R S Edgecombe

PS and OOPS I have just gone back to your entry to make notes, and see that Drigo wrote a variation for Kitri in Act TWO, not V. What variation is this? The waltz in G that serves as her entree is def by Minkus. Is there an insert I'm not familiar with? And I see that Gorsky did the chor for an Act IV variation--is that Act V or really Act IV, because she doesn't do one in the Kirov IV (I think). And, if it is Act V, does that mean the pas de cheval var we in the west attribute to Obokov is in fact by Gorsky? Really!!! Studying ballet history is like doing a white jigsaw puzzle!

RG, I hope you won't think me very Henry MacKenzie-ish when I tell you that I am typing this reply with tears in my eyes. I really can't explain them--gratitude to you, relief after years of uncertainty, joy at final eclaircissement. Oh my prophetic soul. I KNEW the Dryad queen var wasn't by Minkus, and, after spending the better part of a morning dissecting my wobbly reconstruction and conferring with Gwendolen all the while, I am at last vindicated. Now all I must do is find out about Anton Simon and all the other petits maitres you list for DQ. Perhaps the new Grove JUST might have one or two entries to meet my inquisitiveness. I was also convinced that Kitri's E flat variation owed something to Aurora's entree, and this clearly must be so if il Riccardo ottonato (no goldens for HIM, in my book!) wrote it. THANK YOU!!!! (exclamation marks to the power of n recurring) PS Does the Bolshoi do a Paquita that conforms to your list, and if so, is it on tape? I am bursting with curiosity, most especially with regard to the Petipa Sylfida. Does anything remain of this beyond the var listed there?

It does seem a bit perverse, though, to have called him Leon when Louis was there for the taking. I suspect it was a printer's error that got engraved--in metal and then in stone. In my Dance Books reprint of the Stellowsky DQ, LM is Gallicized as L. Mincous on the title page, which also shows that dryads carried palm branches (or highly elongated and bedraggled feathers!!) in their hands. How fond Petipa was of this sort of prop--parrots in B and garlands in SB and, in DQ, a dimanche des rameaux in the very presence of Amor! Mel's Aunt Nancy-Anne would NOT approve! On the first page of the score, the C of Mincous gives way to a K very like a kappa and the Cyrillic equivalent, whatever it's called.

Hans, your tape and my tape are one and the same. I must have miscounted the beats of the entrechat. I could never manage more than a quatre, so anything more awes me into blurry wonderment. However, am I wrong in thinking that Nerina once did 32 entrechats huit in the Black Swan coda to cock a snook at Nureyev? Were they in fact sixes? Mel, I do hope you will write your memoirs soon and gather all this priceless information in compact form. I know it's scattered throughout this site, but it would be nice to have it in a vade mecum. Jean-Luc, I am about 80% sure that the first variation in the Kirov Paquita isn't by Pugni, but we could be speaking about different pieces of music. There is a quite distinctive naievete about P's music, which is all the more remarkable because it was wholly affected. He prob knew more about the theory of music than M and Drigo combined. I'm afraid, RG, that the Kirov tape doesn't match up at all with your list. The only thing I am reasonably certain of is that your variation 8 (the Vazyem) is the Kirov 5 (strange that Vazyem, who apparently didn't jump well, should have had to start her variation with jetes). I am also once again undecided about the Kirov 1--its melodic deportment is slightly more Drigovian than Minkusoid, but those acciaccatura crockets are so distinctively M that I really don't know which way to lean. If it turns out that Bolshoi 1 and Kirov 1 are identical, then my mind will be made up for me--but how to establish this??? And I must say that, watching the Kirov 4 again in the knowledge that Fokine wrote it, I felt a mild degree of indignation. How could the choreographer who spurned the old master have helped himself so liberally to Candite and Miettes qui tombent. The dance read quite differently when I didn't know the author, or rather, when I believed him to be doing homage. Now for the pas de trois. Thank you VERY much for the Deldevez information. The 4/4 is especially interesting because there is nothing else quite like it in Minkus (read the Minkus that I know!), but there are several parallels in Fr ballet music, esp. Auber--cf the pas de quatre in Les Rendezvous and also the 8th item in Act I, Scene 1 of Marco Spada that I marked "currente calamo--flute" in some notes I attached to the record sleeve. However, I couldn't confirm the parallels because I no longer have the means to play my vinyls. The dates for both of these Aub pieces (1850 and 1856) suggest the influence flowing from D to A, though one should also bear in mind the earlier influence on both of the female var from Burgmueller's Peasant p de d. As to Del's valse in A major--on Friday I tried to explain to myself why the Queen of Dryads valse doesn't seem echt Minkus, and for a while considered the fact that its first bar is harmonized on the dominant. (I don't have the music, but I guessed V4/3 after the anacrusis, which sounded right-ish, and Gwendolen, sitting on top of the piano and looking down on me, narrowed her eyes in assent!) Then I remembered this valse from the pas de trois, and rejected those particular grounds, though I think others remain. Now that I know it's D, I might want to reinstate the 1st bar on the dominant reasoning. However, the valse is SO like the coda of the Enchanted G scene in DQ that one must assume that M was very fond of this variation, and used it as a template for some of his own compositions. And before I go, could I ask you please to explain why, in a response to a post by Solor in another thread you called this pas de trois the "golden"? Thank you SO much, once again.

