When Petipa Re-Choreographed . . .

[odinthor]

Do we know to what degree Petipa scuttled the previous choreography when he rechoreographed an existing ballet?  At times I have the feeling that the previous choreography has at least "colored" much of what Petipa's rechoreography/revision presents. 

Unless he always completely changed everything, obviously it would vary from ballet to ballet; but I'm interested in knowing what remains of the work of previous choreographers in Petipa's rechoreographies.  Perhaps at times Petipa simply fine-tuned what he regarded as occasional miscues in the original.  We may have more of St.-Léon or Perrot etc. than one might at first think.

(One is also almost tempted to enquire as to what remains of Petipa's choreography in today's production of Petipa's ballets; but that's a separate question!)

[Quiggin]

Good question but a formidable task with something so ephemeral as dance. No equivalent exists of X-raying a painting to see what came before.

The new Nadine Meisner Petipa book, however, may provide some hints. From the LRB review, "The Bedroom of a Sorcerer" –

Quote

In his memoir, Petipa’s score-settling pushes out details of the construction of his ballets. Meisner explains what Petipa took from Jules Perrot and Arthur Saint-Léon, his collaborators at the Imperial Ballet; how French and Italian techniques intermingled in the Russian context; how grand ballets differ from ballets-féeries; and how Petipa responded to demands for more or less patriotic content.

Meisner –

Quote

It was also from Perrot that Petipa acquired the ability to manipulate large numbers of dancers …

This was beyond Saint-Léon, who in Khudekov’s words “did not know how to deal with big numbers of people [ … ] All his morceaux d’ensemble are lifeless and colorless."  On the other hand, Saint-Léon was a ballerina’s ideal maker of solos. "St Léon knew how to compose those correct, rhythmic movements which in ballet language are called classical dance-variations. Soloists used to say that it was always comfortable for them to dance variations composed by this ballet master." [Ekaterina Vazem?] (The musical logic and delicate stitching of the Saint-Léon variation is evident in the reconstructions by Ann Hutchinson Guest and Pierre Lacotte of the pas de  six from La Vivandière.)

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n07/simon-morrison/the-bedroom-of-a-sorcerer

I've always enjoyed looking at these Royal Ballet's reconstructions of simple pre-Petipa choreography and steps –

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFEuShFvJzBww3lVbFABGB0HbIxNQ2TiA

 

Edited March 27, 2020 by Quiggin

[odinthor]

^^^ Thanks so much!  It sounds as if I'd enjoy the Meisner book immensely [grabs credit card and rushes off to Amazon]!

[Amy Reusch]

Yes, in this slow time, the silver lining is perhaos more time to read.  Was it Perrot who sued Petipa (and won!) for intellectual property theft, or was it St. Leon?  I think Perrot?  Wishes she had the books in hand...

 

[edited to add]

 

it was Perrot.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/arts/dance/looking-for-the-real-petipa-in-classical-ballets.html

Edited March 28, 2020 by Amy Reusch

[California]

2 minutes ago, Amy Reusch said:

Yes, in this slow time, the silver lining is perhaos more time to read.  Was it Perrot who sued Petipa (and won!) for intellectual property theft, or was it St. Leon?  I think Perrot?  Wishes she had the books in hand...

p. 98: Perrot sued Petipa. Petipa used Perrot's "Cosmopolitana" from Gazelda, after being denied permission by Perrot. Perrot won at trial.

[Amy Reusch]

Oh wow, he asked permission, was demied, and did it anyway!  Shows something of his personality!

[California]

59 minutes ago, Amy Reusch said:

Oh wow, he asked permission, was demied, and did it anyway!  Shows something of his personality!

If you go to Amazon and the hardcover edition, use their feature "look inside" and you can read p. 98. No way to copy-paste from that.

I would recommend this book very highly. Chock full of fascinating details. 

https://www.amazon.com/Marius-Petipa-Emperors-Ballet-Master-ebook/dp/B07QRWZXXF/

[Quiggin]

The lawsuit shouldn't overshadow their fruitful relationship. Nadine Meisner says this –

Quote

Over this long period [twelve years] Perrot’s example became an important formative influence on Petipa and a creative friendship was formed. Although this ended with a widely publicized court battle over copyright (about which more later), Petipa never lost his high esteem for Perrot.

