Stravinsky, Petrushka

One must always bear in mind that Petrushka is a ballet, and that hearing it in concert form instead of seeing a staged production is like listening to vocal music without paying attention to the words. Such repackaging of a musical work often bring with it a series of questions like, “Is Petrushka without the ballet still Petrushka?” or more fundamentally, “What is Petrushka?”

Unlike a painting or a sculpture, a musical work is not a physical object. It is intangible by nature and therefore its essence cannot be pinned down. This elusive quality creates endless possibilities in music, and what the repackaging does is to focus one’s attention onto certain aspects of the work and leaving out the material that is consequently inessential. This can mean preserving the musical narrative and shedding the pantomime, or even forgetting the musical narrative and to present only the extracts that define Petrushka in terms of the orchestra colours.

This recalibration of emphasis is not exclusive to the Petrushka scenario but is in fact at the heart of every musical performance, albeit in a less conspicuous manner – in other words, this is but a form of interpretation. Because music is a non-figurative artform, there is a lot of ambiguity when a message is passed from the composer to the musicians and then from the musicians to the listeners. For example, Stravinsky said that Petrushka’s calling card (arpeggios of C major and F-sharp major stacked upon each other) is a rude gesture made by the puppet to the audience, but at the same time it can also be a musical idea of charm and novelty; looking at the second and third scenes, we can treat them as portrayals of three distinct characters, or as a sequence of unrelated pictures like Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, or indeed anything that catches our imagination. The notion as to whether Stravinsky intended the music to be subservient to the ballet’s plot is irrelevant here – as long as we remain attentive to the structural devices of the music, then we can come up with our own impression of the work.

(For the benefit of members of the audience who would like to hear the work in an authentic manner, the plot of the ballet is as follows:

Scene I: The Shrove-tide fair. Alternations between close-ups of various activities and the general festive atmosphere of the carnival. The Magician is introduced halfway through by drumrolls and he brings to life the three puppets – Petrushka, the Moor and the Ballerina.

Scene II: Petrushka’s room. Petrushka tries to impress the Ballerina but to no avail.

Scene III: The Moor’s room. Whilst the Ballerina dances with the Moor, Petrushka is caught eavesdropping and has a quarrel with the Moor.

Scene IV: The Shrove-tide fair. The Carnaval continues into the evening but the dancing is interrupted by Petrushka’s shriek from the theatre. He rushes out with the Moor chasing behind him. The Moor catches up and strikes him down. The Magician learns of Petrushka’s fate and comes to take the corpse back to his theatre. Petrushka’s ghost then appears above the theatre and the horrified Magician drops the corpse and hurries off.)