PS I forgot to mention, apropos of your amusing onomastic fantasy, Mel, that Aloysius is the name of Sebastian's teddy bear in Brideshead Revisited. I used to pronounce it as spelled, until a friend of mine pointed out that it is spoken as RG has transliterated it, probably because the use of the English name is connected with the Polish saint, and the Poles must pr it in much the same way as the Russians. And when it comes to nominal doublets, I can tell you that I once taught an Elizabeth-Isabel!

RG--a HUGE thank you. So much to digest here and match against my tape. I am already having doubts that the Kirov will tally, though, because the Fokine variation doesn't appear on your list. But I am pretty sure that the variation I mentioned above as starting with a developpe a la seconde is the one to the Drigo waltz. Although I didn't say so in my post, I did have faint doubts about the Minkus authorship, but these faded in the context of a conviction that it definitely wasn't Pugni. It must be early Drigo. He became very distinctively (and somewhat repulsively, in my opinion) himself in the 90s. I shall post again when I have had time to sort out all this info. Mel, a big thank you too for the fascinating info on R&L and Diable a 4. Where do the two of you get all your material? I'm still stuck with Roslavleva!

Ari and Carbro, I'm sure I can't be far behind you when it comes to loving Balanchine. Didn't he say that Fokine took a wrong turn after Les Sylphides or words to that effect? Well, I couldn't agree more. And didn't he say that ballet has no mothers-in-law. Well, what could be truer? In narrative ballets, there are bound to be patches of inertia (as there are in all epic poems). I'm afraid I sometimes fastforward my way through them--as I plan to fastforward past the insufferable Mac Culkin in an effort to get on top of the B Nutcracker tonight. There is never inertia in the non-narrative B. As Keats said Shelley's poetry should be, but wasn't, B's every rift is loaded with ore.

RG, your post is wholly lucid--far more so than any I could have offered after the ordeal you and your fellow East-Coasters have just endured. It's a pity this discussion has split off from the Paquita one in Ballets, because I drew attention to the Tcherepnin solo in that. In my tape it's danced by Larissa L. I am nothing short of stunned to learn that Fokine was the choreographer, having speculated there that it might have been by Lopokov. Fokine could Petipize with the best of them, it seems. And indeed Alastair Macaulay said in a DT review that the ballet from Ruslan and Lyudmila that F is said to have choreographed was also very pre-Isadora and classical tutu.

Yes, Mel. It is the polka-cabaletta for the duet "Quanto amore" (I think it's number 16 in the score). Just as Drigo turned the concertante polka of the Act I pas de deux of Lac into a blaring marche for the male dancer in the so-called Black Swan, so Lanchbery did the same for Colas. In Donizetti the effect is light and fleet, but in Lanchbery it sounds as if my Gwendolen is thundering across the stage! He also dotted the anacrusis (which in Donizetti is even-valued) to make it sound more military.

