1846–1930 · Russia
Riccardo Drigo (1846–1930) was an Italian composer and conductor who spent many years working in Saint Petersburg. He led the orchestra of the imperial ballet, conducted the premieres of Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, wrote the ballets The Talisman, The Magic Flute and The Millions of Harlequin, and prepared an edition of Swan Lake.
Riccardo Drigo was born in Padua in 1846. The boy's father, Silvio Drigo, practised law, and his mother, née Lupati, was active in politics. Nobody in the family had made a name in music, yet at five he began piano lessons with Antonio Jorich, a Hungarian friend of the household. He made rapid progress and, while still an adolescent, already had a local reputation as a pianist.
In the end his father let him enrol at the Venice Conservatory, where his teacher was Antonio Buzzolla, himself a pupil of Gaetano Donizetti. Still in his teens, Drigo began to compose, mostly romances and waltzes. In 1862 he got permission to perform several of his works with his home town's amateur orchestra, and that experience first stirred his interest in conducting. He graduated from the conservatory in 1864.
In Padua Drigo got his first post in an opera house, as rehearsal pianist and music copyist at the Garibaldi Theatre. His first chance to conduct arrived the night before a premiere, Costantino Dall'Argine's comic opera The Two Bears, when the theatre's chief conductor was taken ill. The concertmaster refused the baton and named Drigo, if only because the man who played at rehearsals would know the music inside out. Drigo's conducting was a success, and soon Drigo was named second kapellmeister.
In 1868 his first opera, Don Pedro di Portogallo, was staged in Padua. Over the following decade he won success on the best opera stages of Italy and, among other things, conducted several premieres of Wagner's operas at La Scala.
In 1878, while Padua's opera season was under way, Baron Karl Karlovich Kister, who ran the imperial theatres of Saint Petersburg, went to see Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore under Drigo's baton. The baron was struck that the conductor managed without a score. Drigo showed him some of his own compositions, and Kister offered him a six-month contract with the Imperial Italian Opera in Saint Petersburg.
Almost as soon as he arrived, Drigo was conducting the whole repertory of the Italian opera, which performed at the Mariinsky Theatre. The management was impressed that he conducted Verdi's Un ballo in maschera and Aida without a score in front of him. The newspapers reported every performance in detail, and they wrote about Drigo's appearances with praise. In 1884 Emperor Alexander III disbanded the Imperial Italian Opera, and Drigo, who had been its kapellmeister, found himself without a post.
In 1886 Alexei Papkov, who had served thirty-four years as kapellmeister of the imperial ballet, retired, and the director of the theatres chose Drigo to succeed him. Drigo first conducted a ballet in October 1886, Cesare Pugni's The Pharaoh's Daughter, the best-loved item in the company's repertoire. The emperor and Empress Maria Fyodorovna, both devoted ballet-lovers, were in the audience.
In 1886 too the staff ballet composer, the Austrian Ludwig Minkus, retired, and the director Ivan Vsevolozhsky abolished the post. Drigo was also known as a composer, so he was made kapellmeister and director of music, and at the ballet master's request he had to correct and adapt scores. When Marius Petipa revived La Esmeralda for the Italian ballerina Virginia Zucchi, Drigo refreshed Pugni's old music and wrote a four-part pas d'action with showy solo parts for the violin and the cello; the violin part was made especially for Leopold Auer. The revival was a great success, and this pas d'action is still part of the score and is often played separately as the La Esmeralda Pas de Six.
In 1889 Drigo took rooms at the Grand Hotel in Saint Petersburg, which remained his home for thirty years. It was then that he grew close to Tchaikovsky, who was writing The Sleeping Beauty. The day before the dress rehearsal Drigo became ill and requested that Tchaikovsky lead it himself, but the composer replied that he would spoil his own score, so the ailing Drigo agreed to take the rehearsal. Tchaikovsky remained grateful to him afterwards. Working with Petipa and Lev Ivanov, Drigo conducted the first productions of The Sleeping Beauty (1890), The Nutcracker (1892), Swan Lake (1895) and Glazunov's Raymonda (1898); he conducted nearly three hundred performances of The Sleeping Beauty at that theatre.
Drigo's success with La Esmeralda brought him his first commission for a complete ballet score: Vsevolozhsky gave him The Enchanted Forest. It was Drigo's first full-length ballet and also the first original production of the newly appointed second ballet master, Lev Ivanov. The piece was made for the Imperial Ballet School's end-of-year graduation show, and in 1887 it was moved to the Mariinsky's stage. Ivanov's choreography met with a cool reception, while Drigo's music was highly praised.
Next, for the ballet master Petipa and the ballerina Elena Cornalba, Drigo composed two variations for La Vestale and another for the character of Cupid. Cornalba had seen The Enchanted Forest and herself asked that Drigo supply her extra dances. When her next ballet was planned, she requested him as the author of the entire music. The result was The Talisman, whose heroine is a Hindu goddess sent down from the heavens to find out whether her heart can resist the lures of love on earth. It was first given in 1889 on Cornalba's benefit night. Reviewers and spectators both thought the story dull, but critics of the time called the music a masterwork of the genre.
In 1893 Drigo wrote the one-act The Magic Flute for the school's next graduation performance, about an enchanted instrument that makes everyone who hears it dance. Lev Ivanov staged it, and the young Mikhail Fokine danced the role of Luc. After the success of the school production, the ballet was moved to the Mariinsky stage. His next ballet, The Awakening of Flora, was staged by Petipa for the celebrations at Peterhof marking the wedding of Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna and Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich. The whole imperial court attended the premiere in 1894, and Emperor Alexander III awarded Drigo the Order of St Anna for this score. Later the ballet became a favourite with ballerinas of the day: Mathilde Kschessinska created the role of Flora, Tamara Karsavina danced it, and Anna Pavlova took a shortened version on her tours around the world.
In 1896 Drigo wrote the ballet-divertissement La Perle for the celebrations in Moscow marking the coronation of Nicholas II. Petipa started on a ballet drawn from the Italian commedia dell'arte in 1899. This was The Millions of Harlequin, shown at the Hermitage Theatre in February 1900, with Kschessinska as Columbine and Georgy Kyaksht as Harlequin. The emperor, the empress and the entire court were in the audience. When the curtain fell, the usually reserved court audience burst into applause, and the composer was surrounded by grand dukes eager to congratulate him. Delighted with the music, the empress ordered two more court performances at the Mariinsky Theatre.
At the end of 1894 Drigo made a significant revision of the score of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a ballet first staged in Moscow in 1877. Once The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker had triumphed, Vsevolozhsky wanted this one revived too. Tchaikovsky had died by then, and his brother Modest approved of entrusting the reworking to Drigo, who followed Petipa's instructions. Drigo recalled that he knew Tchaikovsky had been unhappy with the orchestration and meant to return to it, but never managed to.
The staging by Petipa and Ivanov was shown at the Mariinsky Theatre in January 1895, with Pierina Legnani dancing Odette and Odile. Drigo's edition has remained the basis of the standard performing version, and companies around the world use it to some degree. Even so, his name is rarely mentioned when it is performed.
In 1902 Raoul Gunsbourg, who ran the Monte-Carlo opera, invited Drigo and several dancers of the imperial company to Monaco to mount a ballet. Drigo supplied the score of the divertissement La Côte d'Azur, with a libretto by Prince Albert I; it opened in March at the Salle Garnier, with the prima ballerina Olga Preobrajenska among the performers. His last original full-length ballet, which was also Petipa's final work, told of a rosebud and a butterfly. The Hermitage Theatre premiere planned for 1904 was suddenly called off, the official reason being the start of the Russo-Japanese War.
Drigo was on holiday in Italy in 1914 when the First World War began, and it was two years before he could go back to Russia. Shortly after he reached Petrograd, he lost his rooms at the Grand Hotel, whose building was turned into offices for the young Soviet government. For some time he lived in real poverty in a camp among fellow Italians who had settled abroad. In his memoirs he described freezing evenings when he and his friend and fellow musician Alexander Glazunov queued for hours for bread and then dragged the rations home on a sledge. When he first conducted again at the ex-imperial Mariinsky, the audience gave him a standing ovation lasting fifteen minutes.
Drigo left Russia and returned to Italy. At his farewell evening at the former Mariinsky Theatre, Feodor Chaliapin gave a farewell speech in Italian and in Russian. Only 60 kilograms of luggage were allowed, so he left all his belongings in Russia except a bundle of handwritten scores, which served as his pillow on the two-month journey to Padua by way of Odessa and Constantinople. In Padua he became kapellmeister at the Teatro Garibaldi, the house where his career had started. In 1929 his last opera, The White Carnation, was given. For the rest of his life he conducted and wrote masses and songs. Drigo died in Padua on 1 October 1930, and the city now has a street named after him.
He is known chiefly for his ballet scores and Italian operas, and also as a conductor and a pianist. His ballets include The Enchanted Forest (1887), The Talisman (1889), The Magic Flute (1893), The Awakening of Flora (1894), La Perle (1896), The Millions of Harlequin (1900) and a ballet about a rosebud and a butterfly, whose premiere was cancelled in 1904. Many numbers set to his music are still performed today.
Besides his own ballets, he wrote inserted music for productions already in the repertory. By his own recollection there were about 80 such numbers, and he rarely received extra payment for them. By the time he left Russia, almost all ballets staged by the imperial theatres had extra pieces by him. Petipa was reviving older ballets more and more often, and each time he turned to Drigo to refresh the score. The pas d'action for La Esmeralda and the 1895 edition of Swan Lake were works of this kind.
Among the inserted works are two variations for the ballerina Cornalba in La Vestale: The Echo, a canon, and a Valse mignonne. Three of the extra pieces for La Vestale were later published. In 1902 Drigo composed the music of the ballet-divertissement La Côte d'Azur, with Prince Albert I's libretto, for a production in Monaco, and in La Esmeralda his four-part pas d'action, written for Zucchi, contained showy solo passages for the violin and the cello.
Drigo's first opera, Don Pedro di Portogallo, was staged in Padua in 1868. In 1884 the opera La moglie rapita was given at the Mariinsky. His last opera was The White Carnation, staged in 1929. After returning to Italy he kept on composing and wrote masses and songs.
The site has Drigo's Serenade for flute and piano, at an upper-intermediate level. It is the only edition of Drigo's music in the catalogue.