T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, JULY 29, 2019 | 15
culture
Ballet is an art of synthesis. Academic
dance, music and visual design unite,
sometimes with sublime alchemy. But
are these really the most important
ingredients for ballet?
A valuable new book, Nadine Meis-
ner’s “Marius Petipa: The Emperor’s
Ballet Master” (Oxford University
Press), records how many other ele-
ments have often seemed more cru-
cial: notably scenario, casting and
politics. Petipa (1818-1910), French-
born, was the most important shaper
of Russian ballet before Serge Diaghi-
lev, who formed his company, the
Ballets Russes, in 1909.
Today, we single out “The Sleeping
Beauty” (1890) from Petipa’s long
career: That glorious, abundant col-
laboration with Tchaikovsky, made in
St. Petersburg, remains one of the
definitive peaks of ballet classicism.
From the 1920s to the ’70s, however,
Petipa’s classicism was often hailed as
a parent of ballet modernism. “For-
ward to Petipa!” was a war cry in the
ballet experimentalism of the early
Soviet era. Twentieth-century aficiona-
dos saw his ballets as enshrining pure
dance and elevating aspects of human-
ity to the sublime.
In the 1960s and ’70s, when the West
came to know the Elysian Shades
scene of Petipa’s “La Bayadère”
(1877), his reputation soared: He was
the master architect of formal values
in ballet. George Balanchine and
Frederick Ashton, the dominant West-
ern ballet choreographers of the sec-
ond half of the 20th century, hailed him
as such.
It turns out, however, that Petipa
was working along quite different
lines. Soon after his arrival in Russia
at the age of 29, in 1847, he began
making ballets that were peak artistic
expressions of the czarist regime:
royalist, hierarchical, elitist.
Dynastic succession is a recurring
theme in their scenarios. Peasants,
when they reach the stage at all, are
generally happy, except sometimes in
affairs of the heart. Russia is almost
never the location. The worlds de-
picted so intensely by Petipa’s Russian
contemporaries — Dostoyevsky, Tol-
stoy, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov
and Repin — might have come from
another planet.
Ms. Meisner’s book, the first full-
length Petipa biography in English, is
by far the most detailed and complete
survey of his life and work to date. Not
all its fascinations are cheering, how-
ever. Ms. Meisner retells, in all seri-
ousness, many of the stories of Peti-
pa’s ballets, even though their narra-
tives are all too often dismayingly
absurd.
And though dance made an impor-
tant contribution in most Petipa bal-
lets, in several it was far from their
raison d’être. “King Candaules” (1868)
ends, after its title character has died,
with a scene in which his queen is
haunted by his ghost until she drops
dead; that, Ms. Meisner writes, is
followed by a tableau in which, amid
the other gods in the cloud-filled heav-
ens, Venus-Astarte points “at the
corpse of the hubristic queen who had
dared to compete with the goddess of
beauty.”
Fatuous, yes — and all too charac-
teristic of other Petipa ballets. Such a
narrative epitomizes what the Bolshe-
viks would soon want to sweep away.
Petipa’s story was also entwined
with the careers of dancers and their
influential supporters. In no country
was balletomania as extreme as in
Russia. Over 60 years with the Rus-
sian ballet, Petipa did marvels for
ballerinas from Western Europe and
Russia. We learn in Ms. Meisner’s
book about the “ballerina war” of1862-65, when the main excitement
was caused by Maria Surovshchikova
(Petipa’s first wife) and Marfa Mu-
raveva, Russians both, and about the
visiting Italians — notably Virginia
Zucchi and Pierina Legnani — whose
standards transformed Russian ballet
at the end of the 19th century.
The super-ambitious Russian prima
ballerina Mathilde Kschesinskaya
(1872-1971), however, became Petipa’s
enemy. Her power was immense:
Having been the mistress of Czar
Nicholas II in his youth, she became
involved with two other grand dukes of
the Romanov dynasty. She established
a monopoly on a number of the best
roles. When a director of the Imperial
Theaters fined her for an anachronistic
change of costume, she used her influ-
ence to have the fine canceled. The
director, thus overruled, promptly
resigned.
