The name of the French conductor and composer of Belgian origin D. G. A. Pari (c. 1756–1840) is only rarely found in European and Russian literature on the history of music. The court composer of the Russian court, Pari played a significant role in the theatrical and concert life of St. Petersburg, gave this city over forty years of creativity. He arrived in Russia at the same time as С. A. Cavos (1799) and died in the same year as the Italian master. The article discusses the little-known circumstances of the conductor’s and educational activities of the musician, for the first time gives an assessment of his artistic heritage and a review of ballet compositions based on documentary sources — musical and literary materials of Paris’ ballets, preserved in library collections of St. Petersburg and Moscow. These are works of the period 1799–1813, the music of which belongs entirely or is attributed to the composer: “The Wedding of Thetis and Peleus,” “Village Heroine,” “Little Sailor,” “Shepherd and Hamadryad,” “Consequence of the Village Heroine,” “Russians in Germany, or Consequence of Love for the Fatherland.” The study of Paris’ works raises a number of questions related to the formation of the ballet genre in Russia, including the problems of authorship and style, orchestration, musical dramaturgy, compilability and citation of material (in particular, fragments of Ch. W. Gluck’s opera “Orpheus and Eurydice”), relationship between music and choreography. The large-scale problem of operatic (literary and musical) transcriptions in ballet is also connected with the composer’s work. The study of Pari’s ballets leads to the conclusion that the choice of subjects in his works was often dictated by historical circumstances and the will of choreographers (P. Chevalier, Ch.-L. Didelot, I. Walberch), so his function as a composer was not only to create original music, but also arranging other people’s work.
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