerina onstage, like Plato’s Idea of the Good, takes the dance essence of humanity and floods time and space with its sublimity. Petipa does matter after all.
SOURCE NOTES
1. The pas de deux from Le Corsaire was widely performed at such in the West between the early 1960s (earlier in Russia) and the late 1980s. Oleg Vinogradov’s production of the complete Corsaire for the Kirov Ballet established in 1988 that this number was a pas de deux à trois. Only in the twenty-first century did evidence become widely known that Andrianov had choreographed this in 1915.
2. I first watched “Swan Lake” in 1975. Most of the Odiles I watched in 1975-1986 at the Royal Ballet did very much the same choreography that can be seen in 1950s films of Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes. The most obvious changes in Odile’s variation are in its start and end: the beginning phrase used to feature a phrase including a pirouette en attitude (arms en couronne) followed by two double rond de jambe steps, the first as part of a petit développé into a side tendu position, the second one introducing a grand développé à la seconde); the ending consisted of a long and undiluted manège of soutenu turns. Some equally striking changes have happened when Odile returns to the stage after her fouetté turns: her re-entry diagonal consists of a repeated phrase of two top-speed pas de chat followed by a développés into arabesque, but her front arm in those arabesques was not croisé (stabbing at Siegfried with a “Gotcha!” emphasis à la Plisetskaya) but efface, as if exultantly quoting Odette’s “swan” arabesque; after which she, Odile, used to do a series of échappés retreating up the centreline – which, as Nadia Nerina remarks in her “Ballerina” book, should be the true climax of the pas de deux rather than the fouettés.)
3. George Balanchine quoted by Edwin Denby, “Some Thoughts about Classicism and George Balanchine” (Dance Magazine, February 1953), Edwin Denby, Dance Writings, 1986, p. 434.
4. Photographs from 1934-40 show how Robert Helpmann, as Siegfried, knelt in profile as Odile (either Alicia Markova or Margot Fonteyn), on point in penchée arabesque, held his knee with both hands: a configuration found nowhere else in ballet. Eyewitnesses from the early 1940s told me that this was how the adagio, or pas d’action, concluded; and around 2012 Doug Fullington confirmed that the Stepanov notation recorded this ending. Those eyewitnesses (Joan Seaman, David Vaughan) recalled that Margot Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann were still dancing this conclusion during London’s 1941 Blitz. Probably they amended it when the ballet was given a new production by the Vic-Wells Ballet in 1942. Since Fonteyn and others later testified that they seldom if ever changed the choreography they had been taught for the classics, this is interesting one of the few known provable exceptions. See Macaulay, “So Whose ‘Swan Lake’ Is It?” New York Times, May 10, 2012.
5. Ivor Guest, The Ballet of the Second Empire, Pitman, UK, 1974, pp. 170-171.
6. Nicolas Legat, Ballet Russe, Memoirs of Nicolas Legat., p. 23.Translated, with a foreword by Sir Paul Dukes. Dedicatory poem by John Masefield. Methuen & Co., London.1939.
7. Legat, op. cit., p, 19.
8. August Bournonville, My Theatre Life, translated Patricia McAndrew, A.&C. Black (UK) 1979, pp. 580-581.
9. Alastair Macaulay, “The Perils of Odette, Retold in Brooklyn”, New York Times, January 15, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/17/arts/dance/mariinskys-swan-lake-at-brooklyn-academy-of-music.html
10. Legat, Ballet Russe, pp.19-20.
11. “…he always carried around a blue pencil, and would carefully pencil out a bar of music, which, for some reason, wearied him. The offending bar would receive a long, strong, blue cross through it. This would mean that I must phone Constant Lambert, who would come round in the lunch break and put the bars back….” Ninette de Valois, Come Dance with Me, Hamish Hamilton, UK, 1953, p. 106
12. Alastair Macaulay and Alexei Ratmansky, “A Sleeping Beauty Questionnaire,” Ballet Review, vol 43:3, Fall 2015.
13. Legat, Ballet Russe, p. 20.
14. For Petipa’s notes to Tchaikovsky, see Roland John Wiley, Tchaikovsky’s Ballets, 1985, pp. 354-382. For Petipa’s notes to Glazunov for Raymonda: see Ballet Review, vol. 5, no 2.
15. Wiley, op. cit., pp. 373, 376.
16. Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography, 1962, Norton & Co, USA.
17. Most of The Nutcracker was choreographed not by Petipa, who fell ill after work on the opening party scene, but by his colleague Lev Ivanov. Ivanov, however, never refers to either “Nutcracker” or Swan Lake” in his memoirs, whereas he took pride in other works he had made; it’s likely that with the two Tchaikovsky ballets he was working closely within Petipa’s ideas and suggestions.
18. Mary Skeaping, “A Conversation about ‘The Sleeping Beauty’”, Ballet Review, vol. 5 no 4.
19. Goldner, email to Alastair Macaulay, 2009.
20. Dale Harris on Margot Fonteyn, “From Snowflake to Superstar”, Ballet Review, vol. 4 no 6, reprinted in Robert Gottlieb (editor), Reading Dance, Pantheon USA 2008, p.704.
21.Collier had learnt that phrasing from Ashton. She subsequently changed it, losing its magic entirely.
1: Caricature of Marius Petipa by Nicolas Legat.
2. Photograph of Marius Petipa (1818-2010)