Meisner will present Petipa's point of view, then gently correct it for the recond. What's impressive about the book is the number of footnotes in Russian cyrillic – so it appears she done lots of primary research rather than recycle others' takes on the subject. But I don't have the book at hand yet (which I eventually will), I'm working from a borrowed view via Google books.

Edited March 28, 2020 by Quiggin

[RhinoHaggis]

Are any of the classical ballets recorded in notation pre-Petipa?  It's strange to me to think that -with notation being around- a popular theater like the Paris Opera would have staged their ballets without recording the choreography in some form.   It's my understanding that the Beauchamp-Feuillet notation is mostly a floor pattern?  It seems to have been used mostly for court dances but was it replaced by ... nothing... in Paris in the 1800s?  Or were records maybe discarded or lost?  Shockingly few Adam musical scores survive in the Opera archives; I suppose hoping for choreography is asking too much?

I suppose the last place one could look to do a little personal comparing might be contemporary reviews of ballets that described some of the dances.  I've tried looking at libretto-programs for ballets hoping to find information about the music, and my recollection is that -whether the summaries are two pages or twenty- it's always just text about the plot, with no information about the actual dancing or music..... which -again- seems a little short-sighted for a publication designed to give the at-home aficionado a sense of the action. 

Anyone know more about this?

[RhinoHaggis]

Reading through @Quiggin's quotes -and at the risk of exaggerating the case- it's interesting to consider that perhaps Petipa wasn't the best composer of solos.  Perhaps I'm alone in this, but one of the things that immediately cries "Petipa" to me is steps which would normally be a petit allegro drawn out into a slower tempo, like the slow part of the third shade variation from la Bayadère:

 there's an uncluttered elegance, but it also looks like a miniature nightmare for the dancer, to fill all the time convincingly, with such small and quick movements .  HOP .....    . .... HOP ......     .... HOP.  The last time I played this for a class studying the variation, it was all I could do to keep the tempo down.

Anyway, there are of course a million possibilities, like for example that we have slowed down the tempo (the music is very tempo-neutral).... but it's funny to think that one possibility is that Petipas wasn't always so hot at writing variations, and the dancers were huffing and complaining.

Edited September 11 by RhinoHaggis

[volcanohunter]

I would point out that when Ratmansky staged his reconstruction of La Bayadère in Berlin, that particular variation was danced much faster. Ratmansky has complained that ballet has grown slower because of the premium placed on very high extensions: it simply takes longer to get legs way up there and to bring them back down again. The way that variation is generally performed today, as in the video, is asinine. It's a gauntlet of extremely long balances with zero flow in the choreography or the music.

I'll also stick my neck out by saying that while I admire Petipa’s ability to move groups of dancers around, in general I find him to be an unmusical choreographer, which became even more frustrating for me in productions of his ballets reconstructed from notation. He had no qualms about throwing random composers together, to slicing and dicing musical scores, whether rearranging the order of pieces or removing big chunks of music. When I saw a video of Ratmansky's reconstruction of the final scene of Swan Lake, I thought it was a musical abomination. The music was hacked up something awful. And when Petipa was given a beautiful piece of music, such as the vision scene in Sleeping Beauty, the choreography he devised to it was bo-o-oring.

Edited September 11 by volcanohunter

[doug]

Marian Smith and I have discussed some of these topics in detail in our book, Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg. 

Henri Justamant made many staging manuals for 19th-century French ballets. 

Nikolai Sergeyev’s piano score for the Shades scene in Bayadère gives a metronome mark of 120 bpm for an 8th note in the variation shown in the video above. This is much faster than the variation is now traditionally danced.

Increasingly slowing tempi has been a trend in ballet since at least the 1960s.

It was very common in the 19th century for dancers acquiring new roles in existing ballets to interpolate new dances into those ballets, hence some ballets have come down to us with numbers by multiple composers.

[Quiggin]

10 hours ago, volcanohunter said:

I'll also stick my neck out by saying that while I admire Petipa’s ability to move groups of dancers around, in general I find him to be an unmusical choreographer, which became even more frustrating for me in productions of his ballets reconstructed from notation.

