Ballets By Marius Petipa - Notation of Petipa's Work

Notation of Petipa's Work

It was in 1891 that many of Petipa's original ballets, revivals, and dances from operas began to be notated in the method of dance notation created by Vladimir Stepanov. The project began with a demonstration to the committee of the Imperial Ballet (consisting of Petipa, Lev Ivanov, the former Prima Ballerina Ekaterina Vazem, the former premier danseur Pavel Gerdt, and the great teacher Christian Johansson) with Stepanov himself notating Lev Ivanov and Riccardo Drigo's 1893 ballet La Flûte magique, and not long afterward the project was set into motion with a revival of Jules Perrot's ballet Le rêve du peintre. After Stepanov's death in 1896 Alexander Gorsky took over the project, all the while perfecting the system. After Gorsky departed St. Petersburg in 1900 to take up the post of Balletmaster to the Moscow Imperial Bolshoi Theatre, the project was taken over by Nicholas Sergeyev, former Danseur of the Imperial Ballet (and later régisseur in 1903) with his team of notators – Alexander Chekrygin joined the project in 1903, and Victor Rakhmanov in 1904.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917 Nicholas Sergeyev left Russia with the notations in hand. In 1921 Sergeyev took over the post of régisseur to the Latvian National Opera Ballet in Riga, and during his appointment there he added a substantial amount of the musical scores belonging to the notated ballets. In the 1930s, with the aid of the notations, Sergeyev went on to stage Petipa's The Sleeping Beauty, his definitive version of Giselle, Coppélia (as danced by the Imperial Ballet), and The Nutcracker for the Vic-Wells Ballet of London (later the Royal Ballet) who still almost religiously perform many of these ballets with little changes from when they were first staged. It was through these revivals by Sergeyev in London with aid of these notations that the ballets of Petipa where first staged in the west, forming the nucleus of what is now known as the Classical Ballet reperotry for not only the ballet of England but for the world.

In 1969 the Harvard University Library purchased the collection, which is today known as the Sergeyev Collection. The collection consists of choreographic notations documenting the compositions of Marius Petipa for his original ballets and revivals (the collection also includes two notations for ballets by Lev Ivanov – his 1893 La Flûte magique and 1887 La Forêt enchantée), and one by the brothers Nikolai and Sergai Legat (their 1903 revival of The Fairy Doll), as well as Petipa's choreography for dances from operas, along with various Pas, incidental dances, etc. from other works. Not all of the notations are complete, with some being rather vague in sections, leading some historians who have studied the collection to theorize that they were made to function simply as "reminders" for the Balletmaster or régisseur already familiar with these works. The collection also includes photos, set and costume designs, and music for many of the ballets in their performance score editions (mostly in piano and/or violin reduction), many of which include a substantial number of dances, variations, etc. interpolated from other works.