Nadine Meisner has been a dance critic for The Independent, The Sunday Times, and The Times.
Nadine Meisner tells the gripping story of Marius Petipas remarkable career at the Imperial Theatres with great flair. Her scrupulous research reveals the French choreographers seminal role in laying a foundation without which the dance revolution wrought by Diaghilevs Ballets Russes in the twentieth century would scarcely have been possible. * Rosamund Bartlett, author of Wagner and Russia * Marius Petipa, the architect of classical ballet as we know it today, finds a splendid biographer in Nadine Meisners The Emperors Ballet Master. This compulsively readable book gives us not only Petipas melodramatic life, from his youthful wanderings through his artistic flowering in Russia, but the very flavor of the worlds he passed through and settled in all narrated in supremely graceful and lively prose. Absolutely essential reading for cultural history devotees. * Elizabeth Kendall, author of Balanchine and the Lost Muse * In Marius Petipa: The Emperor's Ballet Master, the first biography in English of the preeminent architect of Russian ballet classicism, Nadine Meisner offers a vivid portrait of the French-born itinerant dancer who choreographed dozens of ballets during sixty years of service to Russia's tsars. In this deeply researched book we meet the workaholic who labored over the grand ensembles and cascades of solo dances that became defining features of ballets such as The Sleeping Beauty and raymonda; the lover and man of passion who was also a devoted father, and the company director who learned to navigate a world of courtiers, bureaucrats, and protectors' to create with his dancers a world of beauty in movement. * Lynn Garafola, author of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and Professor Emerita of Dance, Barnard College *