Even today’s most skilled performers find Petipa’s fairy variations a test of classical precision: the slightest false move or cheat—a leg straying off center or a step out of line—immediately shows and throws the whole dance into disarray, as if a poem had been scanned poorly or a column in a Greek temple carelessly distorted. Performing these dances well is a matter of technical acuity and cast-iron discipline but also of style: a dancer cannot plausibly get through them without a modicum of charm. The steps and music—not to mention the luxurious costumes—make dancers move like courtiers, with chest open and a light, high center of gravity.
No acting was necessary: Beauty had very little “he said, she said” pantomime, and the mime and dance sequences were not musically distinct or set apart, as they had been customarily. The gestures and the dances flowed together seamlessly, and Petipa and Tchaikovsky thus quietly returned ballet to one of its original premises: mime and dance were a natural extension of the noble comportment that Russian courtiers had been practicing and perfecting for nearly two centuries. They meshed so beautifully because they came from a single source, just as they had in the grand siècle: court etiquette.
Audiences, or at least critics, were disoriented: Beauty did not fit into any of the old categories, and many saw it as little more than an empty parade of “too luxurious” sets and costumes. “A ballet, as we understand it?” one indignantly squealed. “No! It is the complete decline of choreographic art!” If there was a reference point, it lay in the decorative rather than the performing arts. Beauty bore a striking resemblance to Fabergé’s exquisitely rendered objets de luxe. These ornamental pieces, including the famous Fabergé eggs, were enormously sought after by the tsar and the Russian elite at the time. Their superior craftsmanship, hyperrefinement, and meticulous, detailed re-creation of a world-in-a-shell had an intense appeal for an elite increasingly in retreat from the social and political problems facing their country. Fabergé reproduced the court in miniature; Beauty put it on the stage. The similarities were not lost on a younger generation of artists, including several who would later go on to create the Ballets Russes. They rightly saw that sealed within The Sleeping Beauty lay a whole way of life and “world of art.”34
The Sleeping Beauty was thus the first truly Russian ballet. It was an impressive act of cultural absorption: this was no longer Russians imitating the French but instead a pitch-perfect summation of the rules and forms that had shaped the Russian court since Peter the Great. With Beauty, Petipa found a way to take out the seams of French ballet, to expand its technique and expressivity while paradoxically reinforcing its strict formal rules and proportions. And if the ballet’s grand scale seemed to some a capitulation to féerie and spectacle, it could also be read as an exaltation of the dignity and noble ideals of an aristocratic art. But Beauty also showed that high court ballet could meet popular theater and assimilate that and the Italian techniques too, folding them both into a newly Russian style of dance. It is no accident that the ballet flowed from the imagination of a great Russian composer working in conjunction with a Francophile St. Petersburger and a Russified Frenchman, and that its cast was led by Italians with Russians filling the ranks.
The key to the ballet’s enduring appeal, however, was Tchaikovsky. It is a point worth emphasizing: Tchaikovsky was the first composer of real stature to see ballet as a substantial art, and his music lifted dance onto a new plane. Before Tchaikovsky, music for ballet had been tied to dance forms and rhythms, and (later) to programmatic music or vaudeville tunes designed to illustrate and narrate pantomimed action. None of this was necessarily to be regretted: as we have seen, well into the nineteenth century ballet composers across Europe had produced lovely and serviceable ballet scores, from Adolphe Adam’s Giselle and Léo Delibes’s Sylvia (a ballet Tchaikovsky himself greatly admired) in Paris to the melodic dances of the “big three” in St. Petersburg: Riccardo Drigo, Pugni (both Italians), and Ludwig Minkus (who was Austrian). However, these composers tended to follow rather than lead, and their music enhanced and illustrated but rarely challenged—much less upset—the way that dancers moved.
Not so with Tchaikovsky. It was not merely that Sleeping Beauty was a powerful symphonic score that stood on its own merits, without Petipa’s dances. What mattered was the way the music worked on the human body and spirit. Even today, Tchaikovsky’s music pushes dancers to move with a fullness and subtlty that few other composers then or since have inspired. It is no accident that Tchaikovsky’s music was initially perceived by some as too operatic or big or difficult for the public, and especially the dancers, to fathom. Human bodies did not—never had—moved that way before. And yet the change was also perfectly natural, scaled to St. Petersburg and their own lives.