Fyodor Lopukhov (brother of Lydia Lopokova and, as choreographer, an influence on George Balanchine) has an interesting critique of Petipa's musicality in "The Ballet Master and the Score." The problem he says is two-fold.

Prior to Tchaikovsky, ballet music was considered to be accompaniment to the choreography, not to work with it. Petipa, he implies, did not realize that Tchaikovsky's musical skills were of a considerably higher rank than those of Pugni or Minkus. "Ballet masters did not imagine that one day a composer would appear who was not subordinate to them but would work in conjunction with them, nor were they aware that the outrageous cuts they made, which deprived music of all its meaning, were quite unacceptable."

And second, Petipa worked to a reduction of the score, played by a violin for melody with another as accompaniment and sometimes a piano. So he could not know what oboe would be doing at one moment, what the clarinet was doing at another. It was all conveyed on the single voice of a sole violin.

Quote

I do no share the view that Petipa’s ballets to the music of Tchaikovsky are his greater achievement. On the contrary, I find they are full of errors not to be found in his ballets to the music of Tchaikovsky’s predecessors. I t was only thanks to his genuine talent, by which he was intuitively guided, that he was able to stage Tchaikovsky’s ballets in ignorance of the score without completely ruining them.

[volcanohunter]

Did Petipa ever see the Reisinger production of Swan Lake? Had he never heard any of Tchaikovsky's symphonic music? The first complete performance of Tchaikovsky's First Symphony took place in 1868. Did he never listen to orchestral rehearsals of the ballets? Or was he really so unmusical that none of this would have made a difference? 

[RhinoHaggis]

Hahaha I thought i was going to get clobbered for saying that!
@doug that is a reassuring tempo mark.  I saw a version on YouTube (that I can't find now) with répétiteur violins that was quite brisk.

In partial defense of whatever choreographers/directors are making these decisions, some of the problem lies in the music.  This music has no countermelodies; no soft rhythm part elaborating the counts.  Musically, it only "works" at tempos where the role of the steady 8th is unambiguous.  It's either a 2/4 coda, a crisp moderato with equal-weight eighths, or a false adagio where with some imagination you can pretend the eighth is subdivided. In the same way that it would be terribly awkward to stop the accelerando early and finish the piece without breaking into the coda tempo it's hard to take a slower tempo without falling down the drain into the false adagio.

Also, thanks for the info on notation! I'll have a look!

[Quiggin]

I take it that Lopukhov's point was that previously all ballet music was considered to be "accompaniment," rather than on equal terms with the choreography, and could be cut and pasted as  necessary. (Stravinsky apparently thought the opposite in his collaborations with Balanchine, until Agon.) But also that Petipa rehearsed with a severely reduced version of the original, so it  would be difficult to match movement to various lines of musical development. Listening to the orchestral rehearsals would already be too late in the process, the structure had been set.

Lopukhov, of course, is making points to promote his ideas of music and choreography being equals, but he was an eyewitness to some of this (b. 1886) or heard from others at the Mariinsky what had gone down. As I recall reading, Balanchine himself used reductions but they were sometimes ones he had done himself.

 

[RhinoHaggis]

It's crazy to think of someone using two violins with a modern piano available.  With répétiteurs it would be impossible to take any stock at all of a longer Tchaikovsky piece.  Tchaikovsky did his own reductions and they are quite good.   Still, we already know the orchestral versions, and I agree that - -if we didn't already know them- even with piano reductions it would be difficult to grasp the bigger picture for his broader numbers, like the long waltzes.  He introduces a fabric of interlocking countermelodies that appears like characters, spark new interest and textures, and allow the principal theme to fall underneath as accompaniment.  He was also a masterful orchestrator.  He showcases the colors of the different instrumental registers, and melodies are tailored to specific instruments with phrasing and articulation that is hard to imitate at another instrument, or imagine in its absence.  The piece I have in mind is not Tchaikovsky, but Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture.   If it's unfamiliar, give it a listen, and try to imagine capturing it in a piano piece.  I hesitate to say it's impossible; Yuja Wang does the impossible every day. But it'd have to be close.

