Ludwig Minkus: Don Quichotte; Ballet en cinq actes, avec prologue et épilogue, et onze tableaux, par Marius Peitpa après Miguel de Cervantes Piano Score
About this ebook
Don Quixote became established in the repertory, and its continued life on the Russian stage bears testimony to the appeal of its exuberance, “the life-asserting and life-loving nature of its dances” (Natalia Roslavleva). Generations of Russian ballet-masters and dancers preserved these dances in essence, and the ballet is still part of the Russian repertory, given today in all Russian and Siberian companies, in the Moscow version of Alexander Gorsky, in three acts and seven or eight scenes.
Petipa’s version of Don Quixote, with its life-affirming music by Minkus, has during the 20th century spread throughout the world, not least because of the work of Rudolf Nureyev who made a film version of the Australian Ballet production in 1971 that became very famous. It co-starred Robert Helpmann and Lucette Aldous, and made world history in being the first ballet to be produced with full film technique, so providing wider scope for imaginative handling of the famous story. Don Quixote has become the standard ballet version of the Cervantes tale, and one of the most popular pieces of the international repertory. Much of its emotional fervour is captured in the celebrated virtuoso Grand Pas de Deux for the wedding of Kitri and Basilio in the last scene. This piece, with a spectrum of feeling enshrined in its rapturous melodies and irresistible rhythmic élan, has assumed a life of its own as a concert piece in countless renditions wherever ballet is performed.
The piano score of the St Petersburg version was published as Don Quichotte (St Petersburg: Theodore Stellowsky, c. 1882). This version is reproduced here.
About the author
Minkus’s reputation has suffered with his work negatively compared with that of his contemporary, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), an unhelpful exercise as the two composers were from different musical traditions. Tchaikovsky, from his first major work, the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, emerged as an orchestral composer, accustomed to working with complex structures, large time spans and rich orchestral colours. Minkus, from his Viennese training and background, became a dedicated ballet composer, specializing in rhythmic music with immediate melodic appeal; the character, length, tempo and beat of the dances being determined by the choreographer, a practice Tchaikovsky himself followed in his score for The Sleeping Beauty. The rhythmic ebullience and melodic charm of Minkus’s music are nowhere better revealed than in the basically comic scenario for Don Quixote. But his apprehension of a tragic vision in La Bayadère was also a masterly achievement, where his conception of broader spans, Leitmotif and emotional colour, with a more symphonic approach in the famous episode of the Kingdom of the Shades, resulted in a supreme masterpiece of the ballet repertoire.
Marius Alphonse Petipa (11 March 1818 Marseille–14 July 1910 Gursuf, Crimea) studied music and dancing in Belgium, particularly with his father, Jean Antoine Petipa. He became premier danseur at the Comédie Française in Paris (1840), choreographer and dancer at the King’s Theatre in Madrid (1843-6), premier danseur at the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg (1847), and then Imperial Ballet Master in 1862, a position he held until the beginning of the 20th century. He is regarded as the father of Russian ballet, having choreographed fifty-four new ballets, re-choreographed seventeen old ones, and provided the dances for thirty-five opera ballets. His best known works include Pharaoh’s Daughter (with Pugni) (1862), Don Quixote (1869) and La Bayadère (1877) (with Minkus), The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and Swan Lake (1895) (with Tchaikovsky, and the choreographer Ivanov), Raymonda (1898) and The Seasons (1900) (with Glazunov) and Millions d’Arlequin (with Drigo) (1900).
Robert Ignatius Letellier has specialized in the music and literature of the Romantic Period. He has studied the work of Giacomo Meyerbeer (a four-volume English edition of his diaries, a collection of critical and biographical studies, a guide to research, two readings of the operas, as well as compiling and introducing editions of the complete libretti and non-operatic texts, and a selection of manuscripts facsimiles). He has also written on the ballets of Ludwig Minkus and compiled a series of scores from the Romantic Ballet.