Petipa became a great choreographer because of Tchaikovsky, and he knew it: his memoirs pay touching tribute to the composer and he was well aware of the momentous opportunity Vsevolozhsky had afforded him. Tchaikovsky was pleased too, and Modest recalled the composer’s delight with “the miracles of elegance, luxury, originality in the costumes and scenery, and with the inexhaustible grace and variety of Petipa’s fantasy.” And if Alexander III failed to appreciate the ballet’s significance, commenting dryly that it seemed to him “very nice,” the public was enchanted: The Sleeping Beauty was performed more than twenty times in 1890–91, accounting for more than half of the ballet performances that season. Modest wrote to the composer: “Your ballet has become a kind of obsession.…people have ceased saying to each other ‘How are you?’ Instead, they ask, ‘Have you seen The Sleeping Beauty?’ ”35
The following year, the same team—Vsevolozhsky, Petipa, and Tchaikovsky—began work on another ballet-féerie, based this time on a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann: The Nutcracker. Designed as an entertaining afterpiece to Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, it was to be a short, two-act affair. The Nutcracker was set in France during the Directory—the conservative reaction to the French Revolution with its notorious sartorial excesses and dandified aristocrats—but it was also a fond depiction, as one observer later recalled, of Christmas à la Russe drawn straight from “Russian children’s memories.” It sketched familiar drawing-room rituals and featured a sparkling decorated tree, delicious German candies, brave toy soldiers, and, as the scenario put it, a scrumptious “enchanted palace from the land of confectionary sweets.” There was a frosty, St. Petersburg–like snow scene spectacularly lit with electric light and a waltz of gilt sweetmeats (today’s flowers). In keeping with the precedent set by The Sleeping Beauty, the lead role of the Sugar Plum Fairy was danced by an Italian ballerina, Antonietta dell’Era, and the cast numbered over two hundred, including a platoon of students from the School of the Regiment of Finnish Guards (they played the mice).36
Soon after the ballet went into rehearsal, however, Petipa fell ill and was forced to turn over his duties to his second-in-command, the ballet master Lev Ivanov. The end result was a patchwork of dances, probably mostly by Ivanov with additional contributions from the dancer Alexander Shiryaev. When the ballet premiered in 1892 prominent critics dismissed it as just another féerie, calling it “an insult” to the Imperial Theaters and “death for the company.” And indeed—ironically, in view of its iconic status today—the ballet had only limited public appeal and soon fell from the repertory.
The snow scene, however, was highly praised, and Ivanov’s extant sketches for this windblown dance open a small window onto his often forgotten talent. Dancers were flung together in complicated formations that then fractured and dissolved into new and equally intricate designs: stars and Russian round dances, zigzags, and a large rotating Orthodox cross with a smaller circle, like a bejeweled ornament, around its center and rotating in the opposite direction. This dance was not like Petipa at all: the symmetries were there, but the formations were more tenuous and airy, less formal and ceremonial. They had an impressionistic urgency and spontaneity that never would have flowed from the French ballet master’s more controlled palette, even as a
description of snow.37
Lev Ivanov was different: he was the first significant Russian choreographer to emerge from the Imperial Theaters. Like so many dancers in Russia, he had modest social origins and had passed through a foundling home before his mother (who was probably Georgian) reclaimed him, and although the family circumstances improved, he was sent at age eleven to board at the Imperial Theater School. He graduated into the ballet company in 1852 and immediately fell under the influence, and shadow, of Marius Petipa. After Petipa was promoted to the rank of ballet master, Ivanov took over his position as first dancer of mime and character dance and performed original roles in many of Petipa’s ballets, including the lead male in La Bayadère. Some twenty years later, Ivanov was promoted to régisseur and then second ballet master (still under Petipa), where he remained until his death in 1901.
