Petrushka’s survival

Abstract

First performed in Paris, 1911, the “burlesque” ballet Petrushka stands today as a central work of the modernist canon and an unruly assemblage of artistic media that eludes any attempt to define it simply in terms of a single “author” or as a work independent of its original production. In this chapter, I focus on Petrushka’s reputation precisely as a concert work—its various instrumental reductions, transcriptions, performances, and their own reception history—as a lens through which to consider the relationship between music and (choreographic) motion. Through a brief analysis of the 1965 Swedish television film of Stravinsky’s Three Movements from Petrushka performed by Alexis Weissenberg and directed by Åke Falck, I consider Petrushka’s life, and that of the work’s eponymous puppet, beyond the theater, and examine in what ways the extra-musical elements of the original work were either erased or preserved in “purely musical” versions.