Stravinsky composed Petrushka as his second ballet for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. This came after the spectacular success of Stravinsky’s The Firebird. Petrushka premiered in Paris on 13 June 1911.   In 1947, Stravinsky revised Petrushka to secure new copyright protection. As the original 1911 version had fallen into the public domain, in many countries, including the USA.   Abbado used the 1947 Boosey and Hawks rescored version for a smaller orchestra.

Petruška tells the story of a love triangle among three puppets. The ballet begins at the Admiralty Square in St. Petersburg during the 1830s at the Shrovetide fair; our hero, Petruška is in love with the ballerina, who, in turn, is enchanted by the Moor.  A crowd gathers around the magician who presents the three puppets in a small theatre. He charms them into life with his flute,  and to the audience's delight and surprise,  the puppets come down from the stage and dance amongst the crowd.

In the second Tableau, Petrushka is dejected, as he has failed to win over the beautiful ballerina;  he is sad and rues the fact that he was given life,  only to find that the Ballerina has fallen for another. 

In the third Tableau, Petrushka enters the Moor's room and interrupts the Moor and the ballerina,  but the Moor casts Petruška out. 

In the fourth Tableau, we return to the main Square,  where an altercation ensues between the Moor and Petrushka.  The Moor strikes Petrushka down with his scimitar.  The crowd is horrified, so the Magician is summoned to the scene, as well as a police officer. The Magician reminds everyone that Petrushka is nothing but a puppet made of straw and cloth, and so cannot have either real emotion or 'life'. As the crowd disperses, the showman is left alone onstage. 

Petrushka's ghost rises above the puppet theatre as night falls. He shakes his fist and thumbs his nose at the Magician, making the Magician flee in terror. Petrushka then collapses to a second death.

Nikolai Myaskovsky, acclaimed Russian composer and a friend of Stravinsky’s, wrote in his review of the work, “Is Stravinsky’s Petrushka a work of art? I don’t know. Can one call life a work of art? That very life that roars all around us, that calls forth our wrath and our joy, that weeps, that rages, that flows in a swift, broad current? For Petrushka is life itself. All the music in it is full of such energy, such freshness and wit, such healthy, incorruptible merriment, such reckless abandon, that all its deliberate banalities and trivialities, its constant background of accordions not only fail to repel but, quite the contrary, carry us away all the more…The music of this extraordinary ballet has such integrity, energy, and such inexhaustible humor that one positively loses all desire to attempt a more detailed analysis – it would be like a vivisection.”

Recording

DG, when they originally recorded Abbado & the LSO in 1976, were unsure of the new digital format, so they also recorded the performance on an 8-track analogue tape recorder. The original LP and cassette were made from the digital recording.  In 2025,  DG’s Original Source Series remixed & remastered the same performance from the 8-track tape analogue recording. We have compared many of the first pressings on LP to the recent Original Source reissues and can confidently state that the analogue reissues are superior to their digital counterparts.  The analogue reissues are not only more resolute, but offer a fuller, richer midrange, with greater tonal colour.