I would also hesitate to jump to the conclusion "unmusical".  I think any musician who has worked with a choreographer has the experience of working-out phases of choreography where the music is simply not an equal partner, if for no other reason than the music is already written but the choreography is not.   In some sense choreography depends on music to exist, but just as the composer should freely elaborate her ideas , so also the choreographer should be allowed to elaborate the dance freely into the future on the principles of choreography and not as mere accompaniment. There is no need to write off a failure to grasp the measure of Tchaikovsky and the possible implications for choreography, as a lack of musicality.

[volcanohunter]

I think a great deal can be conveyed in piano versions. Brahms produced tons of four-hands music and made four-hands versions of practically everything he wrote for orchestra and instrumental ensembles. Some of these I like even better than the orchestral compositions (for example, Variations on a Theme by Haydn, which I love in any version).

I also distinctly remember the documentary Dancing for Mr. B and Allegra Kent describing La Sonnambula. In the background as she was talking you could hear the piano reduction of the final scene, which I thought was absolutely marvellous, far superior to Vittorio Rieti's orchestral version and even more atmospheric than the original "Ah! non credea mirarti."

[Helene]

Violins are far more portable than pianos, and the musicians can tune them quickly and easily for themselves.

I do remember a wonderful accompanist who played for the adult advanced beginner classes at the 92nd Street Y in the late '80's or early '90's.  One day, he stepped away from the piano, opened up a violin case, picked up his violin, and played for the adagio.  It was magical.

 

[RhinoHaggis]

@Helene while those things are certainly true (and increasingly relevant as the piano wanes and strapped dance studios surely question the investment in live music on battered uprights)… it is probably impossible to overstate the ubiquity of the piano in the 19th and early 20th century.

After 1800, the piano developed rapidly, becoming sturdier, with a broader range of dynamics and tone, and requiring less and less frequent maintenance.  By mid-century the piano was for all practical purposes the instrument we know today. The layout of the keys is transparent reading exactly like a musical staff.  Harmonies are distinguishable at sight. This, and the ability to play more notes at once in more complex interrelations than any other instrument made it the default reference instrument.  For everything.  Every musician that attended conservatory anywhere in Europe was required to learn to sing… and play the piano, a tradition which is only now beginning to fade.  Every working musician could play the piano.

And the piano was necessary for modern music.  The violin répétiteur has a kind of mystique in ballet history, but “répétiteur” is just the French word for the job that -say- a pianist does helping an opera singer prepare for a concert.  It isn’t a question of the loveliness of the tone, but of pure practicality: you can’t help a singer prepare Puccini with a violin.  There is certain music that she needs to prepare and you need to be able to play it.  And depending on the singer you will be expected to provide on the piano every specific note and musical quirk (like the speed of rolled chord) that singer uses as cues.  The world of the violin répétiteur had vanished.

And pianos were everywhere.  Bars, restaurants, whorehouses… homes. It was the 19th century turntable.  It is how anyone could hear the melodies to the latest works of any kind.

At the time Petipa was choreographing, there was no such thing as a performance space large or small that did not have a grand piano which was regularly tuned and maintained.  A prominent theater would have in every performance and rehearsal space a piano which could be serviced or tuned before -or even during- every performance.  

I say that not to be a cheerleader ‘rah-rah piano’, but because at the time Petipa was choreographing, the use of a violin répétiteur as a matter of practical convenience no longer existed.  And the music being written was totally unsuited to its use.  The year Petipa died, The Firebird premiered.  Somewhere between Rameau and Stravinsky two-part accompaniment becomes an absurd notion, regardless of the beauty of a solo violin playing well-suited music.

So it raises some interesting questions. Clearly the violin accompanist survived longest in the ballet.  If Petipa was using two violins, it might be because an older  he was revisiting was only available in a 2 violin score.  Perhaps it was a tradition that survived in certain ballet theaters.  Or perhaps by that time it was a peculiar preference unique to him?

Without trying to rag on them, the music of composers like Drigo and Minkus could easily lend credence to the idea that you could still get by with melody and countermelody… while the rest of the world in the meantime, moved on.