A servant of the state and pure product of the Imperial Theaters and their school, Ivanov had been brought up to treat his foreign and aristocratic superiors with obedience and respect. He lacked Petipa’s confidence and highly placed connections and thought of himself as “a good soldier”: he liked to wear a staff uniform, and in his short autobiography he railed indignantly against dancers who would “sin against the service, against art and even against your self-worth.” Yet Ivanov was also dreamy and introspective and could seem “undisciplined and moody,” as the dancer Tamara Karsavina later recalled. Exceptionally musical, he could often be found in a studio at the keyboard improvising, so engrossed that he sometimes failed to notice the dancers expectantly awaiting his instruction. He was entirely self-taught: the authorities had designated him to dance, and he never received formal musical training. He could not even read music, although he had the kind of memory that enabled him to reproduce whole compositions upon a single hearing.38
Ivanov’s fellow Russian dancers had a special sympathy for him—he was more like them than Petipa ever had been; he spoke their language and had none of the aloof and arrogant manners typical of the elite. And if Petipa always had one foot in Paris, it is significant that Ivanov never left his native Russia and was often dispatched to mount dances in Moscow or for the military encampments at Krasnoe Selo—where the royal box, in keeping with the tsar’s Russianizing tastes, was shaped like a peasant cottage. All of this gave him a uniquely Russian perspective, and although Ivanov was fully versed in the technique and style of west European ballet, his dances also had, as one observer memorably put it, “periodic undercurrents of Slavic melancholy and introspection.”39
Nowhere was this more apparent than in Swan Lake, perhaps the most imperfect but powerful of all Russian ballets. The version we know today derives from the production choreographed by Petipa and Ivanov to Tchaikovsky’s music and premiered in St. Petersburg in 1895. But Swan Lake also had another, earlier history. Tchaikovsky had originally been commissioned to compose the score in Moscow in the mid-1870s by one Vladimir Begichev, who was in charge of repertory at the city’s Bolshoi Theater. Begichev’s wife ran an influential Moscow literary salon frequented by Tchaikovsky, who also tutored the couple’s son in music. Discussions at their home and at Ostrovsky’s Artists’ Circle, another literary and artistic club founded in the 1860s, had already inspired a new, self-consciously Russian ballet entitled The Fern based on a folktale recorded by Gogol: Moscow’s back-to-the-people version of Saint-Léon’s Humpbacked Horse, but apparently undistinguished.40
We don’t know who wrote the libretto for Swan Lake, although it may have been Begichev and it was probably drawn from German folk and fairy-tale sources and perhaps influenced by Wagner’s Lohengrin. But the ballet also had roots in Tchaikovsky’s family life: some years earlier he had composed music for a children’s ballet about “The Lake of Swans,” which he and his extended family liked to perform in “house performances” later warmly remembered by his niece and nephew and featuring large wooden rocking swans. It was a fitting backdrop for a new Russian ballet recalling, however faintly, the domestic and estate settings of old serf ballets. The Moscow production had choreography by Julius Reisinger, a second-rate ballet master imported from Europe, but the lead role was not performed (as was now customary in St. Petersburg) by a foreign star: Odette was first danced by the ballerina Pelagia Karpakova and then by Anna Sobeshchanskaya.41
This Moscow Swan Lake, moreover, bore only a passing resemblance to Petipa and Ivanov’s later St. Petersburg production. The outline of the ballet is familiar, but the Moscow original was more complicated: dark, violent, and tragic. Steeped in Romanticism, the ballet tells the story of a beautiful girl, Odette, trapped in the form of a swan. Tormented and pursued by an evil stepmother in the guise of an owl and demon sorcerer, she lives with a flock of similarly bewitched young maidens in a lake of tears. By day they are swans but by night they are set free to dance in the nearby ruins. Only marriage can break the spell that binds Odette to her watery fate, but when Prince Siegfried falls in love with her, the stepmother tricks him: an imposter black swan seduces the prince, who swears his undying devotion to this glamorous fake, thus betraying the real Odette and dooming her to eternal captivity.
