These composers were masters of pleasant ballet music, but their works could not be compared with Tchaikovsky’s. However, an understanding of Tchaikovsky’s enormous contribution came surprisingly late. Even Minkus was considered “too serious” by Petersburg balletomanes. The reviewers of the premiere of Tchaikovsky’s first ballet, Swan Lake, ruled almost unanimously that the music was dry and monotonous. As one ballet fan summarized it, “Tchaikovsky put the audience and the dancers to sleep.”23 So the seventy-year-old Petipa’s decision to take on the choreography of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty should be considered a daring step. While the composer called Petipa a “sweet old man,” Petipa fully recognized the genius of his collaborator.
Tchaikovsky, who valued Petipa’s classicism, had flirted successfully with classicism in such scores as Serenade for string orchestra and the Mozartiana suite, which Balanchine used later for his choreographic masterpieces. And Petipa was drawn to Tchaikovsky’s music by its nostalgic character. Against the background of Tchaikovsky’s music, Petipa’s grand ball scenes and lush, mysterious rituals and ceremonies took on a new meaning. Ballet action soared beyond its conventional character, beginning to express complex contemporary emotions and moods.
Not long before that, the satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin could wrathfully attack Petipa’s ballets: “Does The Pharaoh’s Daughter deal with convictions, honesty, love of homeland? Never!”24 But by 1890 the premiere of Sleeping Beauty by Tchaikovsky and Petipa on the stage of the Maryinsky Theater enticed and inspired an entire group of aesthetically advanced young idealists, including Alexander Benois, Leon Bakst, and Sergei Diaghilev, the future organizers of Mir iskusstva.
Petipa had created a world where on the surface merriment and order reigned but that still lived precariously, as if threatened by an inevitable flood. The culmination of Sleeping Beauty, Petipa’s greatest work, is an unexpected catastrophe, and not one of individual lives but of an entire civilization. Based on the fairy tale by Charles Perrault, La Belle au Bois Dormant, from Mother Goose, the parable by Tchaikovsky and Petipa about a kingdom plunged into a hundred-year sleep on the whim of an evil witch seemed to foretell the fate of Petersburg. The evil magic that was to freeze the kingdom in an age-long sleep: it was a prophecy that came to pass in Russia in the twentieth century. A pall of foreboding hung over the era that united Tchaikovsky, Petipa, and the Mir iskusstva crowd.
For all that, Benois and his friends, while giving Petipa his due, did not perceive him as a kindred soul, as they did Tchaikovsky. Their choreographic comrade-in-arms was Michel Fokine, who was born in Petersburg in 1880 and died in New York City in 1942.
Mir iskusstva’s aesthetic program was always rather vague, determined largely by individual preferences and temperaments. But it is hard to imagine a more eccentric amalgam than the artistic tastes and strivings of Fokine. His was a mix of yearning for realism, impressionistic sketches, symbolist ideas and decadent excesses, a love affair with pictorial concepts, and a serious interest in music as the basis for ballet movement.
In thirty-seven years Fokine, toward whom Balanchine always remained ambivalent, choreographed over eighty ballets, of which only a few were preserved intact, and only two—Chopiniana (called Les Sylphides in the West) and Petrouchka— became repertory standards. But even those two masterpieces give some idea of Fokine’s creative range. Chopiniana is often called the first completely plotless, abstract ballet. But one forgets that it appeared almost accidentally. After all, Fokine was not planning to make Chopiniana a manifesto of plotlessness in ballet. On the contrary, in its first version, staged in 1907 in Petersburg, Chopiniana was a series of romantic sketches “from the life of the composer,” accompanied by Chopin’s music in Glazunov’s orchestration. Only when it was ridiculed by Petersburg critics did Fokine turn his ballet into an abstract work.
Balanchine told me what he valued most in Fokine: “In Petipa everything was drafted along straight lines: the soloists in front, the corps in back. But Fokine invented crooked lines in ballet. And for me he really invented the ensemble in ballet. Fokine took a small ensemble and designed interesting, strange things for it.”25
