My wife my muse - Maria Surovshchikova-Petipa: Women’s History Month in Dance, 2021

Women’s History Month in Dance 63, 64. The tradition of male artists invoking a female muse for inspiration goes back over two millennia and a half. But the practice of male artists identifying specific women as their personal muses is more recent and more double-edged. Despite occasional female creative artists from Sappho to Virginia Woolf, the notion of Woman As Muse suggests a sexist division of labour: me-Tarzan-you-muse, you-inspire-I-create. Probably this inherent sexism is this why the muse tradition seems to have no twenty-first-century exponents: it seems all about an imbalance of the sexes that fewer and fewer people accept 

That imbalance reached its most ambiguous when male artists married their muses: a practice that goes back at least to Rubens and Rembrandt, and includes Rossini and Schumann and Picasso, Bergman and Fellini and Fosse. There are many species of marriage, but that of the Schumanns should remind us of the fruitful complexity involved. Clara Schumann was a composer herself, and an epoch-making concert pianist, an editor, a mother (eight children); her husband took some of her music as the seedbed for some of his own greatest compositions.

The history of ballet furnishes an unusually large number of examples of choreographers who married the ballerinas who may be said to have been their muses. To us today, the most famous is George Balanchine, who married four of the many muse-ballerinas he loved; but the list also includes choreographers Pierre Gardel (1758-1840), Charles-Louis Didelot (1867-1837), Salvatore Viganò (1769-1821), Jules Perrot (1810-1892: he didn’t actually marry Carlotta Grisi, but they toured as if they were husband and wife; Arthur Saint-Léon (1821-1870: he did have a high-profile if not longlasting marriage with the ballerina-choreographer Fanny Cerrito); Marius Petipa (1818-1910); and - sigh- Roland Petit (1924-2011), Yuri Grigorovich (b.1927), and Peter Martins (b.1946). In all these cases, the ballerina-muse had an important career of her own, often taking most of the limelight with the dances her husband had made for her.

Of these choreographer-ballerina marriages, the most troubling to contemplate is Marius Petipa’s first one, to his young Russian ballerina Maria Surovshchikova (1836-1882). (The marriage of Peter Martins to Darci Kistler has had immensely troubling features too, with much publicity and longterm consequences. But check out the Petipas’ marriage.) Like many of the other ballerinas on the above list, Surovshchikova (63) was shaped by her husband’s teaching, a Galatea to his Pygmalion. “He had a raked floor, mirror, and barre installed in their home and coached her, accompanying her on the violin,” writes Nadine Meisner in her 2019 biography “Marius Petipa, The Emperor’s Ballet-Master”. They married in 1854, year of her eighteenth birthday; she ascended fast to stardom. She was not known for precise technical brilliance but for overwhelming charm. 

The births of two children, in 1857 and 1859, scarcely interrupted her career at all. (Photo 65 shows her with her children c.1865: she wears her “little muzhik” costume.) in these years, she and her husband had begun compete with or battle against a rival ballerina, Marfa Muravieva (1838-1879), and choreographer, Arthur Saint-Léon, both slightly younger than the Petipas; Murafieva excited with the technical dazzle and polish that Surovshchikova-Petipa lacked, while the less exact Surovshchikova-Petipa captivated observers as Murafieva could not. Balletomania had long been at its most pathological and manic in Russia: in 1862-1864, the Russian audience warfare between Petipists and Muravievists did Russian ballet a feverish kind of good service, stirring passions about native Russian ballerinas rather than foreign stars. (Any rivalry between the two choreographers seems to have been healthy.) The warfare extended to Paris, where Surovshchikova-Petipa danced in 1861 and Murafieva in 1863. (In the years 1858-1862, Surovshchikova’s ardent admirers included Otto von Bismarck, then Prussian ambassador to Russia.)

But ill health terminated Murafieva’s career early in 1865. And in 1867 Surovshchikova-Petipa left her husband, lodging a formal complaint (published in full by Meisner) that his physical displays of jealousy - over ten years - often reached the point of his throttling her, spitting in her face, dragging her into the bedroom, and hitting her repeatedly, often until she fell unconscious. We know that Petipa’s violent temper was real. In this instance, his lawyers were warned that, if this case were found against him, he faced a prison sentence. Certainly, however, Surovshchikova-Petipa entertained numerous admirers; in an country where the serfs had only been emancipated in 1861, wifely infidelity may have seemed a greater crime than it does to us. We can hypothesise - I don’t say we should - that her petition greatly exaggerated her husband’s abuse in order to pre-empt any claims by him that her own adulterous behaviour was cause for divorce. Alternatively Petipa may have been the monster she claimed. 

We can’t judge, because they settled out of court. They separated officially, he bringing up their daughter Marie (who became an important star of the Imperial Ballet), she raising their son Jean (who died in his twenties, an army officer). Surovshchikova’s technique had already been in decline while she was living with her husband ; she thereafter appeared infrequently, before giving her farewell performance in 1869, aged only thirty-two. She kept both her beauty and her male admirers; in 1876 she gave birth to a son, Jules, whom Petipa never acknowledged. In 1882, she died of smallpox. Petipa remarried, had other children, and enjoyed his greatest successes after her death.

Surovshchikova’s 1867 petition against her husband only came to light this century. Although Russian newspapers had addressed it, I had heard nothing of it until 2018, in Meisner’s book. Distressing in itself, it’s also perplexing because Surovshchikova truly had been Petipa’s muse, creating the heroines of most of his work for eleven years. And it’s disturbing because Petipa’s choreography tends to glorify women, giving them a dance splendour and radiance that counter-balances their often dramatically passive roles in the narrative. (See my “New York Times” essay on the 2018 bicentennial or Petipa’s birth: “The Ambiguous Sexism of Marius Petipa, Ballet’s Towering Master https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/arts/dance/marius-petipa-bicentennial.html?referringSource=articleShare .”) What are we to make of these contradictions about an artist central to ballet classicism? It’s best not to rush to any answer here.

In 1862, Petipa had enjoyed his first great Russian success when he choreographed the full-length ballet “The Pharaoh’s Daughter”, a spectacular that remained in repertory until 1928. He made it for the visiting Italian prima Carolina Rosati, but after her departure he gave her role to his wife, who “created such a furore that the ballet dancer for twenty-seven performances in succession during the winter <and> the theatre was always full.” (Meisner.) It was for his wife that Petipa, in 1863, choreographed his version of “Le Corsaire”; as Medora - a role inherited by many leading ballerinas ever since - she again enjoyed immense success. 

Petipa’s numerous vehicles for his wife came to an end with “Titania”, a ballet in which she danced the title role opposite his own Oberon. He was in his late forties, she just thirty. He was probably the first choreographer to have taken Mendelssohn’s music as the basis for a ballet, setting a precedent that George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton would follow almost a century later. Shakespeare’s Titania-Oberon play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” constructs a cosmic warfare as the result of the dissension between the fairy monarchs. It so happened that Surovshchikova had left her husband five days before the premiere. Performances were, understandably, flat. (Petipa later successfully resurrected and reworked the ballet, now as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, with other casts.) Titania can be a troubling role, a furious wife who is drugged into bestial adultery by her husband, but she is nonetheless powerful. It’s another source of puzzlement that Petipa chose this as a vehicle for his muse-wife, just at the moment when their marriage was breaking down irreparably.

Saturday 20 March

63: Maria Surovhchikova-Petipa in 1859

64: Maria Surovshchikova-Petipa, in her “little muzhik” costume c.1865, with her children by her husband Marius Petipa, Marie Petipa (who would be the original Lilac Fairy in 1890) and Jean Petipa (who died in his twenties)..