A source study of two ballets and a divertissement by Marius Petipa

Abstract

The ballets of Marius Petipa (1818–1910) account for most of the nineteenth-century ballets that constitute the current global classical repertory. In this dissertation, I use a selection of sources to provide detailed descriptions of the music, choreography, pantomime, and action in early productions of two of Petipa’s original ballets, La Bayadère (1877, revived 1900) and Raymonda (1898), and the divertissement Le jardin animé from the ballet Le Corsaire (staged by Petipa in 1868, 1880, and 1899), all of which are part of this canon. These ballets today are usually presented in versions that have been handed down from artist to artist via oral transmission, the time-honored method of passing traditional work from one generation to the next. But because such productions inevitably bear the accumulated accretions and deletions from a century of changes in taste, technique, and aesthetics, much of the choreography, mime, and action created and staged by Petipa has been lost. Fortunately, sources survive that reveal much about Petipa’s stagings of these ballets. Among them are such documents as the choreographer’s preparatory notes, instructions for composers, musical and choreographic scores, and mime scripts. These performance-related sources also offer insight into Petipa’s creative process and reveal features that distinguish his work. Such features include his incorporation of Italian ballet technique into his French-based choreographic step vocabulary and his inclusion of a new type of narrative-based, multi-movement dance suite for which Petipa appropriated the old term pas d’action. In addition to scene-by-scene descriptions, I offer a detailed introduction to the Stepanov choreographic notation system used to document Petipa’s choreography, discussion of the genesis and broader context of the ballets, plot summaries, character sketches, music analysis, performance histories, and detailed descriptions of sources. I also contextualize certain elements of these ballets within Petipa’s output, and I discuss several Western productions of La Bayadère and Raymonda that were staged in the early and mid-twentieth century either using some of these sources or retaining features found in them. Ultimately, a much clearer picture emerges than what has heretofore been known of these ballets in their earliest incarnations.