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Kratt (1943)
Kratt is a four-act Estonian ballet with a score by Eduard Tubin, first staged on 31 March 1943 at the Vanemuine Theatre, with a libretto by Elfriede Saarik. It is described as the first Estonian ballet, built entirely on Estonian folk tunes, and it holds a fixed place in Estonian cultural memory because a later performance was interrupted by the Soviet bombing of Tallinn.
What is danced
The article does not describe choreography, steps, or named dances within the ballet, and it records no choreographer at all — this entry should be read as a musical and historical record more than a movement record. What can be said is structural: the work runs to four acts and its score is 'entirely based on folk tunes,' which points to an Estonian ballet built from folk-derived material rather than the standard classical-ballet vocabulary of mime, adagio and divertissement. The article's comparison to Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is offered as a characterization of the score/ballet's aesthetic lineage (folk material treated with modernist, primitivist force), not as a description of specific danced movement, so it cannot be used here as evidence of actual steps or technique used on stage.
Context
Tubin began work on Kratt in 1938, within an independent Estonia building a national theatrical repertoire, and produced a second version in 1940–1941 as Estonia passed under Soviet and then German occupation during the war. The 1943 premiere at the Vanemuine Theatre in Tartu placed a folk-tune-based, allegedly Rite of Spring-influenced work at the center of a fledgling national ballet tradition at a moment of extreme political instability. Tubin later revised the ballet again in 1960, after he had emigrated to Sweden, indicating the work stayed with him as an ongoing project across a career that spanned Estonian independence, occupation, and exile.
Staging history
The ballet premiered on 31 March 1943 at the Vanemuine Theatre. It is best documented for a later performance at the Estonia Theatre, which was underway when the Soviet March 1944 bombing of Tallinn began; the theatre was evacuated and then heavily damaged. Tubin returned to the work twice more after the original 1938 conception, producing a second version in 1940–1941 and a third in 1960, but the article gives no detail on which companies or choreographers staged these later versions.
How to watch it
Listen for the folk-tune basis of the score across all four acts — the article frames this as the ballet's defining musical feature rather than an incidental touch. Approach any staging with awareness that no choreographer is credited in the historical record used here, so the movement vocabulary you see reflects a particular production's choices rather than a fixed, authored choreographic tradition tied to the piece.
Credits
- composer: Eduard Tubin