Abstract
Marius Petipa, according to Nadine Meisner, has remained unsurpassed as one of the most influential choreographers of modern times: ‘he served four emperors, was chief ballet master (of the St Petersburg Imperial Ballet) for forty-one years, created more than fifty original ballets, staged versions of nineteen other ballets, and made dances for thirty-seven operas’ (p. 3). The only artist to compete with Petipa was another Russian choreographer who emerged out of Petipa’s company: George Balanchine.
When one considers Petipa’s importance, it is surprising how little literature exists; Nadine Meisner’s study is one of few attempts at a full-length biography. But she has written more than just an account of his personal life; she lets his life unfold in Russia and traces his impact on Russian ballet. In a sense this is also a socio-political biography of Russian ballet in the nineteenth century. There are some things she does not do, and she is aware of it. Though she gives some insights into the evolution of Petipa’s style she does not undertake a thorough analytical study of all of his works, nor does she want to ‘offer a scientific analysis of [his] aesthetic or compositional procedures [or] a musico-choreographical analysis’ (p. 11). This study then is a politico-institutional examination of Petipa as choreographer, battling and exploiting the bureaucracy, of his work within the circumstances he found in Russia, how he shaped and moulded a genre to suit his own abilities and his cultivation of dancers, always within the framework of the tsarist cultural environment.
Meisner approaches the field of dance history from the specific perspective of a scholar of Russian history and the Russian language. This attitude makes her work on Petipa stand out and it shifts the discourse on dance to a more general level – that of how ballet works were created in this very special cultural environment and through a specifically defined set of collaborations, with dancers, composers like Tchaikovsky, and also administrators with artistic ambitions such as Vsevolozhsky, Volkonsky or Teliakovsky. No other scholar investigating Petipa has managed to uncover and access so many sources, from letters to photographs, from newspaper cuttings to sketches, from political analyses to ballet reviews. The result is a most impressive collage of a vast array of various kinds of documents.
Meisner’s use of as many sources as she could find, from the obscure to the well-known, her attention to detail and her ability to synthesize a vast amount of information create a fascinating image of Petipa. And he was not always the most pleasant person. He was short-tempered, volatile and nastily calculating, playing off his dancers against each other, conservative and against change. His notes and lists that fill the Russian archives, give an insight into what Meisner calls Petipa’s ‘Style and Structure’ (pp. 135f]), his ‘Working Method’ and ‘Dance Language’ (pp. 159f) and offer glimpses into the way in which he controlled the creation of his ballets – monumental spectacles that emerged from papers and sketches and demonstrate his attention to even the minutest of features of his ballets (p. 163). The apotheotic endings of Petipa’s ballet, the enchainements (a series of steps that form a movement sequence, often repetitive) and the variations are briefly discussed; Meisner seems to see them as the main elements of what she calls Petipa’s classicism and his departure from the French romanticism in which he had grown up as a performer. But the aesthetics of Petipa’s ballets remain somewhat in the background. There are remarks on the ballets that made Petipa famous and that are even now performed across the world – Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, Don Quixote, La Bayadère or Raymonda. But the book is not an attempt to reconstruct them, not least because ‘we will never truly, completely, know how Petipa’s ballets looked’ (p. 7), and it is not her ambition to restore some kind of ‘original’. Rather, Meisner moves towards the principal questions of development and success of an art form through the development and success of one choreographer. Some of Petipa’s contemporaries went to seek their luck in St Petersburg or Moscow, but no one proved to have the same stamina, determination, insights into institutional logic, ability to compromise and, in the end, luck.
Meisner’s study substantiates the internationalism of ballet in the nineteenth century, its (like Petipa’s) systematic movements across Europe, and the way it settled in Russia and managed to be ‘russified’. So much so, in fact, that at the end of Petipa’s tenure, he not only personified ‘Russian ballet’ but ballet had become ‘Russian’ and was now defining the way in which it was presented in European countries. Petipa enabled and prepared the Ballets Russes that sent shock waves across the globe and introduced a new and modern concept of ballet – that of the twentieth century. But he hated the ‘new aesthetics’ and did not understand them (pp. 288, 291f).
One can only hope that Meisner extends her vast knowledge to a second study of Petipa and his ballets, in which she does what she explained she had not been able to do in this book: shed further light on Petipa’s body of works, analyse them and place them in their aesthetic as well as their institutional context. Then she could be more explicit about what Petipa did to European romantic ballet, a once highly contemporary and politically interventionist genre. She could then trace its transformation, undertaken by Petipa, from bourgeois and progressive art form to a reactionary and spectacular representation of aristocratic power. She could give us her thoughts on what happens when an art form, such as ballet, is transported from an European parliamentary democracy to a Russian autocratic monarchy.
This is a ground-breaking study with a new perspective on Marius Petipa and ballet in Russia.