A style of theatrical dancing that developed in France during the 17th century, achieved ‘classical’ status in the 19th century, and today maintains its roots in the past while continuing to evolve. The term also describes a theatrical spectacle, in which use it has a history stretching back to the Middle Ages (see Dance andBallet de cour); as a spectacle, ballet could, in various times and places, include singing as well as dancing. Ballet became institutionalized in Paris in 1672 with the formation of the first permanent professional dance troupe within the newly founded Académie Royale de Musique (known informally as the Opéra), which occurred during a time when the basic movement vocabulary was becoming codified. For much of its history ballet has been closely tied to opera, both in the types of works in which ballet has appeared and because of the institutional structures that supported it; a number of ballet companies are still attached to opera houses. Starting in the 18th century, however, ballet also began gradually to establish itself as an independent art, one through which a narrative could be communicated without sung texts; since the late 18th century ‘ballet’ as a genre has usually meant a spectacle accompanied by purely instrumental music, although many operas continued to include ballet. The 20th century saw a shift in emphasis away from story ballets set to newly composed scores towards more abstract works set to pre-existing music not necessarily composed for dancing. Although ballet is primarily a Western art, it is now practised in many parts of the world, where it is sometimes absorbed into local dance traditions.
REBECCA HARRIS-WARRICK (1), NOËL GOODWIN (2, 3), JOHN PERCIVAL (4)
(i) The 17th century in France.
(ii) The 17th century outside France.
The founding of the Académie Royale de Danse by Louis XIV in 1661 marks an important landmark in the professionalization of dance, but the actual contributions made by this élite group of 13 dancing-masters to the development of ballet remain obscure. According to Pierre Rameau (Le maître à danser, 1725) it was Pierre Beauchamp, the principal choreographer at both the court and the Opéra, who codified the five positions of the feet and set the standard for the developing art; his tenure as ballet-master at the Académie Royale de Musique from its inception by Jean-Baptiste Lully in 1672 generated widespread admiration. Even François Raguenet, defender of Italian opera, admitted (Parallèle des Italiens et des François, 1702):
The Italians themselves will own that no dancers in Europe are equal to ours; the Combatants and Cyclops in Perseus, the Tremblers and Smiths in Isis, the Unlucky Dreams in Atys, and our other entries are originals in their kind, as well as in respect of the airs composed by Lully, as of the steps which Beauchamps has adapted to these airs … No theatre can represent a fight more lively than we see it sometimes expressed in our dances, and, in a word, everything is performed with an unexceptionable nicety.
No employment records survive from the early years of the Opéra's existence, but it is nonetheless known that there was at least some overlap between the professional dancers employed at the court and the members of the dance troupe in Paris, including such notables as Hilaire D'Olivet (who also sometimes choreographed for the Opéra), Louis L'Estang and Jean Favier l'aîné. Initially the troupe was entirely male; although a number of professional female dancers had appeared at court over the years, women did not dance on the public stage of the Opéra until 1681 when Lully's ballet Le triomphe de l'Amour opened in Paris, after receiving its première at court with a cast that had included both professionals and aristocrats. Even after women began joining the troupe, men continued to dance female roles for a number of years until the increasing number of women made that practice unnecessary. By 1704, the first year for which there are employment records for the Opéra, there were ten women and 11 men in the troupe, as well as Louis Guillaume Pécour, who had replaced Beauchamp as compositeur des ballets following Lully's death in 1687.
Several solo and duet choreographies that Pécour composed for the stage of the Opéra are preserved in Feuillet notation in two published collections (1704, 1713). These dances show that whereas a basic movement style was still shared by both theatrical and social dancers, the gap between the amateurs and the professionals was widening. Theatrical choreographies make use of a very large vocabulary of steps that are recombined in imaginative ways; they tend to involve many leaps and hops (‘la danse haute’), and also to use ornamental steps such as pas battus or ronds de jambe. When men and women danced together, either as a couple or in a group, they almost always performed the same steps in unison; similarly, both wore shoes with heels (whose heights seem to have varied) and made their rising steps onto partial toe. Theatrical choreographies for couples and for solo women are often quite demanding technically (surviving English choreographies for solo women even more so than the French), but the most virtuoso dances were designed for men alone. In the published collections these include entrées graves (in a slow duple metre with stately dotted rhythms), sarabandes, canaries, loures and chaconnes, with such virtuoso steps as entrechats or pirouettes on one foot with multiple beats that are rarely given to women during this period (fig.1). By way of contrast, the few group theatrical dances that have come down to us, most of them in Favier notation (see Harris-Warrick and Marsh, B1994), suggest that their choreographic interest derived less from the steps and more from the varied patterns the dancers traced on the floor. Both choreographic notations and period engravings reveal how symmetrical the dance figures were: when there is an even number of dancers, half are on each side of the stage; with an odd number, one dancer occupies the centre axis while the others are arranged symmetrically on either side (fig.2).
