Fokine may have been influenced by other ballets about life-size animated dolls such as "Coppelia" (1870), "Arlekinada" ("Les Millions d'Arlequin"), and "Fairy Doll" (1903). Some moments and scenes in "Arlekinada" presage similar ones in "Petrushka". Fokine's most revolutionary gestures in "Petrushka" are the demotion of virtuoso star roles to character roles, and the elimination of classical ballet's narrative introduction, "white" act, obligatory virtuoso dances for the stars, and divertissement. The solo moments for The Moor and Petrushka are basically mime, and, without her own scene, The Ballerina has no solo.
Fokine used Russian national dance forms in a fragmentary fashion for the various characters in the crowd. Fokine complained that the crowd was insufficiently rehearsed, Nijinsky complained that movement for the crowd was never really choreographed but was left for the dancers to improvise, and Benois complained that Diaghilev would not spend the money necessary to realize certain effects. Kirstein writes, "The metaphor of manipulated automata remains poeticallty powerful, now haloed in the nostalgia of many period memoirs. Did Benois see Diaghelev as the charlatan Showman? Was Nijinsky typecast as Petrouchka?"
Vaslav Nijinsky was born in Kiev, Russia in 1889 or 1890. His parents were Polish dancers. He went to the Imperial Ballet school in 1900. He studied under Cecchetti. He rose through the ranks. He partnered Anna Pavlov, Mathilde Kschessinska, and Tamara Karsavina. He met impresario Serge Diaghilev and the two became lovers. Nijinsky left the Imperial Ballet to join Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.
Nijinsky was famous for losing himself in a character. He transformed his Slavic features, his athletic physique, his virtuoso technique, and his classical discipline into one of the most moving portraits in the ballet repertoire that of a sad puppet with jerking, awkward movements.
He had difficulty understanding the character in rehearsal and asked Benois for guidance. On the night of performance however, Nijinsky's superhuman understanding of character transformed him into the puppet. Benois wrote, "The metamorphosis took place when he put on his costume and covered his face with make-up I was surprised at the courage Vaslav showed, after all his "jeune premier" successes, in appearing as a horrible half-doll, half-human grotesque. The great difficulty of Petrushka's part is to express his pitiful oppression and his hopeless efforts to achieve personal dignity without ceasing to be a puppet. Both music and libretto are spasmodically interrupted by outbursts of illusive joy and frenzied despair. The artist is not given a single "pas" or "fioriture" to enable him to be attractive to the public, and one must remember that Nijinsky was then quite a young man and the temptation to be "attractive to the public" must have appealed to him far more strongly than to an older artist."
American dance critic Carl Van Vechten describes Nijinsky's Petrushka: "He is a puppet and remarkable touch a puppet with a soul. His performance in this ballet is, perhaps, his most wonderful achievement. He suggests only the puppet in action; his facial expression never changes; yet the pathos is greater, more keenly carried over the footlights, than one would imagine possible under any conditions. I have seen Fokine in the same role, and although he gives you all the gestures the result is not the same. It is genius that Nijinsky puts into his interpretation of the part. Who can ever forget Nijinsky as Petrushka when thrown by his master into his queer black box, mad with love for the dancer, who, in turn, prefers the Moor puppet, rushing about waving his pathetically stiff arms in the air, and finally beating his way with his clenched fists through the paper window to curse the stars? It is a more poignant expression of grief than most Romeos can give us."
"Petrushka" was first performed by the Ballets Russes in Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 13 June 1911. Nijinsky portrayed Petrushka, Tamara Karsavina The Ballerina, Alexandre Orlov The Moor, and Enrico Cecchetti The Charlatan. Pierre Monteux conducted.
Fokine revived the ballet in 1925 for the Royal Danish Ballet, and again for Ballet Theatre in October 1942. The Royal Ballet revived the work on 26 March 1957 with Alexander Grant, Margot Fonteyn and Peter Clegg. Rudolph Nureyev danced Petrushka with the Royal Ballet in 1963.
The ballet was first performed in the United States by the Ballets Russes at the Century Theatre in New York City on 25 January 1916 with Leonide Massine in the title role. The Joffrey Ballet revived the work in New York City on 13 March 1970, and the American Ballet Theater revived it on 19 June 1970 at the New York State Theater.
Tableau I: The Shrovetide Fair
Tableau II: Petrushka's Room
Tableau III: The Moor's Room
Tableau IV: The Shrovetide Fair (Toward Evening)
Blackbody radiation
Blackbody radiation is radiation produced by heated objects, particularly from a blackbody. A blackbody is an object that absorbs all radiation (visible light, infrared light, ultraviolet light, etc.) that falls on it. This also means that it will also radiate at all frequencies that heat energy produces in it.
Everything glows, depending on its temperature. Hotter things glow more in shorter wavelengths. Cooler things don't glow so much, especially in short wavelengths. Partly the radiation wavelength depends on what the material is, and partly it doesn't. The part that only depends on temperature, and not on composition, is called blackbody radiation.
This part of the story of radiation was first explained by James Clerk Maxwell via wave theory but the predicted and actual intensity vs. frequency curves did not go together right. At higher frequencies classical physics predicted that more and more energy would be radiated from the body until the energy became infinite. This broke the first law of thermodynamics which is a fundamental part of all physics. This was called the ultraviolet catastrophe.
When it was realised that classical physics did not work for blackbody radiation, the German physicist Max Planck explained their relationship by saying that there are individual things (he did not try to guess what kind of things) that vibrate, each at its frequency. Each wave of each frequency has its special energy level. A single x-ray is very high photon energy and can go right through the human body.
A single wave or photon of infrared light is very low energy, cannot go through the human body, and can only warm it. Planck's good thinking was to realize that to get a single wave at the x-ray frequency, it was necessary to have a big enough package of energy (or "quantum") to make such a strong wave. So if a blackbody took in a single wave at the x-ray frequency, then it could give off an x-ray at some later time. But if the blackbody only took in infra-red light it would not matter how much of it was absorbed.
It could only give off infrared light and could not give off even ordinary red light, much less any higher energy light such as ultraviolet light or x-ray radiation. Planck said that the total energy given off by a blackbody at any particular frequency is equal to the number of the "vibrating things" (see above), n, that was vibrating at a given frequency, f times a special constant, h, that turns frequency units into energy units. The equation is:
The constant he made, h, is called the Planck constant.
The idea that a unit of light at a given frequency always has the same energy, the idea that there is a quantum of energy for each unit of light at a given frequency, became the doorway into quantum mechanics, so the idea of a blackbody is something that is basic to modern physics. It shows up in discussions of a wide variety of physics topics having to do with energies and frequencies.
Sputnik 1