Petrushka, along with The Firebird and The Rite of Spring, is one of the three innovative ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev that were composed by Igor Stravinsky during his ‘Russian’ period. Nicknamed a man of a thousand faces by his contemporaries, Stravinsky revealed his neo-folklorist face in Petrushka; in collaboration with the artist and librettist Alexandre Benois, he courageously brought a motley street crowd, complete with a magician and his puppets, merchants, gypsies, cabbies, and mummers, onto the ballet stage.

Even more important, however, was that Stravinsky showed the world that fairground entertainment is not alien to classical music. His audiences now heard popular and folk genres from a new perspective, including street cries, the sound of the hurdy-gurdy, accordion tunes, and melodies of well-known folk songs, including archetypal Vdol po Piterskoy (Down the Peterskaya); Ah Vy Seni, Moi Seni (Ah you, inner porch), and Ah Sneg Tayet (The snow is melting). The scenes of the Maslenitsa or Mardi Gras festivities in St. Petersburg in the 19th century were portrayed so colourfully that Benois described the work as a ballet of the streets; it was also his idea to resurrect the spirit of Petrushka in the finale, as a recognition of Petrushka’s longing for personal happiness and assertion of self-worth.

The musicologist Boris Asafiev believed that a concert performance of this ballet would give the listener’s imagination much more food for thought than any staged production.