[RhinoHaggis]

[Here’s a little love for the violin to counteract the brutality of the 19th-Century machine instrument 

❤️]

[RhinoHaggis]

5 hours ago, volcanohunter said:

I think a great deal can be conveyed in piano versions. Brahms produced tons of four-hands music and made four-hands versions of practically everything he wrote for orchestra and instrumental ensembles. Some of these I like even better than the orchestral compositions (for example, Variations on a Theme by Haydn, which I love in any version).

I also distinctly remember the documentary Dancing for Mr. B and Allegra Kent describing La Sonnambula. In the background as she was talking you could hear the piano reduction of the final scene, which I thought was absolutely marvellous, far superior to Vittorio Rieti's orchestral version and even more atmospheric than the original "Ah! non credea mirarti."

As mentioned above, piano versions of everything are indeed how orchestral music  of every kind was -and still is- performed for all accompaniment purposes.  Here in the U.S., every  year thousands of students in every state visit the designated local school with a piece prepared for ajudication.  Every single one of them who requires an accompanist will use a pianist, as every single piece of solo-instrument-with-orchestra in the entire repertory has an orchestral accompaniment arranged for piano.

Likewise every auditioner for a competition, etc. Etc.  For every purpose it it assumed sufficient for the needed musical purpose.  And when that assumption fails it is because the music is dense enough that a single  piano is simply not enough to portray the musical texture.

But interestingly two-piano versions pose a challenge for a rehearsal setting as they require tight coordination of the two pianists and this kind of overhead is just not a part of accompaniment tradition.  Proper rehearsal scores are always for a single pianist, even when there are extra staves showing additional countermelodies.

But even with two pianos, the color and character of the original instruments is lost.

I actually asked a dancer from the Dutch National Company about this whole business recently, because reductions like the Firebird are unplayably difficult.  He said that the first rehearsals with the orchestra music  after piano preparation are always a disaster as dancers adjust to all the extra musical activity going on: counter melodies jumping out of nowhere; moving inner voices, etc.

But in all these settings, the principal performer knows the orchestral version.  if Petipa was reluctant to consider all the extra notes in the full score as having much importance, it changes the meaning of a reduction.

[Quiggin]

Maybe the violin was used because it was closer to an orchestra sound (in miniature) than the percussive piano. And in cold studios it was easier to keep in tune, as Helene suggests above.

I'm reading Prokofiev's "Diaries 1915-1923" and he often has to compose without a piano or try track down one, not always in tune. He seems to be very proficient in expansions and reductions of his own scores, such as "Chout" for Diaghilev.

There's a nice long digression about the Partita #2 Chaconne in a recent novel by Greg Baxter, "The Apartment," a kind of auto fiction mostly consisting of everyday details of searching for an apartment in an unnamed European city. The narrator is buttonholed after a student recital he happens to wonder into, and his interlocutor goes on and on about the many voices Bach can pull out of such a simple instrument as a violin. '"Bach looked out across the landscape of music that had come before him and gathered it all up, every sound and every theme the ever existed, and to him they were bricks and wood and stones and glass, and he refined them into a musical cathedral that was unimaginable to anyone living in his age and unrepeatable to anyone after," said Schmetterling.'

Nicolas Economou claimed that he managed to squeeze every Tchaikovsky note into his transcription of the "Nutcracker." Always chuckle when I listen to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA0ivU2we5M

 

Edited September 12 by Quiggin

[Lidewij]

According to Doug Fullington in one of his Works&Process presentations, the piano wasn't used in the Imperial Theatres to accompany rehearsals until the early 20th century. 

So the violin répétiteurs were absolutely used by Petipa @RhinoHaggis

[cubanmiamiboy]

In the Legat book he speaks of his and his brother 's early training with their father, and there's one of their famous drawings showing them at the barre with papa Legat close by playing the violin. In this case he was both the teacher and the musical accompaniment. He was able to be close by, give corrections and stop and resume as he wanted. It is intimate and probably less time consuming 

The piano implies orders to the pianist and to the dancers, with shouting in different directions. It could be frustrating for the teacher. Plus...an extra salary.

Edited Friday at 02:53 PM by cubanmiamiboy