Within the basic technical parameters, different styles emerged by which choreographers characterized the varying types of dancing roles found in operatic divertissements. In Lully's tragédies en musique, the dominant genre on the stage of the Opéra in this period, his principal librettist, Phillippe Quinault, took great care to integrate the divertissement that appeared in each of the five acts into the fabric of the drama, a quality for which he was greatly praised by the 18th-century dance reformers Cahusac and Noverre. Although dancers in Quinault's librettos generally represent unnamed minor characters (‘un berger’ or ‘une magicienne’) who appear in only one act, they often serve as the moving bodies for the chorus members who, except when making entrances and exits, generally remain motionless around the perimeter of the stage. In this capacity they make visible through their movements the ideas expressed in the vocal numbers with which the instrumental dances are interleaved (fig.3). Even though dancing occurs primarily during instrumental numbers (and in some choruses, most frequently during the instrumental phrases that alternate with the singing), Lully made the connection between dance and sung text explicit by composing back-to-back pairs of dances and songs or choruses that share key, metre, tempo, and rhythmic and melodic figures. The divertissement from Act 2 of Thésée has a typical structure: an instrumental air, during which ‘Theseus appears, accompanied by the populace of Athens, celebrating his victory’; a musically related celebratory chorus; an instrumental dance for old men which is heard twice, before each verse of a musically similar duet for deux vieillards athéniens (‘Pour le peu de bon temps qui nous reste’); and finally a repetition of the celebratory chorus. Thus the audience is invited to view the dancing as one of several media of expression in the service of the divertissement as a whole, which in turn participates fully in the plot of the opera (the old men here serve as irreverent stand-ins for King Aegeus, who sees Theseus as a threat). Very little of the dancing in Lully's operas deserves to be dismissed as merely ‘decorative’; on the contrary, it is allied to fundamental concerns within the works.
The implicit connection between text and movement seen in Lully's operas finds support in 17th-century dance theorists such as Michel de Pure (Idée des spectacles anciens et nouveaux, 1668), who described ballet as ‘a mute representation, in which the gestures and movements signify what could be expressed through words’. Both he and Claude-François Menestrier (Des ballets anciens et modernes, 1682) insisted that the movements of the dancers, like the music to which they move, be appropriate to the characters they represent – that dances for shepherds be distinguishable from dances for kings or for sailors. The Abbé Dubos (Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, 1719), who praised Lully for writing well-characterized music, said of choreography that ‘years ago, the fauns, shepherds, peasants, cyclops, and tritons danced pretty near in the same manner; but now the dance is divided into several characters. The artists, if I am not mistaken, reckon 16, and each of these characters has its proper steps, attitudes, and figures upon the stage’. Quinault himself even made distinctions as subtle as casting two types of shepherds, bergers and pâtres (see, for example, Alceste, Act 5), the latter probably more rustic and less idealized than the former (a convention found in later ballets as well). Distinctions are also implicit in Quinault's librettos between what Cahusac was later to call ‘la danse simple’, that is, dance that represents dance (such as in the joyful celebrations that conclude many operas), and Cahusac's ‘danse figurée’ or ‘composée’, which mimes an action (the trembleurs in Isis, the battling warriors in Cadmus et Hermione). Both types of dance could occur either on earth or in the realm of the merveilleux: demons, for example, could dance for joy or they could frighten people. In either case, choreographies for demons and other transgressive characters seem to have mined a vocabulary of grotesque gestures including false positions of the feet, extravagant leaps and distorted arm positions, whereas distinctions between beneficent character types such as shepherds and sailors seem to have relied on more subtle differences in step vocabulary, arm movements, figures and spatial orientation.
Most of Lully's operatic divertissements contain from one to three instrumental dances, although the prologue may include more. The music generally adheres to one of three structures: binary (the most numerous), rondeau (ABACA), or the extended variation forms of chaconne and passacaille. Most of his dance pieces make use of the full five-part orchestra, although some are set as trios or contain trio episodes. Wind instruments are often employed to enhance characterization: oboes in pastoral scenes, flutes for sacred rites, and trumpets for battles. The enriched orchestration generally extends to the choruses as well, thus giving the divertissements greater aural sumptuousness than the other portions of the opera, which are primarily accompanied by continuo alone. Although Lully included such titled dances as gavottes, minuets, sarabandes and canaries, many are simply called ‘entrée’ or ‘air’, followed by the category of characters dancing (e.g. ‘Entrée des bergers’); such pieces may or may not conform to an identifiable dance type. Much of Lully's dance music has irregular phrase structures; even dance types such as the minuet may have five- or seven-bar phrases. In fact, four- or eight-bar phrases, while not uncommon, are by no means the norm. Although in some instances the irregularities may be a function of dramatic characterization, they are so endemic to Lully's style in so many different dramatic contexts that they do not support facile generalizations about their restriction to comic or grotesque situations.
