Konstantin Korovin — http://gallerix.ru/album/Korovin/pic/glrx-1145585404 · Public domain

The Little Humpbacked Horse

This is the founding Russian-subject ballet of the Imperial stage: a four-act, eight-scene fairytale ballet with apotheosis, made by Arthur Saint-Léon to a score by Cesare Pugni, telling how Ivan the fool wins the Tsar Maiden with the help of a magic horse and ends up Tsar himself. It premiered with the Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg on 15 December 1864, with Marfa Muravyova as the Tsar Maiden; the article records that the planned Ivanushka, Timofey Stukolkin, broke his leg before opening and was replaced by an inexperienced dancer, Nikolay Troitsky.

What is danced

The article's clearest dance information concerns the ballet's folk-dance content rather than its classical vocabulary: Saint-Léon staged 'overall 22 Russian folk dances,' inventing much of the material himself (including an 'Ural dance') because, as a French choreographer, he was not deeply versed in genuine Russian folk dancing. This drew fire from critics such as Saltykov-Shchedrin and Nekrasov, who called it a parody of Russian dance rather than the real thing, even as it delighted audiences and spawned a wave of Russian-style Imperial ballets.

The work closes with a large-scale set piece: a Grand divertissement 'celebrating all the different nations of Russia,' opening with a Grand cortège danced to a march titled 'The Peoples of Russia,' and including Saint-Léon's own balletic treatment of Russian national dance. Petipa's 1895 restaging (as The Tsar Maiden) added a new prologue and apotheosis plus extra bravura variations for Pierina Legnani, composed by Riccardo Drigo — pointing to added classical display work for the ballerina, though the article does not describe its steps.

Beyond this, the article gives no scene-by-scene breakdown of steps, partnering, or technique, so no specific classical-ballet vocabulary (pointe work, mime conventions, pas de deux structure) can be verified from it directly.

Context

Made for the Imperial Ballet in 1864, this was, per the article, the first ballet built on a Russian story, arriving in a period when the St Petersburg company was dominated by imported French and Italian choreographers and largely Western subject matter. Its attempt to fold Russian folk material into an Imperial classical framework provoked an immediate split in critical opinion and, according to the article, set off two divergent lines of development — a more classical St Petersburg performance tradition and a Moscow tradition (crystallized by Sokolov's 1876 restaging) that leaned on genuine Russian folk dance — which the article says persisted as distinct 'schools' of Russian ballet into the 1930s.

Staging history

The ballet moved from St Petersburg to the Moscow Imperial troupe in 1866, with Saint-Léon himself restaging it there (Pugni revised his score) with Muravieva and Stukolkin again in the leads. José Mendez revived it in Moscow in 1893; Marius Petipa remounted it in St Petersburg in 1895 as The Tsar Maiden with Drigo's musical revisions and new bravura material for Pierina Legnani. Alexander Gorsky produced new stagings in Moscow (1901) and St Petersburg (1912), the latter revived by Lopukhov for the Kirov in 1945. In 1960 Alexander Radunsky made an entirely new choreographic version to a new score by Rodion Shchedrin for the Bolshoi (filmed in 1961 with Maya Plisetskaya and Vladimir Vasiliev), and Igor Belsky used the same Shchedrin score for a separate staging in Leningrad in 1963.

How to watch it

Watch for the tension the article itself flags: which passages read as genuine folk dance and which as a choreographer's invented idea of it, since contemporaries accused Saint-Léon of parody rather than ethnography. In the Petipa version, watch for the added prologue, apotheosis, and the bravura variations built for Legnani, distinct from Saint-Léon's original structure; the closing Grand divertignement of 'the different nations of Russia' is the ballet's largest set piece and worth attending to as a period showcase of national-character dance within an Imperial narrative ballet.

Credits

composer: Cesare Pugni

Related works

Other staged works in the register connected to this one by author or lineage.

Questions

Is this the same ballet as Rodion Shchedrin's Little Humpbacked Horse?

No — the article notes that in 1960 Shchedrin composed an entirely new score and Alexander Radunsky created new choreography for the Bolshoi Ballet, a separate work from Saint-Léon's 1864 original, though on the same story.

Why did the ballet's original 1864 cast change at the last minute?

Timofey Stukolkin, cast as Ivanushka, broke his leg before the premiere and was replaced by Nikolay Troitsky, who according to the article had no prior experience dancing principal roles.

Is The Tsar Maiden a different ballet from The Little Humpbacked Horse?

It is the title Marius Petipa used for his 1895 St Petersburg restaging of the same Saint-Léon/Pugni ballet, with a new prologue, apotheosis, and additional variations by Riccardo Drigo for Pierina Legnani.

This entry was written from “The Little Humpbacked Horse (ballet)” on English Wikipedia (revision 1352271783), used under CC BY-SA 4.0. The link points at the exact revision this text was written from, so it shows the words we actually used rather than whatever the article says today. Credits and premiere data come from Wikidata (CC0), cited per field.

← Back to Limelight