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Pétrouchka was the first ballet on a Russian theme to be created jointly by composer Igor Stravinsky, choreographer Mikhail Fokine and artist Alexander Benois. Made for Sergei Diaghilev’s third Saiso...
Die Puppenfee was first staged in Russia in 1897. This one-act ballet was originally created by brothers Nikolai and Sergei Legat and staged across Europe. to the music of Josef Bayer. Die Puppenfee ...
Mikhail Fokine’s one-act ballet L’Oiseau de feu, set to the music of Igor Stravinsky, was premiered in Paris in 1910. Léon Bakst designed the costumes of the Firebird and Princess Unearthly Beauty, w...
Molière’s comedy Dom Juan ou le festin de pierre was the first and most famous collaboration between Alexander Golovin and Vsyevolod Meyerhold for the Imperial Theatres. The director and designer rec...
In 1903, Alexander Benois conceived the idea for a romantic ballet-pantomime based on Théophile Gautier’s novella Omphale. At the start of the 1900s, he and the other members of the World of Art rega...
Mikhail Fokine ’s mimodrama-ballet La Légende de Joseph opened Sergei Diaghilev’s sixth Saison Russe in Paris in 1914. The Austrian composer Richard Strauss composed the music at the request of Diagh...
Léon Bakst’s first theatrical commission was the sets and costumes for a production of Clément Léo Délibes’s ballet Sylvia, designed in collaboration with Yevgeny Lanceray, Konstantin Korovin and Val...
After listening to Mily Balakirev ’s piano fantasy Islamey (1869), orchestrated by Sergei Lyapunov, Mikhail Fokine was inspired to create a ballet based on the motifs of the Arabian Nights. The balle...
The Mikhailovsky Theatre enjoyed a happy fate in the twentieth century, occupying a special place in the cultural life of Petrograd, Leningrad and St Petersburg. At one point intended to be a “labora...
On 6 March 1918, a performance of Gioachino Rossini’s comic opera Il barbiere di Siviglia was given in the premises of the former Mikhailovsky Theatre, which had been abandoned by the French company ...