Anna Pavlova

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Anna Pavlova. (credit: Culver Pictures)

(born Feb. 12, 1881, St. Petersburg, Russia — died Jan. 23, 1931, The Hague, Neth.) Russian ballet dancer. She studied at the Imperial Ballet School from 1891 and joined the Mariinsky Theatre company in 1899, becoming prima ballerina in 1906. In 1913 she left Russia to tour with her own company, which showcased her outstanding performances in classical ballets such as Giselle; the most famous numbers were a succession of short solos such as The Dying Swan, choreographed for her by Michel Fokine. Her tours took ballet to audiences in many countries for the first time and did much to popularize ballet worldwide.

For more information on Anna Pavlovna Pavlova, visit Britannica.com.

Anna Pavlova (1881-1931) was in her time - and is perhaps even now - the most famous dancer in the world. From her early classical training at St. Petersburg's Imperial Ballet School, Pavlova carried on incessant, globe-covering tours, everywhere making new audiences for the ballet.

Anna Pavlova, whose exact origins are as unfixable as the startling images she created on stage, was born on January 31, 1881, in St. Petersburg. She was the daughter of a washerwoman, and reputedly her father was reserve soldier Matvey Pavlov, whom Pavlova never knew. The implication exists, however, of illegitimate and well-born Jewish parentage.

According to Pavlova, she cared to be nothing but a dancer from the age of eight, when she attended a performance of The Sleeping Beauty at the Maryinsky Theatre. Two years later she was accepted as a student at St. Petersburg's Imperial Ballet School. This extraordinary training-ground for classical dancers offered its students lifelong material protection; the Czar himself was its direct and highly visible benefactor. In return, the school demanded a fervent and almost monastic physical dedication.

The young Pavlova, considered frail - she was often characterized as too thin later in her career - and not conventionally beautiful, was nevertheless exceptionally supple, with beautifully arched insteps. Her talents impressed ballet master Marius Petipa, who was to become her most revered mentor. Pavlova's work with Petipa, as well as such other legendary Maryinsky teachers and choreographers as Christian Johanssen, Pavel Gerdt, and Enrico Cecchetti, provided a classical foundation, steeped in directly-inherited ballet tradition, that was to serve as her never-to-be-forgotten physical and artistic heritage.

Pavlova made her company debut at the Maryinsky on September 19, 1899. Competition from her contemporaries and near-contemporaries was marked, yet Anna Pavlova soon claimed as her own a loyal sector of Maryinsky balletomanes, who recognized in the young dancer an extraordinarily poetic and expressive quality.

Pavlova's first tour in what was to become a lifetime of innumerable performances for strange audiences (it is estimated that Anna Pavlova travelled over 400,000 miles in the pre-air-travel age and was seen by millions) was to Moscow in 1907. In February 1910, Pavlova, partnered by the brawny Moscow dancer Mikhail Mordkin, made her first appearance in America, at the Metropolitan Opera House. This tour was like countless others to come, in that most of the audiences had never before seen classical ballet in other than highly degenerate form. This was true even in cities such as Boston and Baltimore. There was simply no critical vocabulary for what it was that Pavlova did - all agreed exquisitely - on stage; writers were reduced to calling Pavlova's faultless pirouettes "twirls" and the ballets themselves "ocular operas."

Although these early tours were undertaken with the Czar's consent, Pavlova's final trip to Russia occurred in the summer of 1914. She was travelling through Germany en route to London when Germany declared itself at war with her homeland on August 2, 1914. Pavlova was briefly detained; more crucially, her protection from and obligations to the Czar and his Maryinsky Theatre were practically, if not emotionally, at an end.

From this point until her death, Pavlova continued to make grueling, globe-covering tours, always with her own company - international in make-up, volatile, and variable in dance talent - to support. The early war years found her back in America; 1917 took her to South America; 1919 to Bahia and Salvador. A 1920-1921 tour to America represented Pavlova's fifth major tour of the United States in a decade, and in 1923 the company travelled under the aegis of impresario Sol Hurok to Japan, China, India, Burma, and Egypt. South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand were given a glimpse of Pavlova in 1926, and 1927-1928 were dedicated to a British and continental tour.

