Les Millions d’Arlequin

Critical Edition

Several members of the group are preparing the critical choreographic edition of Les Millions d’Arlequin, a ballet by Marius Petipa first staged at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg in 1900. The project aims to restore the original choreographic score, aligning its steps with Riccardo Drigo’s music. The choreographic and musical texts to be transcribed as the base edition are those actually performed in Saint Petersburg, in a version as close as possible to the premiere. Given the surviving sources, it is not possible to reconstruct the exact debut performance; however, the edition will reproduce the version of a revival dating approximately between two and fourteen years after the première, and therefore still quite close to it.

At present, the witnesses useful for the critical edition are the handwritten choreographic scores in Stepanov notation preserved in the Nikolai Sergeev Collection at Harvard University’s Houghton Library (MS Thr 245, 52). As for the musical sources, the principal witnesses are the piano reduction (Zimmermann, Leipzig, St. Petersburg, Moscow, 1901) and Riccardo Drigo’s handwritten répétiteur, kept in the private collection of Michele Armelin in Padua (Fondo Riccardo Drigo, box 10, folder 57) and now published in photostatic reproduction (Armelin Musica, Padua 2022).

Choreographic Section

Matteo Ferraresso (University of Padua)

Stefania Onesti (University of Siena)

Silvia Zanta (University of Padua)

Parte musicale

Giulio Andreetta (University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain)

Caterina Piccione (Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna)

Stage Reconstruction

On May 11, 2024, at the Accademia Nazionale di Danza in Rome, a reconstruction of the third scene was presented, the outcome of the workshop carried out with the students of the Second Classical Biennium, sections A and B: Claudia Bevivino, Eleonora Di Saverio, Adriana Donnarumma, Sofia Emovilli, Iole Galbusera, Federica Maira, Giulia Marchese, Dalila Marino, Alessia Martino, Chiara Parlati, Alesia Perja, and Simona Rotolo.