Marius Petipa

Born in France in 1818, Petipa danced his way to Russia and by 1871 held the top post at the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres, a perch he kept until 1903. Over those years he created more than fifty ballets - The Pharaoh's Daughter in 1862, Don Quixote in 1869, La Bayadère in 1877, then the trio that hardened into canon: The Sleeping Beauty in 1890, The Nutcracker with Lev Ivanov in 1892, Raymonda in 1898. He also revived and reset works by others - Giselle, Le Corsaire, Swan Lake - and those revivals became the versions that survived him. When he died in 1910 at ninety-two, individual pas de deux from his ballets had already split off and started touring the world on their own, small pieces of a system he'd spent a lifetime building.