Although Pavlova's repertoire grew and was influenced by exposure to foreign cultures and by the often shocking innovations in classical technique and choreography being brought to the dance by Isadora Duncan and Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, she remained by temperament and financial imperative a more conservative classicist. She kept several of the great ballet classics, such as Giselle and The Sleeping Beauty, in the company's repertoire; her own popular signature pieces were the Bacchanale, a duet attributed to Pavlova's former fellow-student Mikhail Fokine, and her eerily beautiful The Swan.

It was Pavlova's ability to accept her role as emissary for her art, often with good humor and always with a kind of missionary zeal and self-discipline, that brought vast audiences to her and eventually to the ballet itself. She was willing to let her art find its own level of appreciation, whether in the most discriminating theaters of Europe or, when the economic stresses of maintaining an ungainly touring company dictated, in London's music halls or even New York's gigantic home to vaudeville, the Hippodrome.

Pavlova's rare private days were spent at Ivy House in Hampstead, London, where she kept a menagerie of exotic birds and animals - including a pair of pet swans that were undoubtedly a source of imagery for Pavlova's famous onstage version. Her companion, manager, and perhaps husband (Pavlova was contradictory concerning the exact nature of their relationship) was Victor Dandré, a fellow exile from St. Petersburg.

Pavlova died of pleurisy in The Hague on January 22, 1931. She had performed incessantly until her death; her final words were to ask for her Swan costume to be prepared and, finally, "Play that last measure softly."

Further Reading

Anna Pavlova: Her Life and Art (1982) by Keith Money is the most comprehensive and perhaps the most accurate biography of the dancer. John and Roberta Lazzarini's Pavlova (1980) gives a fine account of Pavlova's repertoire. Two books by Pavlova's associates are Victor Dandré's sometimes misleading but essential Anna Pavlova (1932) and Algeranoff's (born Algernon Harcourt Essex) My Years With Pavlova (1957), based on his diaries kept from 1921 to 1930, the years he was a member of Pavlova's company.

Additional Sources

Fonteyn, Margot, Dame, Pavlova: portrait of a dancer, New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking, 1984.

Pavlova, a biography, New York: Da Capo Press, 1979, 1956.

Lazzarini, John, Pavlova: repertoire of a legend, New York: Schirmer Books; London: Collier Macmillan, 1980.

Money, Keith, Anna Pavlova, her life and art, New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1982.

Anna Pavlova, New York: Dover Publications, 1974.