Dance also figured prominently in Italian opera, especially in Venice, although it tended to have a looser connection to the plot than in France. In most mid- or late 17th-century Venetian three-act operas the dances were concentrated at the ends of Acts 1 and 2, where they often functioned in the manner of intermedi. Many dances were motivated by joyful occasions or by being set in the realm of the supernatural, although some had only tenuous connections with the sung portions of the opera. Many of the same character types appeared on both the French and the Italian stages – nymphs and shepherds, soldiers, demons, or allegorical characters such as dreams – but Venetian opera allowed for more comic roles such as buffoons, cripples or animals than did the French. (Comic roles had been common in the ballet de cour but were abandoned in the tragédie en musique.) Although the composer of the vocal music sometimes composed the dances, the practice of entrusting the dance music to the choreographer or to a secondary composer probably originated during this period and had become the norm by the 18th century. Only a few dance types are mentioned in Venetian librettos and scores, such as the corrento, passo e mezzo and canario; more often a dance is simply identified as a ‘ballo’. As in France, most of the dances have a binary structure. In the last two decades of the 17th century the French style of dancing began to make inroads into Italy, as can be seen not only from the appearance of dance types such as the minuet or borèa (bourrée) in opera scores, but also from the composition of scenes that interleave dances with musically related vocal pieces on the model of the French divertissement, as in Il pastore d'Anfriso (1695) by Carlo Francesco Pollarolo. With the introduction of the Arcadian reforms at the turn of the century, however, came an increased separation between danced episodes and vocal music; thereafter dancing was generally independent of the plot of the opera and relegated to appearing between the acts.
Apart from Giovanni Battista Balbi, who between 1636 and 1657 worked not only in Venice but in several European courts (including France; fig.4), few of the choreographers from Venetian theatres are known. No choreographic notations preserve the dances from this period, but Italian dancing is reported to have been more athletic than the French, with greater emphasis on dramatic leaps, speed and lightness and more opportunity for mimetic dancing, particularly (although not exclusively) in comic scenes. Gregorio Lambranzi's Neue und curieuse theatralische Tantz-Schul (Nuremberg, 1716), a book showing sequential illustrations from several different theatrical dances (for drunk peasants, commedia characters, animated statues and the like; fig.5), provides an idea of the movements – some of them quite acrobatic – available to comic and grotesque dancers. At the same time, the brief descriptions accompanying the engravings show that the French technical vocabulary (pas de bourrée, chassés, various contretemps etc.) had by then become international.
Following the restoration of Charles II to the English throne in 1660, a number of French dancers and musicians made their way across the Channel. Although Robert Cambert's attempt to establish a Royal Academy of Music on the French model failed, his production of two operas, Ariane and Pomone, as well as several other imported entertainments did expose the English to French dancing. Starting in 1673 Thomas Betterton's blending of Lullian balletic practices with English theatrical traditions produced the new genre of semi-opera in works such as Matthew Locke's Psyche (1675), Henry Purcell's The Fairy Queen (1692) and The Island Princess (1699; music by R. Leveridge, D. Purcell and J. Clarke). Although semi-opera died out shortly thereafter, dancing continued to figure as entr'acte entertainment in playhouses such as Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields, where French styles mingled with commedia dell'arte-inflected dancing coming from Italy. Prominent English dancers around the turn of the century included John Weaver, Thomas Caverley and Hester Santlow. The publication in 1706 of two translations of Feuillet's Chorégraphie (one by Weaver as Orchesography, the other by Paul Siris as The Art of Dancing) shows that a market had developed in England for French dancing, as does the publication of a substantial number of notated choreographies between the years 1706 and 1735.
French dancing also took root in northern and central European countries, particularly at courts, such as Dresden and Stockholm, that had political connections with France. Even in cities where Italian opera was established, French dancers and choreographers were often employed to embellish theatrical spectacles. In Hamburg Lully's Acis et Galatée was performed at the public opera house in 1689; operas composed there in the following decade by Johann Georg Conradi, Johann Sigismund Kusser and Reinhard Keiser reveal Lully's influence.
Following Lully's death in 1687, French opera began to change in ways that were to expand the place it accorded to ballet. L'Europe galante (1697) by Houdar de Lamotte and André Campra inaugurated a new genre, the opéra-ballet (called simply ‘ballet’ at the time), which gave a larger scope to divertissements than did the tragédie en musique, although the plots were still communicated through singing. (Related genres, all involving singing, were labelled variously ballet-héroïque, ballet comique and acte de ballet.) The prologue and three or four acts (usually called ‘entrées’) each had a separate action but were tied together by an overarching theme: Les fêtes vénitiennes (Danchet and Campra, 1710), for example, has acts revolving around love intrigues set in contemporary Venice among, by turns, gondoliers, gamblers, spectators at the opera, and guests at a ball (the order and inclusion of acts varied from performance to performance). Thus comic dancing characters such as Arlequin or fortune-telling gypsies, who in Lully's day had been restricted to a few pastiche works such as Le carnaval, mascarade (1675), began to make regular appearances on the stage of the Opéra.
