Petrushka

Stravinsky’s evocation of the merry hubbub of a festive crowd at a carnival fair is unforgettable. For well over a century, the dazzling and zestful orchestral writing of his second ballet, Petrushka (1911), has inspired such composers as American “minimalists” Steve Reich and John Adams, and Hollywood’s Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams. At the centre of its drama is the hapless eponymous puppet, hopelessly in love with the pretty but empty-headed Columbine, who herself is charmed by the gaudy attractions of a third puppet, the Moor. Much of the puppet-hero’s music originated from a Konzertstück for piano and orchestra conceived by Stravinsky prior to the ballet. He visualised a “musician…of Romantic tradition” who “sat himself at the piano and spun contrary ideas at the keyboard, while the orchestra burst out with vehement protests, with sonic fisticuffs”. However, when Serge Diaghilev, the impresario of the Ballets Russes, heard Stravinsky play that work in progress, he instantly suggested that it was the kernel of a ballet. Alexandre Benois, a prime instigator of The Firebird, helped Stravinsky develop his puppet-inspired work, drawing on the commedia dell’Arte tradition of the Harlequinades in which Pierrot (a distant relation of Russia’s rough-mannered Petrushka) is involved in a love triangle with Columbine and Harlequin. Given Petrushka’s violent temper, Benois had originally envisaged the lovelorn puppet killing the Moor in a jealous rage. Stravinsky, however, insisted that it should be the Moor who kills Petrushka, turning the hero into a hapless victim and a perhaps more resonant figure.