Mel, I am an animal generalist as well as a literary one, so I am quite as passionate about Heather's dogs as I am about my cats. Thanks for correcting my stab at ailurophile. In fact it applies MORE properly to your skunks because I don't think Greek has a word for cat, and mongoose was as close as the coiners could get to it. (But I might be wrong--I've learned not to trust my memory these days.) What is the colour of the elephants that alcoholics are meant to see? Is it pink? Perhaps the red lantern in your hilarious anecdote, reflecting off the snow, made the BB elephants seem distinctly pink to the revellers! Ari, I wasn't suggesting any influence or cross-pollination between B and A. I was just implying that, in my opinion, that B isn't as good as A at rendering narrative through dance--in fact, I would even say, isn't nearly as good. Whereas, A, in Symphonic Vs and Scenes de B and even in Sinfonietta, its flimsy score notwithstanding, CAN draw level with B when it comes to abstract musical composition. The best part of MSND, I think, is that breathless, urgent divertissment to a selection of Mend. string symphonies--when the tale has been told.

Jean-Luc, I have just watched my Kirov Paquita tape, and I am fairly sure (about 80%) that the first variation (the one that follows the coda of the pas de trois) was set by Petipa to music by Minkus, and not by Saint-Leon to music by Pugni. To be sure, can you confirm that the variation is a waltz, and that it begins with a developpe a la seconde sur la pointe, followed by a jete de cote en face, and that it has a passage of grands fouettes en tournant toward the end? And my prima ballerina dances her variation to a particularly nauseating slow gavotte for harp solo (written by somebody like Lincke or Krein), which begins, after some preliminary positioning into epaule with a sous-sus, entrechat huit and attitude derriere. That rather thrilling variation that you describe as the true one precedes it in my tape. If my description of the "Pugni" variation doesn't tally with yours, and if it's not to much trouble, could you please tell me the time signature, and list the first three steps? I might be able to find it somewhere in the fruit salad! Thanks so much!

Jean-Luc, many thanks for this post, which I find VERY interesting. I am going to play my tape of the Paquita grand pas immediately so as to identify the Little Hunchbacked Horse variation. I shall post again if I am wrong, but I am pretty certain that the prima ballerina in the Kirov version dances a variation to music much later than the 1830s--later even than Minkus, as I remember thinking. Could you clarify what you mean by the Sylphide variation to music by PUGNI? Was this an insertion into the Schneitzhoeffer score? I wasn't aware that Petipa had mounted a version of La Sylphide, and am highly intrigued. By the way, I have seen Plisetskaya dance a variation from Little HH that looks very C19, even though the music is by her husband. Do you happen to know if this possibly the original Saint-Leon choreography, grafted on to Schedrin's score?

Carbro, I am afraid that recent changes to the BT software prevent me from accessing private messages, so I've asked Glebb if he would be kind enough to give you my email address. I was intrigued by your header, though, and can match "Elephants and sauts de basque" with a story of my own. Many years ago I was required to review an alfresco performance of Giselle, set, appropriately enough, amid the vinyards of Stellenbosch. The amphitheatre didn't have what in Shakespeare's day was called a tiring house, so the dancers had to approach the stage across a wide stretch of courtyard, and I was sitting in the front row on the right of the auditorium. Something caught my eye toward the end of the valse des wilis, and I turned to see the heavy, large and blonde dancer who was being tried out as Myrthe was making a desperate run across the courtyard before getting air-borne for the manege of sauts de basque. I know it's very uncharitable of me, but I had the distinct impression that a white elephant was stampeding through the African night! Highly alarming! I was never able to manage basque jumps, so I don't know what sort of run-up they need. Perhaps this scene is repeated backstage in every theatre where Giselle is performed, and the audience is none the wiser! Pamela, that sounds like the very book I need to read. I love behind the scenes takes on ballet. By the way, have you read the anthropological study of the Royal Swedish Ballet--Ballet Across Borders by Helena Wulff? I have just remembered something about Balanchine that restores some of my confidence in his humanity--a photograph of him with a cat in his arms. Now no aleurophile (sp?) can be all bad--even if he choreographs for elephants!

Ronny, when I read Ivor Guest's Romantic Ballet in England, I was quite excited to discover that Fernando Sor had written music for the Cendrillon that Albert mounted for Mercandotti in the 1820s, since Sor is no slouch when it comes to composing. But it turned out to be a typical ballet score pre 1840--which is to say, a compilation of bits and pieces and airs parlants, with some Sorian connective tissue here and there. The same disappointment followed my discovery that Herold had written a Sleeping Beauty, for I am a HUGE admirer of Zampa, Le Pre aux clercs and Le Muletier. The score of Ashton's Fille mal gardee is also a salmagundi, but it's bearable because Herold is close enough in style to his borrowings from Rossini and Martini and Haydn, and the lurid gloss of Lanchbery's orchestration helps integrate even the resistant Hertel music. Not so the Kirov DQ and Corsaire, where one lurches from 1869 to circa 1935 and back again in a gut-wrenching way.

Well, Vanniai, your name is just another of many interesting things that I've learned at this site. The only Russian name for God that I know is Bozhe, and I often recite Tatiana's pained line from Eugene Onegin--O Bozhe, kak obidno e kak balno--when I embarrass myself! In English the name Vanessa was invented by our rather strange writer Jonathan Swift (he was very upset to discover that his girlfriend went to the lavatory!!), and he made it up from ESther VANomrigh. I wonder if you get the butterfly that we call "The Painted Lady" in Peru. It's very widespread, occurring both in Europe and in South Africa, so you might well know it, though it would have had to cross the Atlantic on a boat rather than with its wings, I imagine! Its wings are speckled brown and white and orange, with a pinkish flush near its body, and its zoological name is Vanessa cardui, cardui meaning "of the thistle" because that's the food its caterpillars like. Anyhow, Vanniai is a very good name for a ballerina to have. I bet you will flutter across the stage to great applause when you do your Paquita variation!

Many thanks, Mel. Episodes is terra incognita for me, but Con Bar I know well because it was in the Cape Town repertoire. It ranks with Palais de cristal (which is now prob called Bizet Symphony or Symphony in C or something along those lines) and Serenade as my favourite B works. MSND and Nutcracker, where he challenges Ashton on home ground, strike me as being rather weaker--though I haven't been able to study my Nutcracker tape properly because of an untreatable allergy to McCauley Culkin (sp?). Could you possibly also tell me if the prima or seconda ballerina does the doubles sauts de basque in the finale of Ballet Imp--which I would give my back teeth to see, along with Diamonds, because Tchaikovsky is my favourite composer.

Carbro, I'm afraid I feel utter revulsion at the thought of circuses involving animals. And trapezes terrify me (as much as the 32 fouettes about to be attempted by dancer who isn't suited to them) and clowns bore me! So I give them very wide berth, and look forward to the day that they become as incomprehensible in their cruelty as the Roman circuses now are that gave them their name. I am sorry that B associated himself with them, but then I am also sorry that Petipa commissioned a stuffed tiger and stuffed parrots for Bayadere. Ari, you are quite right about my ignorance concerning Balanchine. When I was a little boy growing up in the provincial town of Port Elizabeth, I read every book on ballet in the library system--my kind, longsuffering parents taking me from branch to branch every Friday evening, just in the hope that I might turn up something new. There was exactly one on Balanchine--Bernard Taper's, which I read dutifully. However, not having seen a step by Balanchine at the time, I didn't absorb very much--except perhaps that B once had the men support the women in upside-down entrechats because a motif had been inverted at that point in the music. Is that in Taper? I've definitely read it somewhere, though I can't remember the ballet. It must have been to a Bach piece. Since then, I've read some Denby and some Croce, but a large portion of B's output remains unknown to me. Even so, I hold him in the highest artistic esteem--along with Petipa, Ivanov and Ashton. It's just that I have doubts about his niceness--though Petipa and Ashton certainly weren't saints either. My source for the washing up story is Julie Kavanagh's biography of Ashton, and she reports that A was definitely hurt by it. In fact he felt slighted by the way B treated him, and jokingly (though one imagines with a hint of real suspicion) suggested he might have been behind the fire that destroyed the Tintagel sets and effectively took the ballet out of the NYCB rep. B seems to have looked down on A because he couldn't read music. However, the story as you tell it is much less spiteful, so perhaps the malice was in the eye of the beholder--A's in this case.

Vanniae, your info about Minkus and Petipa is about as accurate as one can hope to be in the present circumstances, but I'd be careful about giving the variation a sequence number since there doesn't seem to be a stable format for the grand pas. You will find fewer variations in some productions, and more in others. Or perhaps your X was an algebraic X, and not the Roman version of 10! What nationality is your name, by the way? Is it Greek?

