Petipa, Marius ___ 1818-1910 ___ French ___ dancer

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Petipa was born in Marseilles and educated at the Grand College in Brussels. Both he and his brother Lucien were drawn into the dance world by their father Jean, a ballet master. Petipa's debut came when he was still a child in one of his father's productions in Brussels. As a consequence of the Belgian revolution the family moved to Bordeaux and then to Nantes where Petipa became a principal dancer in 1838. A year later, Petipa and his father toured the US. Subsequently, Petipa lived and danced in Spain for four years, an experience which had a significant influence on his developing choreographic work, before moving in 1847 to St Petersburg, to dance for the Imperial Theatre. He married the dancer Mariya Surovshchikova, and created 'The Children's March' for her in 1859. Petipa's first major success came in 1862 with the 'The Pharaoh's Daughter'. This led him to become a ballet master for the Imperial Theatre, and then, in the 1870s, the chief ballet master, producing more than 60 ballets over the next 30 years. Petipa collaborated with Tchaikovsky on 'The Nutcracker' and 'Sleeping Beauty'. He was meticulous in his preparations, and is considered to have laid the foundations for modern classical ballet in Russia. He divorced Mariya, who had born him two children, in the mid-1870s, and married another dancer, Lyubov Leonidovna, who bore him six children. A translation of his diaries in English by Lynn Garafola is not easily available.
A biography link
Wikipedia bio
The Diary Review - The Greatest Ballet in Europe

DIARY DATES, CONTENT DESCRIPTORS
1900g-1910g ___ culture music

WEB TEXT LINKS
about
a bit about
one extract

ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LINKS

SOME PUBLISHED TITLES
The Diaries of Marius Petipa
 

May 2005, July 2008, July 2010, April 2013
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IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS: 1) The first line of basic information may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown, or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British' a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies. 4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges, and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising. I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some variety between them. 5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries.