(from Gk. pantomimos: ‘one who does everything by imitation’).
A musical-dramatic genre, taking different forms in different periods and places. The Latin pantomimus originally referred to a Roman actor who specialized in dumb show, supported by instrumental music and a chorus; by extension the word denotes a dramatic representation in dumb show. Normal modern English usage is confined to a theatrical entertainment, usually presented in the Christmas season, which, whilst no longer in dumb show, continues to use music and other spectacular elements to support a children’s tale that is often no more than a flimsy backcloth for buffoonery, dancing, topical songs and allusions and, until comparatively recent times, a harlequinade.
The origins of pantomime are of great antiquity, but it was made fashionable in Rome in 22 bce by Pylades of Cilicia and Bathyllus of Alexandria. As Horace wrote (Satires, i, 5, 64), to dance the shepherd Cyclops in tragic mask and buskins was nothing new. According to Macrobius (Saturnalia, ii, 7) Pylades was responsible for introducing instruments and chorus; Bathyllus seems to have specialized in light, satyric themes, and Pylades was in style closer to the tragedy. Pantomime usually took its subject matter from mythology, but also from history and the themes of tragic drama; unlike straight mime, it was not coarse.
The performance took place on a public stage or in a private house. The pantomimus, sometimes supported by a speaking actor, wore a graceful silk costume and a fine mask with closed lips. The chorus and instrumentalists stood behind him. The pantomimus sometimes appeared in as many as five roles in turn, each with its own mask. There are tributes to the eloquence and directness of a good dancer who could undertake to retell a whole tale with several parts, and to the expressiveness of one performer whose powers of mime, Lucian wrote, were rich enough to overcome the language barrier for a foreign visitor – unable to comprehend the narrative songs, he nevertheless so highly prized the actor’s miming that he wished to take him home to his own country to act as an interpreter (a similar tribute was paid to ‘Kasperl’ Laroche – himself originally a dancer – in Vienna at the beginning of the 19th century, by the Turkish minister Ismael Effendi who, largely ignorant of German, claimed to understand what Laroche was saying, thanks to his mimetic powers; see Ueberblick des Ueberblicks des neuesten Zustandes der Literatur des Theaters und des Geschmacks in Wien, by C** X**, 1802, p.78).
The use of steps, posture and especially of gesture (‘manus loquacissimae, digiti clamosi’) was aided by conventions not unlike those familiar from modern ballet. The role of the songs seems to have been minor; those fragments that survive are in Greek rather than Latin. Lucan and Statius were among poets who were not afraid to abase their talents by earning good money writing pantomimes, for it became a highly popular form of entertainment, not without importance in its effects on morality (especially after females began to appear in pantomimes), and even on the political scene the historian Zosimus attributed the moral decline of Rome to the vast popularity of the pantomimi.
The renewal of interest in ancient forms of drama during the Renaissance led to the birth of various kinds of pantomime, the boundaries between which are often hard to distinguish. In England the title denotes a new form, which, in the early 18th century, looked to many sources for its success. The characters of the commedia dell’arte were familiar to audiences; their popularity had increased during the previous century, and the influx of actors from the Paris fairgrounds and the Théâtre Italien provided a new impetus to interval entertainment in dancing and mime. In the second decade of the century visiting foreign troupes and the published scenarios of Gherardi’s collections provided a framework for lazzi, involving Harlequin and other commedia characters, as well as introducing a mythological constituent. By 1715 a pattern assembled from these elements provided a more extended type of ‘afterpiece’ entertainment. The playhouse managers frequently advertised these as ‘Entertainments’ and promoted what was clearly beginning to be a popular form which might enliven their stock repertory. The farcical (or ‘grotesque’) parts, which appear to have had continuous musical accompaniment (the ‘Comic Tunes’), began to be interspersed with masque-like interludes sung in the style of Italian opera seria (the ‘Serious’ or ‘Vocal’ parts), which supplied a foil to the clowning and which scaled down the operatic conventions that might have become tedious for the largely middle-class playhouse audiences. ‘Descriptions’ were published, providing a libretto for the ‘serious’ parts but not detailing the buffoonery, which was improvised. The devisers of these afterpieces looked to contemporary Italian opera for recitative and aria in the ‘serious’ parts, to the French ballet de cour for the dances, to the English masque for the scenes, machines and decorations, and to the commedia dell’arte for the knockabout. The serious parts are sometimes referred to as ‘masque’ interludes in playbills and contemporary writing, but continental French influences were strong.
