Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg offers fascinating new looks at five classic story ballets: Giselle (1841), Paquita (1846), Le Corsaire (1856), La Bayadère (1877), and Raymonda (1898), drawing on a treasure trove of manuscripts that offer explicit written information about how many nineteenth-century ballets were performed in their earliest incarnations. Bursting with details forgotten for more than a century, these manuscripts bring the ballets to life by disclosing steps, floor patterns, and mime conversations as well as valuable insight into how the music helped create the drama.

Generously enriched with more than 50 images and more than 350 musical examples, the book also includes, in appendices, English translations of seven French and Russian librettos. Emerging from the plenteous new findings in this book is a fresh portrait of a living, breathing art form with strong audience appeal. Simply put, Five Ballets fills huge gaps in dance history, inviting both general readers and specialists to rethink the usual narratives about nineteenth-century ballet, its music, characters, and choreographies, its depictions of Others and Elsewhere, and the careers of its major choreographers. It also offers a rich resource to practitioners seeking to learn how the makers of these five classic ballets found such great success.