You know how, when you see the Kirov’s Raymonda–last performed here in Washington, D.C. in 2016– it looks very authentic, the least subject to Soviet- era revision of all the nineteenth-century repertory? I mean, apart from the Vikharev reconstructions.
Well, Tamara Karsavina, a thirteen-year-old Rossi Street student when Raymonda premiered at the Mariinsky in 1898, wrote in The Dancing Times in 1966:
“Some of Raymonda has been retouched but the main features of Petipa’s choreography are still there.’
Sometimes oral, kinetic transmission proves very accurate.