Carnaval is a one-act, plotless ballet Michel Fokine built directly onto Robert Schumann's piano suite Carnaval, Op. 9, using an orchestration credited in the source to Glazunov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov and Tcherepnin rather than to Schumann alone. It has no narrative in the conventional sense: Fokine and designer Léon Bakst assembled a string of encounters among stock commedia dell'arte figures (Harlequin, Columbine, Pierrot, Pantalone) alongside characters standing for aspects of Schumann's own life and psyche — Florestan and Eusebius for his two natures, Estrella and Chiarina for the women he loved.
What it contains
- Classical Ballet · Throughout the ballet, across its run of small numbers among the gallant males, coquettish females, and six couples — Built from a sequence of formal partnered and solo academic ballet units — pas de deux, pas de trois and pas seuls — performed by Imperial Ballet-trained dancers, with the interpretive weight carried through carriage, gesture and interplay rather than bravura steps. Source: "Fokine devised numerous pas de deux, pas de trois and pas seuls."
- Classical Ballet — Harlequin solo · The Harlequin solo — The one number the source distinguishes from the ballet's otherwise 'almost simplistic' steps, implying a more technically demanding classical solo variation. Source: "if one looks at just the steps (except for the one Harlequin solo) they are almost simplistic"
What is danced
The article is explicit that the choreography itself is spare: 'if one looks at just the steps (except for the one Harlequin solo) they are almost simplistic.' What carried the ballet, according to this source, was not step vocabulary but the performers' ability to fill in 'lightness, gaiety, coyness, and self-absorption... combined with an underlying sadness' — qualities Fokine himself said could not be taught from outside the dancer. Structurally, the piece is built from a run of small-scale partnered and solo numbers: 'Fokine devised numerous pas de deux, pas de trois and pas seuls' for the gallant men, coquettish women, and the six light-hearted couples who tease, accept and reject one another across the ballroom ante-room set.
The one passage singled out for its steps rather than its acting is the Harlequin solo, danced in the original production by Leonid Leontiev and, in the Ballets Russes staging, by Fokine himself. Beyond that, the article gives no further breakdown of enchaînements, partnering holds, or floor pattern — this is a work whose documentary record foregrounds interpretation over technique, which the source itself frames as the central difficulty of reviving it.
Context
Carnaval was made in 1910 (per this source) for a single charity benefit and only afterward became a repertory piece — an origin the article frames as almost accidental, three rehearsals put together at the request of two young magazine men who gave Fokine free rein beyond a general 'carnival' theme. It entered the wider dance world through Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, which is how, per the article, it 'became world-famous.' Bakst's Biedermeier-style costumes and enclosing curtain set are described as central to the effect, deliberately making the dancers 'appear smaller' so the audience read the piece as a 'finely tuned miniature' rather than a grand spectacle — a scale and intimacy that sit apart from the large-cast imperial ballets of the preceding decades.
Staging history
According to the article, the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo revived the work in London under Woizikovsky's staging with Alexandra Danilova as Columbine, and the Vic-Wells Ballet staged it with Margot Fonteyn in the same role. The source also notes later reconstructions in England, Sweden and the United States, describing their results as inconsistent because the piece depends on qualities 'created from within each individual performer, not from externally imposed steps or gestures' — a problem Fokine himself is quoted raising in the 1930s, when he felt the coquettish female persona the ballet depends on no longer matched how women of the era carried themselves.
How to watch it
Watch the Harlequin solo as the one moment the article flags as technically substantive; everything else is built from small pas de deux, pas de trois and solo turns among named commedia and autobiographical characters rather than large ensemble architecture. Pay attention to how the Biedermeier set and costuming compress scale, and to the closing 'Marche des Davidsbündler contre les Philistines,' where the two lines of couples embody Schumann's own artistic camps — new art against philistine convention — as much through positioning and demeanor as through steps.
Structure
- Harlequin soloA solo for Harlequin, singled out in critical commentary as the one passage of technical substance in an otherwise deliberately simple choreographic scheme.
Structure read from an encyclopaedia article, not from a libretto or score we hold. Confirm against a programme before treating the numbering as authoritative.
Credits
- composer: Robert Schumann