Petrushka

The ballet unfolds in four connected scenes, played without long pauses. First tableau, the Shrovetide fair: a bustling St. Petersburg carnival crowd is sketched in layered, colliding tunes, including a barrel organ and a jaunty street song, until a magician brings three puppets to life. Second tableau, Petrushka's room: the puppet-hero is trapped and heartbroken, expressed through the score's famous "Petrushka chord," two clashing keys played at once to suggest his split, uncomfortable existence. Third tableau, the Moor's room: a lumbering, exoticized dance for the vain, brutish Moor puppet, interrupted when the Ballerina puppet arrives to a jaunty trumpet tune. Fourth tableau, the fair toward evening: the opening crowd music returns, bigger and busier, with a coachmen's dance and a masqueraders' scene, until the Moor chases down and kills Petrushka in front of the horrified crowd. The ending is deliberately ambiguous, a solo trumpet call suggesting Petrushka's ghost is somehow more alive than the humans around him. Listen for the constantly shifting meters, the sleigh bells, and how melodies from the street fair keep interrupting each other, never quite resolving into one another.

Stravinsky wrote Petrushka in 1910 and 1911 for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, initially conceiving it as a concert piece for piano and orchestra before Diaghilev persuaded him to turn it into a ballet. It tells the story of three puppets, Petrushka, a Ballerina, and a Moor, who are brought to life by a magician at a Shrovetide fair in St. Petersburg and become caught in a tragic love triangle. The ballet premiered in Paris in 1911, choreographed by Michel Fokine with Vaslav Nijinsky dancing the title role, and was an immediate success. Stravinsky later revised the score in 1947, partly to secure copyright and partly to slightly reduce the very large original orchestra, and this revised version is the one most often heard in concert halls today.