Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka is a ballet about a puppet who longs to become human —and discovers that having a human heart can mean having human sorrows. Yet beneath its bittersweet story lies one of the most dazzling scores of the early 20th century, a work in which Stravinsky transformed the sounds of the Russian fairground into a revolutionary orchestral language.

After a 1920 concert performance of Petrushka, New York Times critic Olin Downes concluded that “the score is a marvel of genius, genius which creates with the certainty and recklessness and prodigality of inspiration.” He drew attention especially to the music’s vitality, humor, and “the extraordinary originality of both harmony and instrumentation.”

The ballet premiered in Paris in 1911, with choreography by Michel Fokine and the famed Vaslav Nijinsky dancing in the title role. The scenario centers on a Shrovetide fair in St. Petersburg, where a magician brings three puppets to life: Petrushka, the Ballerina, and the Moor. Petrushka falls desperately in love with the Ballerina, but she prefers the more powerful Moor.

Their triangular drama ultimately ends in Petrushka’s death, after which his ghost appears above the puppet theater.

Stravinsky’s music vividly evokes the fair: street cries, dances, barrel organs, marching bands and the bustle of a carnival crowd. He juxtaposes fragments of popular melodies with startling harmonies and sharply contrasting instrumental colors.

The ballet’s emotional world is more complex than its colorful surface suggests. Petrushka is comic, awkward and absurd, but also vulnerable and capable of genuine feeling. His tragedy arises from the cruel gap between what he wants to be and what the world allows him to be.

Petrushka was part of the extraordinary sequence of Stravinsky ballets that began with The Firebird and continued with The Rite of Spring. But unlike the primitive violence of The Rite, Petrushka finds its modernism in the combination of the sophisticated and the popular, the comic and the tragic, the human and the artificial. Its puppets may be made of straw, but Stravinsky gives them remarkably human souls.

© 2026 Paul Hyde

Paul Hyde, a longtime arts journalist, is an English instructor at Tri-County Technical College in South Carolina. He writes regularly for the Washington Post, Greenville Journal, the S.C. Daily Gazette, ArtsATL, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Readers may write to him at pah598@g.harvard.edu.