Kschesinskaya’s shenanigans, noto-
rious even when she was at her prime,are a blatant sign of what was corrupt
about the Russian ancien régime. It
seems appropriate that when Lenin, on
his return to Russia in 1917, addressed
the revolutionary crowd in St. Peters-
burg, he used the balcony of the house
that had been hers. Declaring his
politics to be Russia’s future, he con-
signed her to its past. Or to the West:
She escaped Russia with one of her
grand dukes. (The Bolsheviks killed
the other one.)
The successful 1917 revolution, how-
ever, was preceded by a failed one, in- Hundreds of workers were killed
or wounded when the police fired on
their peaceful protest march on what
was called Bloody Sunday. Petipa’s
favorite ballerina, Olga Preobrazhen-
skaya, danced that night. But although
noting in his diary the flowers and gifts
she received, he then wrote, “It’s too
much — here they’re dancing, and in
the streets they’re killing.” Then 86, he
went with his youngest son to look at
the broken shop windows on Nevsky
Prospect, the city’s most eminent
street.
These are among the many touching
details of Petipa’s life that Ms. Meisner
records. Yet she leaves unmentioned
two other signal events of St. Peters-
burg’s 1904-5 winter. Isadora Duncan,
dancing rapturously and with radical
simplicity to classical music without
any male partner, made her local de-
but, causing a sensation among artistic
progressives. And Diaghilev presented
an outstanding exhibition of historical
Russian portraits that made both
aristocrats and the intelligentsia recon-
sider Russian history.
Diaghilev gave a visionary sum-ming-up speech as his exhibition
closed. “I have become completely
convinced that we are living at a terri-
ble time of fracture: We are doomed to
die so as to give rise to a new culture
that will take from us all that remains
of our tired wisdom,” he said. And he
spoke of “a new and unknown culture
that we are creating but which will
clear us away.”
Did Petipa attend Duncan’s dance
performances? Did he visit Diaghilev’s
exhibition or read the text of his
speech? He must have been aware of
them. He certainly must have known of
the ambitious young Diaghilev, who
had caused crises during his brief time
on the staff of the Imperial Theaters.
Ms. Meisner writes that “the Ballets
Russes grew from the soil that Petipa
had tended.” Well, yes — Diaghilev’s
lead dancers were drawn from Petipa’s
company — and no. In 1909, Diaghilev
and his colleagues constructed a ballet
company that was a vital corrective to
what Petipa had been doing. They used
music by leading Russian composers
whom Petipa had ignored, notably
Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov; theyabsorbed multiple aspects of Duncan’s
influence.
The three main composers of Peti-
pa’s ballets were Cesare Pugni, Ludwig
Minkus and Riccardo Drigo: all West-
ern, all harmless, all decades behind
the main current of classical music in
their day. Diaghilev consigned them all
to history.
In recent decades, however, all three
composers have been infiltrating ballet
repertory — thanks to Petipa. An
abbreviated (but still long) pastiche of
his preposterous “The Daughter of
Pharaoh” (Pugni) was staged in 2000
by the Bolshoi Ballet, which has toured
it to London and New York. Many
Western troupes now have productions
of the Petipa-Minkus war horses “Don
Quixote” and La Bayadère.” The chor-
eographer Alexei Ratmansky, using
period notations and other sources,
has reconstructed Petipa’s “Harlequin-
ade” (Drigo, 1900); he’s also staged
“Don Quixote” and “La Bayadère.”
What cause could anyone have to cry
“Forward to Petipa” today?
Perhaps every ballet era will re-
invent Petipa. Over the last 40 years,
the dance world has come to see “La
Bayadère” not as a single act of formal
dance classicism but as a full-length
story ballet, abounding in melodrama,
processions and scenic effects. It once
seemed laughable that anyone would
resurrect “The Daughter of Pharaoh,”
whose titular character throws herself
in despair into the Nile, which
promptly entertains her with a great-
rivers-of-the-world ballet; in this cen-
tury, thousands have seen it in several
countries.
Today, we’re also given — often
onstage, as in Mr. Ratmansky’s recon-
structions — new quantities of histori-
cal information about Petipa’s dance
texts and style. These newer versions
of Petipa are often less heroic in scale,
less idealist in manner. Are we now
seeing Petipa the proto-postmodernist,
playing history games that are full of
clever detail, meta-narrative and inci-
dental humor? I think we are. Petipa,
changing his shape, seems determined
to survive and dominate the ballet
scene.Long look back on a ballet maker
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOKA valuable new biography
examines the 19th-century
pioneer Marius PetipaBY ALASTAIR MACAULAYJAMES HILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESANDREA MOHIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESTop, the Elysian Shades scene from
Marius Petipa’s “La Bayadère,” in a 2013
performance by the Bolshoi in Moscow.
