etrouchka came to the United States in the Diaghilev Ballets Russes repertory in 1916. It was staged by [Michel] Fokine for the Original Ballet Russe in 1940, with Yurek Lasowski in the title role, Tamara Toumanova as the Ballerina, Alberto Alonso as the Moor, and Marian Ladre as the Charlatan. In 1942 (the last completed work before his death) Fokine mounted the ballet for Ballet Theatre, with Lazowski, Irina Baronova, Richard Reed, and Simon Semenoff. At various times, Americans have danced in principal roles: Jerome Robbins and Michael Kidd as Petrouchka, for example. One historic performance listed Lucia Chase, with Robbins and John Taras. As far as can be ascertained, no “all-American” cast for Petrouchka is recorded and the revival of the ballet, under Leonide Massine’s direction, by City Center Joffrey Ballet is the first such production.
Petrouchka is generally considered the perfect ballet, in its harmonious union of music, story and setting, and choreography. Although it is usually thought of as Fokine’s masterwork, and the ballet in which he most clearly stated his precepts for dance, it is as much the creation of the composer Igor Stravinsky, and of the librettist and designer Alexandre Benois. Finally, it is a “a Diaghilev ballet” from the now legendary first Ballets Russes, and the remarkable man who brought the company into being and sustained it-and its artists-until his death in 1929. For twenty controversial years Diaghilev set a course that often baffled his most devoted admirers and antagonized his dearest friends. Within another twenty, the seed germinated in the Ballets Russes had scattered and taken root throughout the Western nations, to alter concepts of 19th century ballet and produce the ballet of the 20th century.
As City Center Joffrey Ballet prepared Petrouchka, Olga Maynard talked to Massine and Joffrey about the 1970 production, and recalled what she knew about the original, through the memoirs of Diaghilev’s compeers. Petrouchka in 1911 (Diaghilev’s Petrouchka) has a turbulent, anguished story. Petrouchka in 1970 (Joffrey’s) is more serene, but no less interesting. “They bridge two eras,” says Olga Maynard, “and in the truest ballet tradition, which is its continuity-and ‘continuity’ means identity with respect to a series of change.”
By 1910, Diaghilev Ballet Russes was already a cult: les fervents des russes, although only a few perceived that it would alter ballet in the Western world. “We really did stagger the world,” mused the painter Alexander Benois in his Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet, of the historic 1909 Paris season in which the Russian “barbarians” dazzled with the Dances from Prince Igor, and beat the French “Athenians” on home ground in Le Pavillon d’Armide. A group of Russian artists, resolved to redefine concepts of theatre, had broken with the Imperial Theatres. They banded under Serge Dhiagilev-neither painter nor composer, dancer nor choreographer, but the man with the courage and enterprise to found Ballets Russes. He was the company’s omnipotent head, and his life-work was contained in its sustenance, (he was a princely beggar for its support) and the development of his extraordinary aesthetic tastes. Around the charismatic “Seriozha” circled his company, in a dance of love-hate.
…Perhaps the single greatest genius of the Ballet Russes was the choreographer Michel Fokine, whose revolutionary precepts (aborted in the Imperial Theatres) were developed under Diaghilev’s aegis. A friendship had grown between Benois and Fokine, during their collaboration on Benois’ (book and designs) Le Pavillon d’Armide. In 1910 the friendship extended to a new discovery of Diaghilev’s: a young composer whom Seriozha heard play at a concert; his name was Igor Stravinsky. The first collective work of Benois, Fokine and Stravinsky was L’Oiseau de Feu. Their second was the masterpiece, Petrouchka, the ballet that quite possibly set the precedent for 20th century multi-media theatre. In between came Scheherazade, on which Benois’ love for Diaghilev foundered.
…Soon after, [in 1910] Benois received a letter from Diaghilev saying that, a few days before, Stravinsky had composed and played for Diaghilev two fragments of music that Stravinsky called a sort of “Russian Dance” and “Petrouchka‘s Cry”. Diaghilev felt they were works of genius and wanted to use them for a ballet, somehow incorporating the St. Petersburg Shrovetide Carnival, and including the Russian Punch and Judy-Petrouchka-performance conventional to fairs. “Who else but you,” wrote Diaghilev to Benois, “could help us with this problem?” Benois could not possibly refuse!
“Petrouchka, the Russian Guignol or Punch, no less than Harlequin, had been my friend since my earliest childhood,” Benois wrote. “Whenever I heard the loud, nasal cries of the traveling Punch and Judy showman “Here’s Petrouchka!”…I would get into a kind of frenzy to see the enchanting performance…As to Petrouchka in person, I immediately had the feeling that “it was a duty I owed to my old friend” to immortalize him on stage. I was still more tempted by the idea of depicting the Butter Week Fair on stage, the dear balagani that were the great delight of my childhood, and had been the delight of my father before me. The fact that balagani had, for some ten years, ceased to exist made the idea of building a kind of memorial to them still tempting.”