Pavlova, Anna (b St Petersburg, 12 Feb. 1881, d The Hague, 23 Jan. 1931). Russian dancer. The legendary ballerina of the 20th century. She trained at the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg from 1891, studying with Vazem, Gerdt, and Petipa. She graduated in 1899 and joined the Maryinsky Theatre, becoming ballerina in 1905 and prima ballerina in 1906, while still continuing her studies with Cecchetti in St Petersburg. Petipa was her champion: he cast her as Nikiya in his La Bayadère when she was still a coryphée in 1902. He followed that by casting her as Giselle the following year. In 1907 she created Fokine's Dying Swan, a brief but bewitching solo which was to become her most famous role. She created parts in Petipa's Les Saisons (1900), Harlequinade (1900), and The Magic Mirror (1903), Ivanov and Gerdt's Sylvia (1901), N. and S. Legat's The Fairy Doll (1903), Fokine's The Vine (1906), Pavillon d'Armide (Armide, 1907), Chopiniana (1907), Eunice (1907), and Egyptian Nights (1908). In 1908, dissatisfied with life at the Maryinsky, she began to tour abroad; she finally left the St Petersburg company in 1913. In 1909 she danced with Diaghilev's troupe in Paris; her final appearance with Diaghilev was in 1911 in London (she preferred the classical repertoire to Diaghilev's revolutionary modernist ballets). She danced in Berlin in 1909, New York and London in 1910. In 1911 she bought a house in London (Ivy House in Golders Green) and from there put together her own company which toured extensively, including to places which had never seen ballet before. Europe, N. and S. America, the Far East: Pavlova maintained her hectic touring schedule until 1929. She was the company's prima ballerina and her partners on tour included Mordkin, Novikov, Volinine, and Vladimiroff. It was through Pavlova's exhaustive touring that classical ballet gained a new international following. Her repertoire encompassed abbreviated versions of the classics, along with ballets by Fokine and Clustine and solos she choreographed herself. She created roles in Mordkin's The Legend of Aziade (1910) and Bacchanale (1910), Zaylich's Amarilla (1912), Fokine's The Three Palms (1913) and Les Préludes (1913), Clustine's La Péri (1917), Noir et blanc (1917), and The Romances of a Mummy (1924), and Romanov's The Champions (1928). Works she choreographed included Le Papillon (mus. Minkus, 1910), La Rose mourante (mus. Drigo, 1910), Blue Danube (mus. Strauss, 1911), Snowflakes (Tchaikovsky, 1911), The Magic Flute (mus. Drigo, 1913), Dragonfly (mus. Kreisler, 1915), California Poppy (mus. Tchaikovsky, 1916), Christmas (mus. Tchaikovsky, 1916), Autumn Leaves (mus. Chopin, 1919), and Masquerade (mus. Wurmser, 1926). An extraordinarily poetic dancer whose delicacy and grace transfixed audiences, she was the most famous ballerina in the world, and her performances inspired a whole new generation of dancers and choreographers (including Ashton, who saw her in Lima in 1917 while still a schoolboy). She gave her last performance in London in 1930 and died of pneumonia at the age of 50. She appeared in several films, including The Dumb Girl of Portici, a silent film made in Hollywood in 1915. In 1956 a film was released, entitled The Immortal Swan, which featured footage shot in the 1920s of Pavlova in The Dying Swan, Fairy Doll, Oriental Dance, Rose mourante, California Poppy, and Colombine. From 1912 she taught at her home in London.

(1881 - 1931), the most famous of Russian ballerinas.

Anna Matveyevna Pavlova (patronymic later changed to Pavlovna) began her career in the St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters in 1898, which ended amidst her usual flurry of performing in 1930, only weeks before her death. Pavlova's rise to the rank of ballerina in the Imperial Theaters (by 1906) was rapid, though her artistic breakthrough came the following year, when she appeared in several short works choreographed by Michel Fokine. Two of these works (Les Sylphides and Le Pavillon d'Armide) would join the roster of Serge Diagilev's Ballets Russes (as would their star performers, Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky). Both the ballets and dancers achieved unprecedented fame in that company's Paris season of 1909. Pavlova debuted another Fokine composition in St. Petersburg in 1908, a solo that would become her signature work and that remains strongly identified with her: The Swan, to music of Camille Saint-Saëns. Popularly known as the dying swan, this evanescent figure suited Pavlova's physical type and stage temperament. Pavlova excelled in ethereal, romantic roles such as "Giselle," and would later create for herself a multitude of roles in which she portrayed butterflies, roses, snowflakes, dragonflies, poppies, leaves, and various other delicate creatures. After achieving international stardom with Diagilev's Ballets Russes, Pavlova struck out on her own, first negotiating an enviable contract with the Imperial Theaters, and subsequently abandoning the Russian stage to settle in London. In twenty years of touring the globe, Pavlova came to personify the peripatetic Russian ballerina, the touring star whose only home was the stage.

Bibliography

Money, Keith. (1982). Pavlova: Her Art and Life. New York: Knopf.

—TIM SCHOLL

Quotes:

"No one can arrive from being talented alone. God gives talent; work transforms talent into genius."