The kind and fascinating tale of the French storyteller Charles Perrault is well known not only to every adult, but also to every child. In its plot, films were made, performances were staged, cartoons were created, and, of course, ballet was staged. After all, the dance extravaganza itself is an amazing fairy tale. So who was the author of the ballet "Cinderella"?
Remembering the plot
The literary basis of any dance performance is a specially written libretto. For the fairy tale "Cinderella" it was performed by Nikolai Volkov.
If you recall the story of Cinderella in the authorship of Perrault, then the girl's father was a widower and married a second time. The stepmother disliked her stepdaughter, humiliated and insulted her in every possible way, kept her in a "black body", starved her, forced her to do work beyond the scope of an ordinary person, even beat her. But more often than not she manipulated Cinderella’s love for her father: she insulted him, threatened to expel him from the house. Cinderella was very sorry for her father, and therefore she tried in every possible way to serve the stepmother and her two relatives, very wayward, evil and selfish daughters. However, the tale does not describe the scene with which the ballet begins. In it, Cinderella does homework.
Longing for mother, she takes out her portrait. The portrait of the stepmother covers with a cloth. An angry woman breaks her anger at the girl. At the time of a quarrel, a beggar appears on the scene and asks for alms. Everyone turns away from her except Cinderella. Later we will see that the poor is the godmother of Cinderella - a kind sorceress, capable of reincarnations. In Perrault's tale, she does not appear as a beggar. The first time we encounter her is right after the stepmother and her daughters depart for the palace.
In the gathering scene for the ball, we will also find differences. According to the plot of the tale, Cinderella must sew three elegant dresses for her stepmother and sisters in a short time. And then help them directly in the fees for the ball. At the same time, except for the stepmother, her daughters and Cinderella, no one else was present. Tailors, and hairdressers, and musicians, and dance masters attended the ballet at the ballroom training camp. And when the godmother collects Cinderella for the ball, only her pupil helps her in the fairy tale, and in the ballet - many helpers.
You can continue the detailed comparison of the stories yourself. And our task is to find out who the author of the ballet "Cinderella" is. And a representative of what profession can be considered them.
So who is the author of the ballet Cinderella?
To understand, let's turn to the lexical meaning of the word "author". Dictionaries offer us several meanings. Firstly, it is any person whose creative work created a work. Secondly, it is the creator of creation in any form of art. Thus, the author of the ballet can be a libretrist, stage director, composer. Of course, a large role is assigned to the latter.
Based on the foregoing, we have already called the creator of the libretto. The author-composer of the ballet "Cinderella" is Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev.
But the choreographers can be called several, since there are many options for the stage embodiments of the play. In the classical version, Vakhtang Chabukiani performed the initial production of the ballet in the first, pre-war stage, and Konstantin Sergeyev in the second, post-war stage. But the performance was presented to the public for the first time in the production of Rostislav Vladimirovich Zakharov. It happened in Moscow, at the Bolshoi Theater.
Five months later, the original version was demonstrated at the Mariinsky Opera and Ballet Theater. Kirov, but the classic version in the history of ballet is still the production of Rostislav Zakharov.
Author - composer
How do they usually answer the question of who wrote the ballet Cinderella? “The author is Prokofiev,” say ballet connoisseurs. And really. The composer is perhaps the most important person in creating a dance piece.
The author of the music of the ballet "Cinderella" S. S. Prokofiev created it in the tradition of a classic fairy tale performance, very romantic and lyrical. During the development of the plot, he used a large set of classical ballroom dances: gavotte, waltz, gallop, mazurka. Moreover, there are several waltzes during the performance. The most famous of them is the "Big". In the practice of symphonic music, it is used as an independent instrumental work.
Ballet music is “speaking” and “illustrative”. For example, in a scene with a clock, using an even tempo and repeating chords, an image of the passing time is created. Prokofiev in "Cinderella" became the successor of the "ballet storyteller", the patriarch of the Russian ballet Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
So different and so traditional Cinderella
The productions of many musical theaters at different times carried out their own versions of the famous production. Traditionally, the musical and scriptual basis of the performance has not changed. Only the authors of the ballet Cinderella changed.
Since 1964, in the Great Hall of the Conservatory of St. Petersburg, the ballet Cinderella has been staged by the famous Oleg Vinogradov, who began at that time as a choreographer. The premiere of the performance took place on the stage of the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theater. This version of the famous ballet is a reflection on talent and mediocrity, beauty and ugliness, spirituality and inner emptiness.
In 2016, a new version of Cinderella directed by Alexei Miroshnichenko was presented in Perm. He suffered all the action in the 1950s, where he spoke about the first version of the ballet at the Bolshoi Theater of Moscow.
But in the contemporary production of Kirill Simonov, the Musical Theater of Karelia presented its viewer with a very tragic reading of a story that plunges into the atmosphere of the 1930s and 40s, when Sergei Prokofiev wrote music for an immortal performance. Simonov is sure that it reflected the author’s difficult experiences, based on personal tragedy, as well as the expectation of war, which hung invisibly around.