A year prior, attempts had been made by some of Benois’ associates to stage a Petrouchka performance with live actors as puppets and it had been discovered that the Guignol-Petrouchka screens were inappropriate. The effect of adults’ heads appearing on top of a curtain, and little wooden puppet legs underneath, was more pitiful than comic. Benois foresaw that it would be ludicrous to “dance” a Petrouchka ballet in which dancers did not use their “natural” legs. It seemed to him that he should abolish the conventional screens and replace them with a small theatre (a stage within a stage) where the puppets would come to life without ceasing to be dolls-“retaining, so to speak, their doll’s nature.” The two dolls were Petrouchka and his Columbine, and Benois decided that a magician (The Charlatan) should bring the dolls to life. He added a third doll, The Moor.
…Having seen, as in a vision, what the ballet should be, Benois accepted Diaghilev’s proposal and forgot his wounded pride. Diaghilev returned to St. Petersburg and the two friends met everyday for tea in Seriozha’s flat on Zamiatin Lane, where the ballet of Petrouchka gradually took form, in four fairly short acts with no intervals. The first and fourth acts were set in a great public square during the Shrovetide Carnival (circa 1830’s) and Benois’ determined to make sharp contrast between the “dolls” and the people at the Fair. Stravinsky did not join the friends until December. Then, he sat down at Benois’s old piano in Benois’ little, dark blue drawing room and played the fragments of music, which had been “the beginning of everything.” It was far greater than Benois’ expectations.
…1911 dawned with new hope for Benois, who continued to work on the ballet through the spring. Benois in St. Petersburg and Stravinsky in Switzerland corresponded at length but did not meet again until Benois had completed his book.
He saw the whole ballet as in the clearest vision, and the three dolls took on distinct identities, revealed in the two middle acts.
…Benois was delighted with Stravinsky’s idea of introducing a party of masked revelers, riageni, into the street crowd. The “devil’s diversion” was a convention of the Russian Carnival and the masquers enjoyed special license. At the climax of the drunken revel, Benois decided, Petrouchka‘s anguished cries should be heard coming from inside the Charlatan’s theatre: Petrouchka would flee from the Moor into the crowd but the Moor would overtake and kill him with a sword. Benois and Stravinsky met in Rome (where the Ballets Russes was performing at Teatro Costanzo) and rehearsals for Petrouchka began.
…The company returned to Paris where Benois found waiting for him the costumes and dŽcor (“perfectly executed by Anisfeld”), which had arrived from St. Petersburg. He and Stravinsky engaged in a combat de generosite over name precedence on the program, and Benois insisted that the composer’s name must lead-but Stravinsky dedicated the ballet to Benois, so that the painter’s name appeared twice on the score.
…Nijinsky’s Petrouchka was just such a revelation as made Benois use the term “metamorphosis” to describe the change, which took place in the dancer onstage”… [Benoit writes]”…in the end he amazed us as he had in Pavillon, Scheherazade and Giselle. This time also the metamorphosis took place when he put on his costume and covered his face with makeup-and it was even more amazing…as a horrible half-doll, half-human grotesque. The great difficulty of Petrouchka‘s part is to express his pitiful oppression and his hopeless efforts to achieve personal dignity without ceasing to be a puppet. Both music and libretto are spasmodically interrupted by outbursts of illusive joy and frenzied despair. The artist is not given a single pas or a fioriture to enable him to be attractive to the public…”
…Poor Benois kept haggard watch over Petrouchka in the Diaghilev repertoire, bewailing the gradual shabbiness of the original production, the attrition of the action at the Fair, and the diminution of props and scenery. “The ballet has lost its charm for me and I feel sad when I go to see it,” Benois wrote in 1941. “for des ans l’irreparable outrage seems to have a hold on everything.”
In December 1969, exactly 59 years after Benois began work on Petrouchka, I hold history in my hand-67 maquettes (drawings) for the ballet sent from Paris by his daughter Clement to Robert Joffrey; and I look at Benois’ costume sketches-the colors still pristine-loaned to Joffrey by a New York collector, Nikita D. Lobanov. Upstairs, at Joffrey’s school and offices on 6th Avenue, a pianist is playing Stravinsky’s score as Leonide Massine sets Petrouchka on the Joffrey Ballet. He is assisted by a notable Petrouchka, Yurek Lazowski.
Massine followed Nijinsky into the role of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and danced it for several other companies. He continued to dance Petrouchka after he was himself a famous choreographer (and performed chiefly in his own works) and admits to it being “perhaps” his favorite of all roles. Joffrey first discussed Petrouchka with Massine while the latter was setting The Three-Cornered Hat on the company and found that Massine was very eager to set the ballet.
…For Massine, Petrouchka remains “a Diaghilev ballet.” “It is not generally known,” he told me, “that Diaghilev invented the end of Petrouchka, after the doll dies as a dummy. Diaghilev said “No! Petrouchka must live-that is the mystery of him!” So at the end of the ballet we see Petrouchka alive-or his ghost-looking down at us and the Charlatan!” Ending his work with the Joffrey Ballet, Massine paid the company the greatest compliment: “You have worked well, and I believe that if Diaghilev were here you would please him…”
…It is what Massine calls “trueness” that makes the ballet so apt for our time and place, and the “all-American” production given it in the Joffrey Ballet. It is a parable of human suffering, human frailty and human lust-and the careless, idle Crowd that looks on them. There are many good reasons for reviving Petrouchka, as Robert Joffrey has done, but the best and most valid one is what Balanchine has told us of Petrouchka: it was a very great ballet indeed.”