Le Diable à quatre is a French Romantic-era ballet in two acts and three scenes (the article also notes a three-act version), choreographed by Joseph Mazilier to music by Adolphe Adam and a libretto by Adolphe de Leuven. It was first given by the Ballet of the Académie Royale de Musique on 11 August 1845, with Carlotta Grisi as Mazourka and Lucien Petipa as Count Polinski.
What is danced
The article does not supply a synopsis, scene-by-scene action, or any description of steps, holds, or technique, so no movement vocabulary can be responsibly attributed to specific passages of the work. What it does establish is form (two acts/three scenes, or alternatively three acts) and the identity of the creators and original principals, plus a fact of real interest to dancers: variations from Adam's score were later extracted and are now known independently as the male variation in the Paquita pas de trois (Minkus pas de trois) and the male variation in the Flower Festival in Genzano pas de deux. That detail tells us the score contained bravura solo material suited to virtuoso male variations, but it describes the afterlife of the music rather than the choreography of this ballet itself.
Context
The 1845 premiere sits in the high Romantic ballet period at the Paris Opéra, the same house and milieu that had produced Giselle four years earlier with the same composer, Adolphe Adam, and dancers drawn from the same generation (Lucien Petipa, brother of Marius Petipa, created the male lead here). Mazilier was one of the principal Paris Opéra ballet-masters of the 1840s, working alongside Perrot and the Petipa family in a period when Russian and other European houses were rapidly importing and re-choreographing Parisian successes.
Staging history
The work travelled quickly beyond Paris: Ekaterina Sankovskaya restaged it for the Moscow Imperial Bolshoi Theatre in December 1846, and Roman Turczynowicz mounted it in Warsaw in 1847 under the title Hrabina i wieśniaczka (The Countess and the Peasant), with Józef Stefani revising Adam's score. Jules Perrot expanded it to four acts/five scenes for the Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg in 1850, with Cesare Pugni extensively revising Adam's music; Marius Petipa then revived Perrot's version in 1885 under the title La femme capricieuse, with Ludwig Minkus further revising the score and the ballerina's role renamed from Mazourka to Countess Berta. In the twentieth century Ronald Hynd made a three-act revival (designs by Peter Docherty, score arranged by John Lanchbery) premiered by PACT Ballet South Africa in June 1984 and revived by Santiago Ballet Chile in October 1989; both productions won a Best Ballet Award for 1984–89.
How to watch it
Because the article gives no scene-level detail, a viewer encountering any staging should treat title and act structure (two acts/three scenes versus three or four acts in various revivals) as evidence of which lineage of revision is being performed — Mazilier's original, Perrot-Pugni's expansion, or Petipa-Minkus's La femme capricieuse. Listeners familiar with the Paquita pas de trois or Flower Festival in Genzano pas de deux may recognize borrowed melodic material if it survives in a given edition of the score, which is worth listening for as a link between this now-obscure ballet and pieces still in the standard repertory.
Credits
- composer: Adolphe Adam
Related works
Other staged works in the register connected to this one by author or lineage.