At the same time that the opéra-ballet was expanding both the amount of dramatic time devoted to dance and the range of characters represented, the tragédies also began to increase the number of dances within the divertissements. This tendency can be seen not only in newly composed works (where the librettist Lamotte led the way), but even within operas by Lully, which, when they were revived, acquired more and more dance pieces as time went on. The interpolations, whose music was sometimes borrowed from Lully's ballets but more often newly composed, seem primarily aimed at affording solos or pas de deux for the emerging stars of the dance troupe. The enlargement of the divertissement occurred primarily in scenes that represented fêtes of various kinds (both on earth and in magical or mythical realms), and that thus favoured dance for dance's sake; the newly written librettos offered many fewer occasions for mimetic dancing than had Quinault's. This shift in emphasis towards more purely decorative kinds of dancing can be observed in the replacement in many librettos of scene descriptions for the divertissements in favour of the laconic ‘On danse’ or ‘Le divertissement commence’. In addition, purely danced works, such as the choreographed ‘symphonies’ of Jean-Féry Rebel, were sometimes used to round out an evening at the Opéra: in May 1726, for example, Rebel's Les caractères de la danse followed a performance of Lully's Atys. The growing profusion of dances did not please all spectators: Campra's tragédie Achille et Déidamie (1735) was accused of ‘completely drowning the subject in the divertissement’, and by 1749 Rémond de Saint-Mard (Réflexions sur l'opéra) was complaining that ‘too much scope is given to the dances … everything is to be danced’.
The number of dancers employed at the Opéra grew to accommodate the demands of the expanded divertissements. By 1738 the troupe included 18 men and 13 women, in 1750 18 men and 24 women. A dance school was established at the Opéra in 1713, with the purpose of training singers and dancers already in the troupe; a school for training children opened in 1779. Early in the century the leading dancers included Jean Balon, Marie-Thérèse Perdou de Subligny, the brothers Dumoulin, Françoise Prévost and Michel Blondi, who also served as choreographer at the Opéra from 1729 until his death in 1739. They were eclipsed in star power (and in salary) by the next generation: Louis Dupré (‘le dieu de la danse’), whose long (though interrupted) career at the Opéra spanned the years 1714–51; and two of Prévost's students, Marie Sallé (who made her début at the Opéra in 1727) and Marie-Anne Cupis de Camargo (début in 1726). The two were seen as representing different styles of dance: Sallé was noted for expressivity and finesse (fig.6), Camargo for technical brilliance and agility.
Although no theatrical choreographic notations survive from this period, it appears that ballet technique was growing more virtuoso, especially for women. Because of her adoption of male steps such as pas battus and entrechats, Voltaire described Camargo as ‘the first woman to dance like a man’; her technical innovations drew criticism as well as admiration. The stars of the dance troupe attracted devoted followers who expected to see their favourites prominently featured when they went to the Opéra; that the divertissements favoured solos and pas de deux can often be inferred from the ways the dancers' names and roles are listed in the librettos, although determining which dancers performed in each of the pieces in the score is often difficult. Iconography suggests that couple and group dances retained the symmetrical principles of the previous era, with the dancers doing the same steps in parallel with each other. New dance types – rigaudon, forlane (in Venetian scenes), musette, tambourin, contredanse – appeared on the stage, while traditional ones such as the gavotte, menuet, passepied, sarabande and chaconne remained current; as before, many of the dances simply bear the title of ‘entrée’ or ‘air’ in the scores. As dance styles began to crystallize into the three general categories of noble, grotesque and demi-caractère, dancers started to specialize; Louis Dupré was seen as the epitome of the danseur noble, although he also danced other types of role.
The emphasis on technical brilliance and dance for its own sake found itself at odds throughout this period with a growing desire in some quarters for greater expression, or even for a separation of dance from vocal music. In 1714 in a private performance sponsored by the Duchesse du Maine at her château at Sceaux, two dancers from the Opéra, Balon and Prévost, performed in pantomime the climactic scene from the fourth act of Corneille's tragedy Les Horaces in which the Roman Horace kills his sister Camilla. This experiment in representing genuine tragedy through dance remained isolated for many years, but pantomimic dancing had already been a feature of commedia dell'arte-inspired performances for some time. Following the example of the Italian comedians working in London, the English dancer and choreographer John Weaver had in 1703 mounted a short pantomimic work, The Tavern Bilkers, but in 1717, after having investigated ancient Roman pantomime, he produced at Drury Lane a much more ambitious work, The Loves of Mars and Venus. The three principal roles of Mars, Venus and Vulcan were all assigned to dancers – Dupré, Hester Santlow and Weaver himself – and the music (which has not survived) was entirely instrumental. The scenario alternates between two types of scene: those that would have been sung in an opera on the same subject, such as Vulcan's expressions of jealousy (for which Weaver prescribes arm and head gestures appropriate to the reigning emotion), and scenes that resemble operatic divertissements, such as the Pyrrhic dance for the followers of Mars, for which standard dance steps would have been used. Weaver's next such work, Orpheus and Euridice (1718), was even more serious, using the version of the myth that ends with Orpheus's dismemberment by the Bacchae, but his last pantomime, Perseus and Andromeda (1728), interspersed comic scenes with the mythological ones. Although Weaver's experiments had no immediate imitators in England, Marie Sallé furthered the cause of serious mimetic dancing through two danced entertainments performed in London in 1734, Bacchus and Ariadne and Pygmalion, in which she attracted notoriety by wearing only a simple muslin dress in the Greek manner with her hair loose, as she danced the story of the statue coming to life.