Realizing his mistake, Siegfried begs her forgiveness but—and this is the crux of the difference from later productions—it is too late. A crashing storm and terrible flood signal doom, with great undulating (canvas) waves and “an unimaginable din and uproar” that resembled “the explosion of a powder magazine” (and here a strong whiff of gunpowder filled the theater). In desperation the prince tears off Odette’s crown, which is her only protection from the evil owl, and, consumed in guilt and grief, the erstwhile lovers are swept into the waters and drowned. There is no redemptive apotheosis, as there later would be, but instead a vision of a cruel and indifferent fate: the lovers perish and the moon shines through the clouds “and on the calm lake appears a band of white swans.”42
This ballet had its premiere in 1877 at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater. The music was well received (although some grumbled it was too lush and operatic and thus ill-suited for ballet), but the choreography was roundly panned and went through several versions and many hands before the ballet was finally retired from the repertory in 1883, a victim of drastic cutbacks in the theater’s budget. It disappeared for nearly ten years. Indeed, Tchaikovsky never saw it again: he and Vsevolozhsky had discussed a revival, but in 1893, before it could be produced, the composer died unexpectedly. The following year Lev Ivanov fashioned brand-new choreography for the second lakeside act for a memorial concert in St. Petersburg produced by Vsevolozhsky in honor of Tchaikovsky. Plans for a new production of the entire work proceeded, and Vsevolozhsky wrote to Modest asking him to work on a new libretto: “I hope you will succeed in avoiding the flood of the last act. It is trite and would go badly on our stage.”43
Thus began a series of far-reaching revisions. Modest kept the flood but modified the ending, introducing a melodramatic double suicide: Odette throws herself into the lake and Siegfried stabs himself. In subsequent revisions things got softer and sweeter. Vsevolozhsky and Petipa excised the storm and flood and—building on Modest’s ending—had the lovers jump into the lake together and capped the ballet with the now-familiar heavenly apotheosis: “in the clouds, seated on huge swans, appear Siegfried and Odette.” The music was reworked by the Italian composer Riccardo Drigo (he had conducted the premiere of The Sleeping Beauty), who was asked to alter and shorten the score: as the scholar Roland John Wiley has shown, he lightened the orchestration, cut certain passages and added others, and (perhaps inadvertently) dismantled the tonal structure of Tchaikovsky’s original, giving the ballet an easier and less discordant feel. The music for the storm scene was simply deleted.* The choreography was no less cobbled: Petipa, whose poor health had been exacerbated by the death of his daughter and other family difficulties, took responsibility for the court scenes but delegated the more lyrical and introspective lakeside dances to his Russian colleague Ivanov. This division of labor, however, turned out to be fortuitous: the enduring success of t
he ballet owes much to the tension between Petipa and Ivanov’s contrasting choreographic styles.44
Consider Ivanov’s dances for the moonlit lakeside scene when the swans first appear as women, freed by the night and led by Odette, whose position is marked by her bejeweled crown. Siegfried and Odette meet; she tells her story and they confront the threatening sorcerer von Rothbart. The floor then clears for the entrance of the swans. Recalling Petipa’s shades in La Bayadère, they come one by one, single file, from the upstage corner in a series of simple repetitive steps and weave a serpentine pattern until they are ranked across the stage in straight, symmetrical lines. From this moment, however, a different mood takes hold: Ivanov sends the swans into a series of sculptural patterns that carve through the space, break apart, and recombine. The vocabulary is simple and clear—no more than a few plain-verse steps—with none of the wit or decorative embellishments that might draw the eye to a particular dancer.
This scene is often held up as the greatest possible achievement for a corps de ballet: properly performed, the dancers seem to move as one, and audiences today still marvel at how “together” they are. It is often assumed, moreover, that they are so together because each dancer has been trained meticulously to calibrate her movements to those of her neighbor. But this is not really how it works. Ivanov’s swans are not an assembly line or human machine, nor even a closely integrated community: they are an ensemble created by music. His steps do not so much fit the music as allow a dancer to find the phrase and sustain it in movement, making her way into the sound rather than moving smoothly across its surface. The unity is not “out” to one’s neighbors, but paradoxically a turning “in” and away; it is a togetherness based on musical and physical introspection, the polar opposite of show or ceremony. This is why the dance has such a silent, self-reflective feel.
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