Petrushka in Full Score: Original Version

by Igor Stravinsky

Stravinsky's score for the ballet Petrushka, commissioned by Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes, was first performed in Paris in 1911 and was an immediate sensation with the public and the critics. It followed by a year the great success of his score for The Firebird, also produced by the Ballets Russes, and it confirmed Stravinsky's reputation as the most gifted of the younger generation of Russian composers.
The ballet had begun in Stravinsky's mind as a "picture of a puppet suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios." Soon Diaghilev had convinced the young composer to turn the work into a ballet score. Benois was chosen to be his collaborator in the libretto, Fokine and Nijinsky became involved, and the bizarre tale of three dancing puppets — Petrushka (a folk character in Russian lore), the Ballerina, and the Moor, brought to life in a tragic tale of love — would soon become one of the most acclaimed and performed of ballet masterpieces.
Brilliantly orchestrated, filled with Russian folksong as well as new and striking harmonies, alternately poignant and splendidly imposing, the score of Petrushka continues to be a popular subject for the study of tonal language and orchestration. This edition is an unabridged republication of the original edition published in 1912 by Edition Russe de Musique in Berlin. Printed on fine paper, sturdily bound, yet remarkably inexpensive, it offers musical scholars, musical performers, and music lovers a lifetime of pleasurable study and enjoyment of one of the most popular and acclaimed musical works of the twentieth century.

Genres: Music

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1911

About the author

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. He is widely acknowledged as one of the most important and influential composers of 20th century music.

He was a quintessentially cosmopolitan Russian who was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the century. He became a naturalized US citizen in 1946. In addition to the recognition he received for his compositions, he also achieved fame as a pianist and a conductor, often at the premieres of his works.

He also published a number of books throughout his career, almost always with the aid of a collaborator, sometimes uncredited. In his 1936 autobiography, Chronicles of My Life, written with the help of Walter Nouvel, Stravinsky included his infamous statement that "music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all."

Reviews

[Bernardo Henríquez]

Siendo esta la primera vez que leo Petrushka, entendí mejor lo que explica Bernstein en Poetry of Earth sobre la expresividad objetiva, transformaciones sintácticas ("Igor's asymmetry racket") y me lo tripeé porque generalmente es menos violenta que The Rite of Spring in Full Score pero sigue teniendo sus momentos wtf.

Dividido en cuatro cuadros, Petrushka es la ilustración de la vida y los personajes de The Shovetide Fair. Hay bailarinas, borrachos, un moro, un mago y tres títeres. Muchos personajes bailan, y al final Petrushka se cae y se parte la cabeza (luego el mago llega y lo agita y es chévere como está orquestado eso).

Hay varias partes que cambian muy frecuentemente de indicador compás, y de hecho hay una parte en el primer cuadro donde hay simultáneamente 2/4 y 3/8 o algo parecido.

Ha sido hasta ahora mi introducción más sencilla a la música del siglo XX. Cuando lo lea con más detalle, la reseña será más amplia.

[Erik Graff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Growing up during the sixties, identifying with the counterculture and attending a residential college, I have had virtually no experience with dating if by that word one means inviting a presumably romantically available person whom one barely knows out to an event. The one great exception, probably the first, was during the first year at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

I lived in Hastings Hall on Broadway, a dormitory occupied not only by fellow seminarians, but also by students from Columbia University, Jewish Theological Seminary and the Manhattan School of Music. My neighbor across the hall, Ragin, was a Norwegian attending the latter. Being Norwegian myself and imagining her to be lonely and lost allowed me to be more forward with her than I would normally be with any even remotely attractive single woman. Thus an acquaintanceship happened.

I think it was her idea to go to see Petrushka at Lincoln Center. She had access to tickets through her school. I had no particular interest in Stravinsky, but was intrigued by the idea of sseing a live, professional ballet. We went.

It was terrible! It was a modern production without sets and without superscript. I was quite bored. She seemed pleased enough, but then she was infinitely more prepared than me to understand what was going on. We never went out again. She left at the end of the semester, returning to Norway to become the world-famous violinist she is today.

[Mynameisandycostello · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a nice little compilation of primary source documents. There is not much heavy theoretical analysis of the piece, but rather a lot of historical context. There is considerable attention spent on Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe.