Spartacus is a ballet by Aram Khachaturian (1903–1978). The work follows the exploits of Spartacus, the leader of the slave uprising against the Romans known as the Third Servile War, although the ballet’s storyline takes considerable liberties with the historical record. Khachaturian composed Spartacus in 1954, and was awarded a Lenin Prize for the composition that same year. It was first staged in Leningrad on 27 December 1956, as choreographed by Leonid Yakobson, for the Kirov Theatre of Opera and Ballet (Mariinsky Theatre), where it stayed in repertory for many years, but only with qualified success since Yakobson abandoned conventional pointe in his choreography. Yakobson restaged his version for the Bolshoi in 1962 and it was part of the Bolshoi’s 1962 tour to New York. The ballet received its first staging at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow in 1958, choreographed by Igor Moiseyev; however it was the 1968 production, choreographed by Yury Grigorovich, which achieved the greatest acclaim for the ballet.
Spartacus remains one of Khachaturian’s best known works and is prominent within the repertoires of the Bolshoi Theatre and other ballet companies in Russia and the former Soviet Union.
The plot of the ballet had been around for some fifteen years and was suggested to him by a famous librettist N.Volkov. The composer finally got to work ‘with a feeling of enormous creative excitement’. He’d had a blast of a trip around Italy, visiting the very places at the centre of the famous story of a slave rebellion.
Despite taking a fair few liberties with the plot, the ballet score won Khachaturian the Lenin Prize in 1954, and was premiered in what is now the Mariinsky Theatre, in St Petersburg, just two years later.