The competing demands of a dramatically expressive, wordless ballet on the one hand and the more technically driven dance for its own sake on the other, both find expression in the works of Jean-Philippe Rameau, the composer whose operas and ballets dominated the stage of the Paris Opéra in the middle of the century. The divertissements in his tragédies lyriques such as Hippolyte et Aricie (c1733) or Castor et Pollux (c1737) tend to adhere to the basic outlines of the Lullian model, in which many of the dances are intimately allied to vocal pieces, although several of the divertissements do contain more instrumental dances in a row than would have been found in Lully's works. Some of the opéras-ballets (and the shorter actes de ballet) include even more extensive danced scenes that approach independence from the surrounding vocal context. In the third entrée (‘Les fleurs’) of Les Indes galantes (c1736), the concluding divertissement is introduced as if it were to be a typical celebratory fête, but actually consists of an independent narrative in which the flowers in a garden are buffeted by a storm embodied by the North Wind, Borée, only to be rescued by Zéphire; this scene is built over nine consecutive dance pieces (most simply called ‘Airs’, but including two gavottes) without a single vocal number intervening. The central role, the personified Rose, was created by Marie Sallé, to great acclaim.
Rameau's openness to a more dramatic role for dance was perhaps promoted by his collaborations with Louis de Cahusac, whose book La danse ancienne et moderne (1754) reviewed the history of the art with a goal of promoting greater dramatic expressivity in the dance of his own day. Cahusac saw dance as falling into one of two categories: la danse simple, which represents only itself and is motivated by joy, and la danse composée, ‘which by itself forms continuous action’. He felt frustrated by the outstanding abilities of the dancers of his day, whose talents he saw as being wasted through the overuse of danse simple: ‘the costumes are different, the intentions are always the same’. Although his definition of danse composée seems to call for pantomime, his examples of dances he admired sometimes favour emotional expression over narrative content. In the librettos he wrote for several of Rameau's works (opéras-ballets, pastorales-héroïques and tragédies) Cahusac did not go as far towards integrating the dancing with the plot as his writings suggest he might have liked (he undoubtedly met resistance from the conservative institutional practices of the Opéra), but he did frequently build divertissements around what he called ‘ballets figurés’, whose movements he briefly described in the scene indications. These sometimes call for no more action than the weaving of garlands around the stage, but others have a narrative function. In Act 1 of the pastorale-héroïque Naïs (1749) an athletic contest goes through various stages of competition until an athlete arrives who challenges all the others twice; they refuse both times, he dances triumphantly and Naïs crowns him the victor. The entire scene is set to an extended chaconne that changes character frequently. In other ballets figurés Rameau is similarly responsive to the demands of the choreography, but even in the music he composed to accompany standard fêtes his inventiveness in characterizing the dancers' roles remains unsurpassed.
During the same period genuine pantomime ballets began to appear in the Parisian theatres that performed lighter works (see Paris, §IV, 3). According to Desboulmiers (Histoire du Théâtre de l'Opéra Comique, 1770), pantomime ballets were mounted at the Opéra-Comique starting in the 1720s, while at the Comédie-Italienne the prolific resident choreographer, Jean-Baptiste François Dehesse, composed not only divertissements for stage works of many types, but more than 50 pantomime ballets between 1738 and 1757 (fig.8). His best-known work, L'opérateur chinois (1748, music by Louis-Gabriel Guillemain), features a Chinese seller of patent medicine who has set up shop in the middle of a village fair; a succession of stock characters (an old philosopher, a simpleton with a sore tooth, a ridiculous German baron) involve him in a series of humorous incidents. The libretto, which describes the action scene by scene, divides the cast between dancers, who both mime and dance, and ‘performers in the pantomime’, who presumably only mime; as in Weaver's works there is a substantial amount of danse simple interspersed with the more narrative scenes. The work ends, as was standard in such ballets, with a contredanse générale. Dehesse's imaginative choreography was greatly admired in his day, but because he left no theoretical writings his contributions to the development of pantomime ballet have generally been undervalued by historians.
The only known document that preserves theatrical choreographies from this period, the Ferrère Manuscript, dating from 1782 (see Marsh, B1995), mixes various systems for communicating the dances of several comic pantomime ballets: Feuillet notation, sometimes augmented by written commentary; contredanse notation (floor patterns with no notated steps) for the group dances; and sketches with written instructions for the purely pantomimic scenes. The choreography blends dance steps familiar from earlier in the century with more gestural movements and puts rapid changes of movement style to comic effect. Many of Ferrère's solos and duets are technically demanding; the group dances, for six, eight or 12, also require considerable technique. While the ballets are clearly sectional (new movements being signalled by the dancers' entrances and exits as well as by changes in the music), Ferrère also seems interested in sustaining dramatic continuity by keeping the corps de ballet on stage when appropriate, and by his fluid transitions from dance to pantomime and back to dance within a movement.
