Marius Petipa

Marius Petipa (1818–1910) was a French dancer and choreographer who became the pre-eminent ballet master of the Russian Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg, where he worked for over sixty years. Born in Marseilles into a dancing family, he performed in Paris and Madrid before arriving in St Petersburg in 1847. He was appointed Principal Ballet Master of the Imperial Ballet in 1871, a position he held until 1903. His collaboration with composers Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Léo Delibes, and with his assistant Lev Ivanov, produced the great monuments of the classical ballet repertoire: Swan Lake (1895, with Ivanov), The Sleeping Beauty (1890), and The Nutcracker (1892, with Ivanov), as well as La Bayadère (1877), Don Quixote (1869, Moscow), Le Corsaire (various versions), and Raymonda (1898). The vocabulary of movement, the structural principles of the divertissement, and the formal architecture of the classical pas de deux that he codified remain the foundation of classical ballet training and performance worldwide.