Le Corsaire - Moscow Productions of Le Corsaire

Moscow Productions of Le Corsaire

In March 1858 Marius Petipa was dispatched to mount Jules Perrot's version of Le Corsaire for the Ballet of the Moscow Imperial Bolshoi Theatre (today known as the Bolshoi Ballet), who continued performing the ballet with some regularity for many years in various revivals. In 1888 Petipa supervised the creation of a new production of Le Corsaire for the company, which premiered to a resounding success. Petipa was a leading choreographer of the time in Russia. In 1894 the Bolshoi Theatre's newly appointed Ballet Master Ivan Clustine mounted his staging of Le Corsaire, which premiered on 22 March 1894. Petipa would later allege that Clustine's production apparently plaigarised much of his own choreography, particularly for the scene Le jardin animé.

On 25 January 1912 Alexander Gorsky—Premier Maître de Ballet of the Moscow Imperial Bolshoi Theatre—presented his revival of Le Corsaire, with Ekaterina Geltzer as Medora and Vasily Tikhomirov as Conrad. For this revival Gorsky supervised a substantially revised edition of Adam's score that included a myriad of new dances. The airs of such composers as Edvard Grieg, Anton Simon, Reinhold Glière, Karl Goldmark, Frédéric Chopin, Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Antonín Dvořák were fashioned into dansante accompaniment for new scenes, pas, variations, and the like. Among the most notable scenes added by Gorsky was a dream sequence set to a Nocturne by Chopin, in which the character Medora dreams of her beloved Conrad. Another interpolation of note was a divertissement for Turkish, Persian and Arabian slave-women that took place during the scene in the bazaar of the first act. Even with the production's large number of interpolated pieces, Gorsky chose to retain many of the additional pas as included in the ballet by Mazilier and Petipa.

Gorsky's revival of Le Corsaire remained in the repertory of the Moscow Bolshoi Theatre until 1927. Although the company regularly performed extracts from Le Corsaire for many years thereafter, the full-length work was not given again until Konstantin Sergeyev staged his version for the company in 1992.