Please do call me "Rodney," Paul, and I hope you didn't think me too brash for calling you Paul without clearance! I must say that this info lowers B in my moral estimation. Dancing animals are a pointless and cruel grotesquerie, and I am shocked that he should have been involved. I believe, to paraphrase Archibald MacLeish, that elephants shouldn't mean, but be--and be in the jungles of Asia, on the plains of Serengeti, or in SPACIOUS, well appointed zoos. The only balletic elephant that I'm prepared to accept is the filigree one on wheels that deposits Solor at Gamzatti's wedding in Palais Garnier Bayadere. And I must say that I am beginning to feel graver and graver misgivings about B's moral character. I've never really recovered from the fact that the told Ashton that the only thing he had ever learned from him (A) was how to wash dishes properly. An UNUTTERABLY spiteful thing to say--to anybody, let alone to a man who was, at the very least, his artistic equal.

Vannia, strangely enough I have just posted my response to this question in Le Corsaire thread. The music for Amor is almost certainly by Minkus, and was probably taken into the Paquita grand pas at a much later date, at a time when even variations that were written after Petipa's death were finding their way into that fruit salad of odds and ends. The grand pas was written in 1881, and, at the start almost certainly had a uniform score by Minkus. It was only later that it received all its patches and gussets. Amor's variation doesn't feature in either the 1869 (4 act) or the 1871 (5 act) versions of Don Quixote, but because the Enchanted Garden act is so short, it is highly probable that Petipa inserted it some time during the 1870s. On (very shaky) musical grounds, I would argue that the Queen of the Dryads variation (which you will have seen Fonteyn dance in the RB film of the Corsaire pas de deux) entered the same act of DQ only in the 1890s, at a time when Petipa was around to choreograph it, but when Minkus wasn't there to write the music. This might very well be by Drigo, but I couldn't begin to prove that.

I have only just come across this extremely helpful and interesting thread, which addresses things that have always bothered me a bit. Mel is absolutely right about the Paquita grand pas being a sort of gallimaufry. In my Kirov tape one of the variations is to music by Tcherepnin (Le Pavillon d'Armide), and therefore cannot have been written by Petipa at all, but rather by somebody highly skilled (Lopokov, perhaps) who had mastered Petipa pastiche. The "correct" variation for Medora in the Corsaire pas de deux is almost certainly a polka by Drigo (you can see it in the Kirov tape danced by Altinai A...--daren't try to spell her name!). It dates from Petipa's 1899 insert, and was also always used by Samsova. The music of a later vintage than the Queen of the Dryads valse, and fits better with its Drigo matrix than Nureyev's substitution. I am not wholly sure if the QD variation is by Minkus. Something about the melodic progression tells me it mightn't be. On the other hand, the music for Amor almost certainly is. It doesn't feature in the 1869 score of Don Q, so it must have been inserted at a later date. Since the revival of Paquita that saw the birth of the Grand Pas was made in 1881 and the St Petersburg version of DQ dates from 1871, there is good a priori evidence for its having first appeared in Don Q, when Petipa had to beef up the very brief Act IV of the Moscow text. Silvy, I wonder if the fact that Amor uses the chin-propped-on-finger motif of La Sylphide is meant to suggest that, like her, he is a spirit of disruption.

Did Lydia Pashkova write the libretto from scratch, or did she base it on one of her novels? I seem to have read contradictory accounts in this regard, but I'm not sure. And could one of our Russian members (Mikhail, are you reading this?) please give us some idea of her literary reputation in Russia. I have never been able to find her in any reference books I've consulted. Was she a trashy writer like Marie Corelli, or a semi-respectable one like Walter Scott?

Paul and Carbro, thanks for stressing the fact that Balanchine's taste was much more catholic and flexible than I have been led to believe. And, so I suppose was Ashton's, because he loved Pavlova almost as much as (more than?) Fonteyn, and photos show AP to have had a VERY peculiar, imperfectly turned line. A point of information--I think I read somewhere that the leading ballerina has to do a manege of doubles sauts de basque in the finale of the sometime Ballet Imperial. From what Paul says about Caccialanza, am I to assume that it is the seconda who does these? In my ignorance about the ballet's provenance, I had always suspected he had put these in to be cruel to Fonteyn! The passage must be quite as terrifying to the executant as the 32 fs!