In Italy, the independence of ballet from opera was rarely an issue. Because the already tenuous connections between ballet intermezzos and the acts of the opera that surrounded them had been severed by the start of the 18th century, it was common to find comic dances performed between the acts of an opera seria. Although there are isolated instances of Italian operas constructed on a French model, with the dances integrated, usually the ballet and the opera had nothing to do with each other. The separation did not, however, mean that Italian audiences had any less appreciation for ballet than did their French counterparts; they simply had different ideas about its role. In fact, the use of vocal intermezzos such as Pergolesi's famous La serva padrona, according to Hansell (B1988),
constituted but a short-lived historical parenthesis. For notwithstanding the importance according them in most studies of 18th-century Italian opera, the weight of the evidence proves overwhelmingly that they are properly regarded as the exception rather than the rule. The rule for 200 years, even during the period 1710 to 1735, was that entr'acte entertainments with Italian opera consisted of ballet.
Outside Italy, opera in the Italian manner also tended to reserve dancing for entr'actes, although several of Handel's operas for London (e.g. Admeto, 1727, and Ariodante, 1735) included dance related to the plot within the acts. Well into the middle of the century, Italian entr'acte ballets tended to present dramatically static vignettes that involved character dancing in rustic or exotic settings, such as Un villaggio nella Germania co' suoi abitatori occupati in varie opere contadinesche (1758, Milan) or La celebre Torre di Nanchino nella Cina (1757, Rome). Such subjects exploited Italian proclivities for mimetic dancing and allowed opportunities for the aerial, acrobatic styles in which Italian dancers excelled. Gennaro Magri's Trattato teorico-prattico di ballo (Naples, 1779), which focusses on the highly developed step vocabulary of the ballarino grottesco, is the best surviving source for technical information about this style. Magri, like many other Italian dancers of this period, spent a portion of his career abroad; other international stars included Barbara Campanini, known as ‘la Barbarina’, whose virtuoso technique and pantomimic abilities created a sensation throughout Europe, and the choreographer Giuseppe Salamoni père, generally noted as ‘di Vienna’ in Italian librettos. At the same time, a look at cast lists shows that a number of French dancers also worked regularly in Italy (Jean-Marie Leclair, ballet-master in Turin before he decided to concentrate on the violin, being one notable example). Before 1740 Italian dance companies tended to have only six or eight dancers, but by the 1760s their numbers increased to around a dozen, and even to 16–18 in Turin. This increase coincided with a shift in interest towards ballets with greater narrative content, such as La favola di Polifemo con Aci e Galatea (1748, Milan) or La scoperta dell'America da Cristoforo Colombo (1756, Turin). Ballets with mythological plots allowed the fantastic or magical elements that no longer figured in opera seria to find a place on Italian stages.
By the mid-century, several choreographers around Europe had become interested in creating pantomime ballets on serious subjects. Vienna, a meeting-ground for artistic trends from Italy, France and central Europe, was an important centre in this regard. Working at both the Burgtheater and the Kärntnertortheater, Franz Hilverding (1710–68) turned away from the ‘indecent’ comic characters of the Italian theatre first towards ‘natural’ characters such as Tyroleans or Hungarians and then to mythological subjects. Psyché and Poliphème et Galatée, both from 1752, may be his earliest independent pantomime ballets. Although Hilverding did not publish scenarios of his ballets (because, Angiolini was to report later, he believed that the dance spoke for itself), eyewitness descriptions of many of them have been preserved. Music by Joseph Starzer survives for several dozen of his ballets (in Turin and Český Krumlov) and follows a general pattern: an opening sinfonia followed by 10 to 25 instrumental dances, mostly binary and usually untitled beyond the occasional tempo marking. Sometimes music is borrowed from other works, for example the chaconne from Rameau's Castor et Pollux. The dance pieces are sufficiently gestural as to allow reasonable hypotheses as to how they fit with the story line (see Brown, B1991), although such identifications are far from straightforward. Like Dehesse, Hilverding left no theoretical writings, but his pupil Angiolini later called his teacher ‘the true restorer of the pantomimic art’ (fig.9).
Gaspero Angiolini (1731–1803), an Italian dancer who had moved to Vienna in 1754 and inherited Hilverding's position at the Burgtheater when the latter accepted a post at the Russian court in St Petersburg in 1758, went further than his teacher by staging ‘a complete dramatic action, upon principles handed down by the ancients’ (Brown, B1991, p.288). In his role as choreographer for a repertory company he had to produce not only free-standing ballets but also divertissement dances for operas and plays, and whereas many of his pantomime ballets have mythological, pastoral subjects (Les amours de Flore et Zéphire, 1759), others are of a lighter variety (Le tuteur dupé, ou L'amant statue, 1761). In fact the three works that he himself saw as landmarks – Don Juan, ou Le festin de pierre (1761), Citera assediata (1762) and Sémiramis (1765) – are no less important for being anomalous in his overall output. (In a pattern that was to become familiar with subsequent pantomime ballets, all three were based on pre-existing works – in this case, two plays and an opéra comique that had been performed recently in Vienna; the choreographer could thus count on his audience's familiarity with the stories.) After taking on in Don Juan a subject that one spectator characterized as ‘extrêmement triste, lugubre et effroyable’ (the ballet ends with Don Juan being carried off to the torments of hell by the statue of the murdered Commander), Angiolini decided to move from what he called ‘comédie héroïque’ to genuine tragedy. ‘If there is something of the sublime in dance, it is without doubt a tragic event represented without words and made intelligible through gestures’, he wrote in his Dissertation sur les ballets pantomimes des anciens, pour servir de programme au ballet pantomime tragique de Sémiramis (Vienna, 1765). After reviewing the precedents in the ancient world for this kind of spectacle, Angiolini turned to practical considerations: for proper effect a tragedy should involve only a few characters, but dancers cannot dance for nearly as long as actors can declaim. Thus a tragic pantomime ballet must be short and to the point; Sémiramis should last only 20 minutes. Angiolini did, in fact, reduce the story to its essential elements; although there is a divertissement-like scene in each of the three acts (in Act 3 a group of subjects brings offerings to the queen), the focus remains on Semiramis and her guilty conscience throughout. The balance between danse simple and pantomime thus tilts much more heavily towards the latter than in most other ballets.