Above, Petipa in 1898. Left, Isabella
Boylston and James Whiteside in Ameri-
can Ballet Theater’s version of Petipa’s
“Harlequinade.”HERITAGE IMAGES, VIA GETTY IMAGESFrom the 1920s to the ’70s,
Petipa’s classicism was often
hailed as a progenitor of ballet
modernism.Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) — the
British literary critic, banker, journal-
ist, political sociologist, analyst of
finance, social psychologist and editor
of The National Review and The Econ-
omist — has never lacked admirers.
His devoted friend George Eliot con-
curred with the verdict of another
close friend, Lord Bryce, that his “was
perhaps the most original mind of his
generation.” Gladstone confided that
both Liberal and Conservative govern-
ments so prized Bagehot’s financial
acumen that they looked to him as a
“supplementary chancellor of the
Exchequer.” His posthumous idolaters
have included Woodrow Wilson (whodefined Bagehot’s role as nothing less
than “to clarify the thought of his
generation”); Herbert Read, the mod-
ernist poet, anarchist philosopher, art
critic and literary critic, who pro-
nounced Bagehot’s literary criticism
“the best of its time” save for Matthew
Arnold’s; Jacques Barzun, the intellec-
tual historian, who for decades cham-
pioned him as “the greatest Victorian”;
and Ben Bernanke, who, in a memoir
of the most recent financial crisis, cited
Bagehot more often than any living
economist. Nevertheless, Bagehot is
fated to be best known for not being
better known.
This limbo probably owes something
to the uncertain pronunciation of his
name (most say “Badge-it”; some
insist on “Bag-ot”) and more to the
wide range and seeming incongruity of
his fields of expertise, as the disparate
assortment of his celebrants suggests.
Containing multitudes, Bagehot has
been impossible to pigeonhole. Those
who examine, say, his comparison of
the role of the provinces in “TristramShandy” and the novels of Thackeray
may well be unaware of “Lombard
Street,” his tour de force anatomization
of the psychology of finance and bank-
ing panics and of the sociology of the
London money market. “No book on
banking,” John Maynard Keynes
wrote, “has ever attained such a posi-
tion — an undying classic,” imbued
with “the glamour of intense reality,” it
“is a perfect example of a certain kind
of English writing, and its truth of
human nature.”
Those who champion his startling
elucidation of the social and psycholog-
ical dimensions of the Crown and the
House of Lords in “The English Consti-
tution” tend to form a different constit-
uency from those who look to his pio-
neering exploration of evolutionary
political sociology in “Physics and
Politics” (which William James pro-
nounced a “golden little book,”) and
from those who see his most enduring
contribution to be the creation of a new
prose style — cool, ironic, epigram-
matic, allusive, balanced, sometimesslangy — that remains part of the
mental furniture of Oxbridge, Britain’s
Civil Service and what used to be
called Britain’s “higher journalism.”
While a full appreciation of Bagehot
has been hobbled by his polymathicattainments, he has nevertheless been
fortunate in his devotees — even if, for
the most part, each has been able to
illuminate only specific aspects of his
career and his genius. In his new biog-
raphy, “Bagehot: The Life and Times
of the Greatest Victorian,” James
Grant follows this pattern, burnishing
his subject’s reputation but offering a
somewhat limited appraisal of Bage-
hot’s achievements.
Grant is a biographer of Bernard
Baruch and John Adams, and the
founder and editor of the cheeky and
stylish Grant’s Interest Rate Observer.
The characterization that the highbrow
Labour Party politician Richard Cross-
man (another Bagehot devotee) be-
stowed on Bagehot’s writing — a “mix-
ture of rollicking cynicism and cool
analysis” — applies to Grant’s own
brilliantly contrarian criticism in the
Interest Rate Observer, The Financial
Times and elsewhere of market reck-
lessness, bankers’ irresponsibility and
(to Grant) their concomitant, the ex-
pansive monetary policies of the Fed-eral Reserve that have defined the
booms and busts of the past 30-odd
years.
This biography, though, takes wing
only when it treats Bagehot’s role as a
banker and financial journalist. That
these are the very aspects of Bagehot’s
work that have been relatively ne-
glected by most scholars, who have
tended to concentrate on his literary,
political and sociological oeuvre, might
be reason enough to commend Grant’s
excellent if uneven biography. Bagehot
scholarship, however, isn’t accretive,
and the 1959 book “The Spare Chancel-
lor,” by the worldly British journalist
Alastair Buchan, remains the most
astute, elegant and historically in-
formed assessment of Bagehot’s entire
life and work — including his participa-
tion in and analysis of the powerful and
precarious world of finance.‘The greatest Victorian’
BOOK REVIEWBagehot: The Life and Times
of the Greatest Victorian
By James Grant. Illustrated. 334 pp.
W.W. Norton & Company. $29.95.BY BENJAMIN SCHWARZBenjamin Schwarz is writing a biogra-
phy of Winston Churchill. He is the
former national and literary editor of
The Atlantic.A posthumous portrait of Walter Bagehot.FROM W.W. NORTONРЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
РЕЕExchequer.” His posthumous idolatersExchequer.” His posthumous idolaters
Л“supplementary chancellor of the
Л“supplementary chancellor of the
Exchequer.” His posthumous idolatersExchequer.” His posthumous idolatersЛ“supplementary chancellor of the“supplementary chancellor of theИИЗacumen that they looked to him as a
Зacumen that they looked to him as a
“supplementary chancellor of the“supplementary chancellor of theЗacumen that they looked to him as aacumen that they looked to him as aППОments so prized Bagehot’s financial
Оments so prized Bagehot’s financial
acumen that they looked to him as aacumen that they looked to him as aО
Д
ments so prized Bagehot’s financial
Д
ments so prized Bagehot’s financial
acumen that they looked to him as a
Д
acumen that they looked to him as aments so prized Bagehot’s financialments so prized Bagehot’s financialГГОboth Liberal and Conservative govern-
Оboth Liberal and Conservative govern-
ments so prized Bagehot’s financialments so prized Bagehot’s financialОboth Liberal and Conservative govern-both Liberal and Conservative govern-ТТОgeneration.” Gladstone confided that
Оgeneration.” Gladstone confided that
both Liberal and Conservative govern-both Liberal and Conservative govern-Оgeneration.” Gladstone confided thatgeneration.” Gladstone confided thatВВ
both Liberal and Conservative govern-
В
both Liberal and Conservative govern-generation.” Gladstone confided thatgeneration.” Gladstone confided thatИИЛperhaps the most original mind of his
Лperhaps the most original mind of his
generation.” Gladstone confided thatgeneration.” Gladstone confided thatЛperhaps the most original mind of hisperhaps the most original mind of hisАГclose friend, Lord Bryce, that his “was
Гclose friend, Lord Bryce, that his “was
perhaps the most original mind of hisperhaps the most original mind of hisГclose friend, Lord Bryce, that his “wasclose friend, Lord Bryce, that his “wasclose friend, Lord Bryce, that his “wasclose friend, Lord Bryce, that his “wasРРУУ
П
curred with the verdict of another
П
curred with the verdict of another
close friend, Lord Bryce, that his “wasclose friend, Lord Bryce, that his “wasПcurred with the verdict of anothercurred with the verdict of anotherППАHis devoted friend George Eliot con-
АHis devoted friend George Eliot con-
curred with the verdict of anothercurred with the verdict of anotherА"What'sments so prized Bagehot’s financial"What'sments so prized Bagehot’s financial
acumen that they looked to him as a
"What'sacumen that they looked to him as a
“supplementary chancellor of the“supplementary chancellor of the"What'sNews"generation.” Gladstone confided that
News"generation.” Gladstone confided that
both Liberal and Conservative govern-
News"
both Liberal and Conservative govern-
ments so prized Bagehot’s financial
News"
ments so prized Bagehot’s financialVK.COM/WSNWSgeneration.” Gladstone confided thatVK.COM/WSNWSgeneration.” Gladstone confided that
both Liberal and Conservative govern-VK.COM/WSNWSboth Liberal and Conservative govern-
ments so prized Bagehot’s financialVK.COM/WSNWSments so prized Bagehot’s financial
acumen that they looked to him as aVK.COM/WSNWSacumen that they looked to him as a
“supplementary chancellor of the
VK.COM/WSNWS“supplementary chancellor of the
Exchequer.” His posthumous idolatersExchequer.” His posthumous idolatersVK.COM/WSNWS