The Pharaoh's Daughter - History

History

Even though The Pharaoh's Daughter has not been in repertory since the beginning of the 20th century (until the Bolshoi's 2000 production), its importance lies in the fact that it was Carolina Rosati's farewell performance to Russia and the occasion for Petipa's appointment as second ballet master.

It was also a production of the choreographic trend parallel to that of the grand opera in music, towards the ballet à grand spectacle, which lasted four hours and used different styles and techniques and a large number of people (about 400), with plots characterized by strong dramatic contrasts.

Interest in ancient Egypt was revived by archaeological and political events- the discovery in 1851 by Auguste Mariette of the Serapeum at Memphis and the digging of the Suez Canal in 1859- and by the reports of the educated élite returning from the Grand Tour.

The ballet's literary source is Le Roman de la Momie by Théophile Gautier, the exponent of literary exoticism which offered all sorts of romantic expedients: the passionate love story of the great priest's daughter Tahoser and the Pharaoh set in a Biblical Egypt which, however, disappeared in the ballet, and the Gothic taste for gloomy corridors and dark tombs. What the ballet retains of Gautier's world is the sense of the fantastic which accompanies the most earthly passions. A fragment of the past or a puff of opium- a familiar influence in the works and lives of contemporary artists, such as De Quincey- gave Gautier the possibility of adding a brighter aura to his characters by setting them on the borderline between life and death from which all Egyptian art took nourishment.

So as not to overwhelm his readers with terror, Gautier frequently appeals to irony, which has an anticlimactic effect. Irony serves the same function in the ballet, for example in the moment when Lord Wilson, the quintessence of Englishness, impassively attempts to sketch the scene of the desert disturbed by the simoom, or when Aspicia, after rising from the sarcophagus, looks into a mirror and is pleased to find herself as pretty as she was a few millennia before.

The story called for an artist in the title role who had a special dramatic talent (as did Rosati), because of all the scenes of love, fear, and courage which culminated in Aspicia's attempt to cast herself onto a flower-basket hiding a snake, a classic gesture since Cleopatra's time. Twenty years later, Virginia Zucchi (less conventionally) portrayed an unusually humane princess, not as arrogant and voluptuous as that of her successor Mathilde Kschessinskaya who, on the other hand, made it more of a virtuoso role.

Petipa's penchant for folklore enhanced the dance of unlikely bayadères and the pageant of the rivers- from Guadalquivir to Neva- all dressed up in national costumes. But historical inaccuracy and mixing of styles raised- especially in Moscow- a few criticisms, in spite of the general taste for sets and costumes reinvented with a minimum of realism and a maximum of grandeur.