The composer for all three ballets – and for many others performed in Vienna during this period – was Christoph Willibald Gluck. The collaboration was apparently a happy one: Angiolini said of Gluck's music for Don Juan, ‘he has perfectly realized the frightful essence of the action. He has undertaken to express the passions that are in play and the terror that governs the catastrophe. Music is essential to pantomimes; it is the music that speaks, we [dancers] only make gestures’. Gluck and other ballet composers did, in fact, find ways to suggest the words missing from pantomime ballets: a sacred procession in Sémiramis is set to a ‘cantique’ that has the simple melody and block chords of a hymn, and a mysterious inscription that appears on a wall is set to instrumental recitative. And although Gluck's scores are divided into separate numbers (Sémiramis has 15), many eschew binary or rondo forms in favour of more flexible (sometimes through-composed) structures that respond to the dramatic context through changes in tempo, level of rhythmic activity, and dynamics. Pieces not infrequently end on the dominant, as a means of making the music continuous. Dances in the divertissement sections of the ballets, on the other hand, still tend to adhere to traditional structures. Music for ballets from the court of Mannheim by composers such as Toeschi and Cannabich show a similar balance between the dramatic and the static.
During the same period, Jean-Georges Noverre (1727–1810) was working towards a similar integration of tragedy and ballet. Given the realities of pursuing an international career in the theatre (he had positions at various times in Paris, Lyons, London, Stuttgart, Vienna and Milan), he had to compose many operatic divertissements of the type he was so eloquently to deplore in his famous Lettres sur la danse (1760) and thus was unable to pursue what he was to call ‘ballet d'action’ as assiduously as he would have liked. He staged his first serious pantomime ballet, Le jugement de Pâris, in Lyons in 1751, but found a much more supportive working environment for his theories at the Württemberg court at Stuttgart, where he moved in 1760, just after his book had been published. Of the 20 ballets he created there, Médée et Jason (with music by the court composer J.J. Rodolphe, first performed after Act 1 of Jommelli's Didone abbandonata in 1763) had the greatest success in generating performances abroad; in 1776, in a restaging by Gaetano Vestris, it became the first independent ballet pantomime to appear on the stage of the Paris Opéra.
Noverre argued that, in order to achieve the expressiveness he desired, dancers needed to remove their masks (generally still worn in Paris at that time) so that their faces could augment the expression of their gestures. In a score dating from the Paris revival of 1804 (in F-Po), the actions of one highly fraught confrontation between Medea, Jason and Creusa are cued to rapid and dramatic changes in the music, here an extensive passacaille: ‘[Médée et Créuse] se disputent’; ‘[Jason] s'efforce de leur faire faire la paix’; ‘Médée menace’; ‘elle montre son poignard’ (fig.10). In the absence of choreographies for any of the serious pantomime ballets it is difficult to gauge whether the mimed gestures replaced or supplemented dance steps. Grimm's reaction to Noverre's ballets (Correspondance littéraire, letter of January 1771) is tantalizing but ambiguous: ‘There is considerably more walking in them than dancing … there is dancing only in great movements of passion, at decisive moments; in the scenes, there is walking in time with the music, but without dancing’. In fact, however, Noverre did allow for dancing by building into his ballet pantomimes typical divertissements (Médée et Jason contains dances for the wedding festivities and an infernal scene in which Médée conjures up evil spirits) in which the key roles were assigned to noted soloists. He thus took as his model a structure analogous to sung, not spoken French tragedy – one that, like a tragédie lyrique, balanced narrative against moments of visual spectacle.