John Weaver developed the first ‘Entertainments’ in dancing of any length with a story in mime. The Tavern Bilkers (1703) was not, as he claimed, the first of its kind but was probably the first to appear in which the dance element was to the fore. His Loves of Mars and Venus (1717), which he believed was similar to the Roman pantomimes, was in fact akin to the later ballet d’action. It was John Rich, owner and actor-manager of the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, who seized upon disparate elements and moulded them into what became the pantomime tradition. Rich’s first pantomimes, always performed as afterpieces, appeared in 1717 in competition with Drury Lane. Often identified by the inclusion of the word ‘Harlequin’ in the title (e.g. Harlequin Dr. Faustus, 1712; see illustration), the pantomimes produced from 1723 to 1728 saw the success of the form as a popular afterpiece. Rich’s most successful pantomimes were all devised by Lewis Theobald, and in these he worked closely with the composer John Ernest Galliard, whose familiarity with da capo aria, use of motto openings and predictability of phrase structure and tonality led to a fairly formalized type of melody and harmony, ideal for the easygoing playhouse audiences. In his pantomime music of 1723–6 he favoured a straighforward binary form with little use of ritornello and a shortwinded vocal line; The Rape of Proserpine (1727) marks a change in his pantomime style, with more da capo arias, arioso, with fewer binary airs and more use of ritornello.
The ‘grotesque’ sections, with continuous music, were given titles such as ‘Wedding Dance’, ‘Jigg’, ‘Clodpole’, ‘Gardener’s Dance’, ‘The Birth of Harlequin’, or ‘Quaker’s Dance’, which indicate the action that accompanied them. They were published as ‘Comic Tunes’, whether they were for knockabout or dance; some quickly came to be regarded as traditional. The most developed pantomimes consisted of an overture, possibly a dozen airs and a concluding chorus, with recitative and airs in alternation. Most of the airs deal with pastoral subjects, nature and love or joy and sorrow.
In the course of time the pantomime changed in character, becoming a more fully integrated comic play, the characters and action of which were close to the stock elements of the Italian comedy, with young lovers and their resourceful servants outwitting jealous parents and guardians, often with supernatural assistance. Vocal rather than instrumental music dominated, and some of the leading composers provided scores for the pantomimes (Galliard and Pepusch in the early years, and later the Arnes, Dibdin, Linley, Boyce, Shield and others). Suitable instrumental music accompanied the elaborate transformation scenes, though as the emphasis shifted more strongly towards the spectacular elements of the age of the British melodrama, reputable musicians more rarely wrote pantomime scores. In the 20th century, popular songs of the moment were introduced without relevance or apology, and under the influence of the music hall and variety turn little remains but the name and the framework of a moral fairytale.
On the Continent too the pantomime was a popular form of entertainment in the 18th and 19th centuries, though the phenomenon varied widely between different centres and periods. In France, where Noverre demonstrated the virtues of Garrick’s realistic approach to stage characterization, pantomime tended to be a dignified form of danced entertainment. Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique (1768, p.359) defines the pantomime as an ‘Air to which two or more dancers execute in dance an action (which is itself also known under the same term). The pantomime airs … speak, as it were, and form images, in the situations in which the dancer is to put on a particular expression’. The French tradition of pantomimic scenes and characters in the lyric theatre lived on in the famous mute title-role of Auber’s La muette de Portici (also known as Masaniello, 1828); and though Wagner (who greatly admired La muette) had in fact completed the second act of Rienzi before he moved to Paris in autumn 1839, the ballet sequence in that act is often referred to as a pantomime because of the thematic and even dramatic relevance of the dances to the story. Adam’s La poupée de Nuremberg (1852) and the Olympia act of Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann (1881) are further French operatic scores that contain important pantomimic elements. Wagner may be held to have written the most successful of all pantomimic scenes in opera, that in Act 3 of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in which Beckmesser, painfully reminded at every turn of his beating of the night before, finds and misappropriates Walther’s Prize Song when he visits Sachs’s temporarily deserted workshop.
There was a strong pantomime tradition in 18th-century Vienna, where the presence of a vital popular theatre (including native elements, above all the character of Hanswurst, and elements derived from the commedia dell’arte, such as Harlequin, Pantaloon and Columbine) was combined with a marked south German tendency to use music in the theatre. The appellation ‘Pantomime’ was used in Vienna at least as early as the 1720s. Among authors of pantomime scenarios Kurz-Bernardon is the most important, and Haydn’s lost music for Kurz’s Der (neue) krumme Teufel (c1758) includes a pantomime, Arlequin der neue Abgott Ram in America. Mozart, with the assistance of distinguished friends, gave a pantomime of his own composition (k446/416d; only a fragment survives) at a public rout during Carnival 1783; he gave an account of it in his letter to his father of 12 March that year. The pantomime tradition continued to be strong in Vienna roughly until the advent of the operetta; elements of its more elevated aspect live on in the Kessler–Richard Strauss collaboration Josephslegende (1912–14).
MGG2
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PETER BRANSCOMBE (1, 3), CLIVE CHAPMAN (2)