Following the immensely successful Paris premiere of The Firebird in 1910, Stravinsky approached the director of the Ballet Russe, Serge Diaghilev, with a new idea for a stage work. This involved an ancient, pagan spring rite, with wild music. Diaghilev was very taken with the idea. It came as a rather unpleasant surprise when a few months later, Stravinsky returned and played him not the promised ballet, but extracts from a piece that resembled a piano concerto. What could the Ballet Company achieve with that? After a period of meditation, a new idea was born. The entertaining, but rather sad theme was evidently ideal for the musical stage realisation of a characteristic fairground clown figure. This figure was the archetypal Pierrot, or in Russian, Petrushka. Stravinsky could put aside the pagan work (the music that was to become The Rite of Spring), and work enthusiastically on the Petrushka ballet. The text was devised with the help of the company’s resident colleague Alexandre Benois (incidentally, the grandfather of actor Peter Ustinov). The ballet consists of four tableaux. The first is the hubbub of the fair. Among the many figures present – the merchants and musicians etc – is a magician, who tempts audiences into his fairground booth with a flute. He offers a marionette show, with three performers. One is a Ballerina, the second Petrushka while the third is an evil faced Moor. The puppets start to dance (this is the famous Russian Dance), and then to everyone’s surprise, they step down from the stage. Freeing themselves from their strings, they carry on dancing as though they were true life people. In the second scene, we see the troubled Petrushka. He is in love with the Ballerina, but does not know how to win her favour. The Moor is far more successful. In the next scene, the Ballerina sweeps into a dance with him, until the jealous Petrushka enters the room. Unfortunately, of the two, the Moor is stronger. The final tableau is identical with the first. We are again at the fair. The festive atmosphere is unexpectedly broken by the puppets. The Moor chases Petrushka, catches him and stabs him. There is general astonishment. The Magician then steps forwards. There has been no murder, since this is no flesh and blood human, but a straw puppet. He demonstrates. Slowly, he drags the Petrushka puppet after him back to his booth. Then, unexpectedly, the spirit of Petrushka appears at the top of his show-booth, and derides the Magician.
This is all there is to the story. Stravinsky, who had accumulated many experiences of small town fairs in his childhood, creates splendid, colourful fair-music. He uses many folk songs, which he acquired from the collection of his former teacher Rimsky-Korsakov. Alongside the peasant songs are characteristic urban songs, one of which is played by one of the competing organ grinders. Another melody is a French popular song, which Stravinsky heard in Nice, sung underneath his window, and which Stravinsky immediately inserted it into his work. Such impulsion backfired, when a Mr Spencer, who claimed to have written the tune, demanded a copyright payment for the use of his melody. In the Third Tableau, two further borrowed tunes can be heard, both by Joseph Lanner, one of the masters of the Viennese Waltz (Stravinsky was not sued for appropriating these, however.) It makes for a farcical moment when the Ballerina dances to one of the Lanner’s waltz melodies, while the Moor clumsily cavorts beside her in a quite different rhythm. In the final section, folk melodies are again in evidence. An exception is Petrushka’s motif, which appears for the last time. This binds together two tonalities: pure C major, confronted with the notes of F sharp major. Together, they result in a sarcastic dissonance.
The Parisian audiences were bowled over at the 1911 premiere. The success of Petrushka was greater even than for Firebird. It set the scene for the great failure of his next work, The Rite of Spring, although as we all know, this latter work did not suffer as a result of its adverse initial reception. As with most of his early works, Stravinsky revised Petrushka when living in the Unite States. This rewriting was principally because of the copyright problems, but essentially, the revision made no essential changes to the original music.