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MARIUS PETIPA aka Marius Ivanovich Petipa, Victor Marius Alphonse Petipa
(1818-1910)

    To attempt a biography of Marius Petipa in one go is a daunting task; therefore this article will not attempt it. However, a decent respect to one of the world's preeminent choreographers demands a decent treatment in installments over the career of this genius as traced by the several ballets selected for interpretation in these pages.

    Marius Petipa was born in Marseilles, France on March 11, 1818 and was one of the eighteen children of balletmaster Jean-Antoine Petipa (1787-1855) and his wife, actress Victorine Grasseau. His older brother Lucien (Joseph-Lucien [1815-1898]) created the role of Albrecht in Giselle.

    His family was fairly intinerant, and besides the changes of venue brought about by their father's employment at various theaters in Europe, they also toured quite a bit with their own "pick-up" company of dancers. Young Marius was to make a sensation with his performance in the title role of Jocko, or the Brazilian Ape (one of his father's ballets) when he was about 12 years old (1830) rather before his formal debut as a "jeune homme" danseur in 1838. A portrait of Marius as a child has been identified and shows a handsome, wide-eyed, curly-haired boy of about 12 dressed in Italianate clothing, and tending a small monkey on a chain while seated on theatrical crates and bales. The Petipa company even played New York in 1839.

    Marius was able to squeeze only a small amount (about two months) of study with Auguste Vestris into his busy childhood, but retained the old master's reserve and artistic conservatism. With them, he was able successfully to incorporate the Romantic, liberal ideas which revolted against them, thereby forming his own successful synthesis of style which was to be the trademark of his choreographic output for the rest of his life. Petipa was a formalist, and he found in the formal structures a liberating discipline which ballet audiences admire to this day.

    Eventually the Petipas made their way to Russia, introducing themselves to St. Petersburg with Marius' staging of Joseph Mazilier's Paquita in 1847. He also staged it in Moscow the following year. The critics made a rivalry of him and Christian Johansson which was not really fair to either. Johansson was a danseur classique, specializing in heroic roles, while Petipa performed, with equal brilliance, as a character dancer or grotesque, whose acting was particularly effective.

    Petipa served as a premier danseur under the direction of Jules Perrot and Arthur St.-Leon, and finally succeeded them as balletmaster in 1869. His ballets were to develop in a way that has become the standard for formal production of evening-long or even one-act ballets. His own choreography was recognized as brilliant, although somewhat given to "vogue" elements like high and acrobatic lifts in pas de deux. His taste in scenery and costumes ran to the dowdy, and the musical style that he liked to use, the so-called "dansant", was uninspired, but at least had its own charm. Chief among the "dansant" composers was Ludwig Minkus, whose Viennese background gave his tunes a gemuetlich quality. He had succeeded Cesare Pugni, whose style could be called "one-off Donizetti", as Pugni cribbed melodies from other composers almost at will.

    Petipa revived and revised earlier classics, putting his own "spin" on them, and preserved and extended their lives at a time when ballet elsewhere was in eclipse, decline, or stasis. His influence has been so pervasive that it is difficult, in some cases, impossible, to know what a ballet that had passed through Russia, such as Giselle, was like before his restaging of it.

    His original works saw the transition from the "dansant" to the "symphonist" in the case of music, with the works of Tchaikovsky and Glazunov being the prime examples of the change in musical taste, which led to the "high-art" scores which were an important feature of the next generation of choreographers, like Fokine. But eventually, Petipa fell into an old-age rut of reviving styles of ballet that had long since faded, with the anacreontic genre of allegory such as Glazunov's The Seasons, or the same composer's Ruses d'Amour, which Petipa's teacher, Vestris, would have found entirely comprehensible.

    Marius Petipa was rather forcibly put onto the retired list and pensioned off in 1903. He died at his summer home in the Crimea on July 1/14, 1910.