Roma, I am afraid I'm so ignorant about American ballet that I hadn't even heard of Marie-Jeanne before Ari mentioned her above. I have seen some footage of ME Moylan, but so bleached by the lighting that I couldn't get much sense of her quality. It struck me, even so, that she wasn't a B muse as we have come to conceive the type, though neither, perhaps, were Allegra Kent (is that the right name? it seems wrong) and Darcy Kistler. Would I be wrong to suggest that, valuing speed as he did, B made do with dancers like Marie-Jeanne, but as a stopgap--until he could, by careful selection and training, make his his unique contribution to the typology of dance physiques, viz., the dancer with a jarrete line so extreme that one could call it mannerist, but who can, even so, move like the wind and not fall over her feet. When Patricia Neary staged Serenade for the Cape Town company, they danced it in a demure, gentle, British way, and I thought that S was the most Ashtonian of all the B ballets I had seen--and that, I should add, is too, too few for my liking. Then I saw a tape of the NYCB in S, and it found it ELECTRIC by comparison. The ballet went at almost double the speed, and the dancers were at least a head higher than their Cape Town counterparts, all enormously precise and fleet (soubrette precise and fleet) but LEGGY. I had never seen anything like it, and once again threw up my hands in despair at trying to fathom out the taxonomy of dancers, which always scrambles itself the moment I think I've got it down!

Ray, I am not sure if your source article focussed solely on literary texts, or discussed art works in general. In either case, it's impossible to generalize either about the benefits or the disadvantages. One simply has to proceed on an ad hoc basis. All artists evolve (and we have immediate proof of that in LW's post above)--some so dramatically that they renounce their earlier work and try to suppress it, others along a steady evolutionary line in which the later work is comprised, to some extent in the early. The latter kind of artist doesn't mind having that line displayed in a "complete works," though even he or she might want to carry through a few cosmetic changes here and there on the callow outpourings of youth. In literary scholarship, all changes can be assembled in a "variorum" text, where textual history of any one poem or novel or whatever is laid bare, comma by comma, article by article. Usually the author's final revisions are taken to be definitive, and constitute the reading text. But even here, there are all sorts of problems. Do we modernize Shakespeare's spelling and punctuation? And if we don't, do the plays remain readable where the general public is concerned. (Or--to put that balletically--do we want, say, Giselle to be performed in unblocked shoes that would permit far fewer turns and much shorter balances?) However--and here I might be wrong--I can't think of any literary revisions that compare in scope and scale with Verdi's, whose style underwent a dramatic transformation over three stages. In the case of Macbeth, he modified an early (first phase) work in his third phase style, and, in Simon Boccanegra, a second phase work in his mature style. The textual problems that result are enormous because, while the revisions are superb, they are so discontinuous with the originals as to seem utterly unneighbourly. Imagine Leonardo going back to his Annunciation and repainting Gabriel in the style of his John the Baptist. Almost unbearable, though one might acknowledge his John has more sophisticated morbidezza and tonality etc etc. than that rather stiff, iconic angel. And that brings us to ballet. Changes here and there aren't the problem. I have seen a film in which Ashton rewrote the port de bras for Sinfonietta years after it was staged because he found the original too montonous. Evolutionary change; nothing dramatic. The real problem is the great C19 classics, many of which have come to us in an intolerable musical condition, or with feeble libretti, or with a patchwork choreography. Think, for example, of the mishmash score to which the ABT dances Le Corsaire, and compare it with the recording of Adam's original. That market place dance with hands that pierce the back would never have been written by Petipa, and the music clearly dates from the mid C20. And--to confront Petipa himself, who did the same thing--what about Giselle's E major variation? It's TOTALLY out of style with the ballet as a whole. So what to do? Do we get a great choreographer to try and improve the mess, or, even more radically, to start from scratch in his own style? If we do, it's the Verdi revisions all over again. Superb, but discontinuous. In Graeme Murphy's great Nutcracker, for example, we see Tchaikovsky's danse arabe rendered into contemporary movement. Or do we get a Lacotte to juggle creatively with known C19 formulae. That means stylistic consistency, but choreography of doubtful worth. To quote Dickens, "it's aw a muddle."