St Petersburg полностью

According to Balanchine, Petipa was blessed in that regard: he had worked with Mathilda Kchessinska, Anna Pavlova, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, Pavel Gerdt (Elizaveta’s father). Pavel, the quintessential danseur noble of Russian ballet, was one of Balanchine’s teachers. The young Georges was impressed to learn that he had created the leading parts in Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker, and Swan Lake in Petersburg.

Balanchine always considered the French refinement and humor of Petipa’s choreography, the brilliance and wit of its inventiveness, and, most of all, its inexhaustible variety as the highest examples of what could be achieved in the art of ballet. But all these “French” traits were significantly complemented by specifically Russian softness and fluidity, which Petipa acquired while working with Petersburg artists. The great city influenced Petipa, too—the poetry of its white nights, the ever-present threatening breath of the stormy Baltic Sea, the harmony and grandeur of the classicist architecture, and the cult of high craftsmanship.

Some ballet critics have found in the famous shadow scene of Petipa’s La Bayadère the choreographer’s impressions of Petersburg’s constant floods and made a convincing parallel between the exquisite “white” (in white tunics) compositions of Petipa and the beautiful white nights of Petersburg. Vadim Gayevsky even saw the dream sequence from Petipa’s Don Quixote as a veiled portrait of the Russian capital: “Here is embodied the theme of Petersburgian idealism, one of the main themes in Petipa. Here is outlined the scheme of ‘Petersburg dreams.’”20

This somewhat unexpected linkage with Gogol and Dostoyevsky is fair in the sense that the theme of lost purity can be found both in their works and in Petipa’s. In Swan Lake Petipa created the fatal image of Odile, the Black Swan, the moral opposite of the White Swan, Odette, transfiguring in that way the Petersburg graphic contrast of black and white into a battle between good and evil on the ballet stage.

Gayevsky maintained, “Petipa is the first true urbanist in the history of European ballet. The ensemble—the planning principle of the great city—is at the foundation of his choreographic plans.” From here comes the grandiosity of many of Petipa’s choreographic solutions. In the first version of the shadows scene in La Bayadère, he used sixty-four dancers. The sensation created by that cascade of white tunics on the stage of the imperial theater was overwhelming.

But the embryo of catastrophe always lay dormant in Petipa’s vision of Petersburg’s grandness. At the end of his career he decided to stun the capital’s audience with a particularly opulent production. He began work on The Magic Mirror, in which the main scenic effect would be a huge mirror on the stage reflecting both the stage and the hall. The mirror was filled with mercury and apparently exploded at one of the final rehearsals. Mercury poured out of the cracks in silver streams: a horrible sight and a bad omen. The superstitious Petipa was shocked.

Not long before the disaster with the mirror Petipa wrote in his diary:

My last wishes in regard to my funeral. Everything must be very modest. Two horses for the hearse. No invitations to the funeral, just an announcement in the newspapers. In this year of 1903 I am finishing my long artistic career—sixty-six years of work and fifty-seven years of service in Russia. I receive 9,000 rubles in annual pension, and will be listed in service until my death. That is marvelous. But I fear that I will not be able to use that marvelous pension.22

The sense of change characteristic of fin-de-siècle Petersburg and the hovering expectation of doom did not leave Petipa. This was undoubtedly one of the reasons for his love for Tchaikovsky, who worked, we could say, on the same psychological wavelength. Petipa could easily have remained with the music of Cesare Pugni, Ludwig Minkus, or Riccardo Drigo—after all, some of his biggest successes were collaborations with those minor composers: La Fille du Pharaoh and The Humpbacked Horse (Pugni), La Bayadère (Minkus), and Les Millions d’Arlequin (Drigo).