Noverre's fluency with the written word, demonstrated not only in his Lettres sur la danse, which went through several editions, but also in his pamphlet war with Angiolini, helped spread his reformist ideas all over Europe and has given him a place in dance history out of proportion to his actual accomplishments as a choreographer. Although it is true that dancers who had performed in his productions in Stuttgart and Vienna restaged many of his ballets in cities throughout Europe, Noverre was later to complain that these productions did not accurately represent his vision. In fact, he felt at the end of his life that his reach had exceeded his grasp; his most notable failure was in Paris, where his position as maître de ballet at the Opéra lasted only three years (1776–9, although his appointment did not officially end until 1781). Parisian audiences found his serious ballets such as Les Horaces unsuitable subjects for dancing, although they appreciated such lighter works as Les fêtes chinoises and Les petits riens (to a score composed partly by Mozart). His successor Maximilien Gardel generally preferred lighthearted subjects, such as La chercheuse d'esprit (1777) and Ninette à la cour (1778), or sentimental ones such as Le déserteur (1788); these three ballets, like many others, were based on well-known opéras comiques. Mythological subjects of the pastoral variety also remained in vogue (fig.11), even during the Revolutionary period, as witnessed by the popularity of such works as Psyché (1790) and Le jugement de Pâris(1794), both of which remained in the repertory of the Opéra for over three decades. (Dancers did participate in politically motivated works such as Gossec's L'offrande à la liberté (1792) and Le triomphe de la République, 1793.) La fille mal gardée, mounted by Jean Dauberval in Bordeaux only days before the fall of the Bastille in 1789, still receives occasional performances.
Whereas some of the music for pantomime ballets was newly composed, in Paris many ballet scores were cobbled together out of a wide variety of pre-existing pieces, both vocal and instrumental. Pierre Gardel's Télémaque, which received its première at the Paris Opéra in 1790, contains part of a violin concerto by Giornovichi, passages from Grétry's opéra comique Richard Coeur-de-Lion, symphonic excerpts from Haydn, and dances composed by Gossec for Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, in addition to pieces by Lully, Paisiello, Pleyel, Piccinni and others, all stitched together by the ostensible composer of the score, Ernest Louis Müller. Familiar vocal airs were often quoted instrumentally in order to suggest to the audience words otherwise absent from the mute ballet; the opening bars of Gluck's ‘Che farò senza Euridice’/‘J'ai perdu mon Euridice’ from Orfeo/Orphée appear in more than one pantomime ballet score. Furthermore, the surviving musical sources of French pantomime ballets often show radical differences as to what music was performed from one revival to the next, suggesting that the concept of the ‘work’ may have resided more in the scenario than in the score. Both in pantomime ballets and in ballets within operas from the second half of the century, fewer of the individual pieces bear generic dance designations than had been the case earlier; sometimes a familiar dance type is clearly discernible in the rhythmic and melodic contours, but often a piece is labelled only with a tempo marking because it does not adhere to the traditional binary or rondo structures of earlier dance music. Despite the loss of a substantial amount of the ballet music from the 18th century, a good deal has survived and awaits serious study.
By the last decades of the 18th century, the public's appetite for ballet had resulted in a dramatic growth in the dance troupes: Italian opera houses generally employed 35 to 40 dancers, Stockholm reached a height of 71 in 1786, while the Paris Opéra had 92 dancers in 1770. Dancers tended more and more towards specialized training; Italian librettos even categorized them as ballerini seri, di mezzo carattere or grotteschi. Despite the persistence of strong local and national traditions (the French and the Italian being the dominant schools), the end of the century saw a growing internationalization of ballet styles. The leading dancers and choreographers pursued their careers across Europe, taking with them not only works and dancing styles, but also theatrical practices borrowed from each other. In St Petersburg the dance troupe which had been led by the Italians Gasparo Angiolini (who had worked many years in Vienna) and Giuseppe Canziani was taken over by the French-trained Charles Le Picq in 1786. The Stockholm opera, like many others around Europe, employed both French and Italian dancers, in addition to locals. Costume reforms initiated in the 1790s by Salvatore Viganò featuring loose neo-classic dress and either open-toe sandals or flat, flexible slippers soon spread throughout Europe and helped open the way for the technical innovations of the 19th century. Even the Paris Opéra was not immune to influences from abroad: although the longstanding French practice of integrating dance into the plot of the opera remained in place, individual works sometimes edged towards Italian practices by replacing the traditional internal divertissement with a quasi-independent pantomime ballet at the end of an act. Another point of contact between the two traditions can be observed in the practice of using a long, celebratory fête to conclude many operas; in Italy this was the one danced scene that sometimes bore connections to the plot, whereas in France, where celebratory divertissements had traditionally involved both dancing and singing, the final chorus sometimes disappeared in favour of a purely danced conclusion.
Although by the end of the century pantomime ballet was firmly established as an independent genre, ballet still remained a fundamental part of opera, especially, but no means exclusively, in France. Opéra comique and other similar genres, not to mention much spoken theatre, routinely incorporated dance. Moreover, the same institutional structures supported both opera and ballet; audiences throughout Europe were to continue to encounter opera and ballet together, in the same houses and on the same evenings, for many decades to come.
In ballet the terms ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ are chronologically reversed from their musical usage, the romantic style in ballet having preceded the classical.
(i) The transition to romantic ballet, 1800–1830.
(ii) The romantic ballet and its influence.
(iv) The classical ballet in Russia to 1900.
In composing his music for Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (1801) in the form of an overture and 16 numbers, Beethoven wrote for a ballet en action derived from Noverre’s principles, which in the 18th century had ended the ballet’s subservience to opera and made it an independent theatrical art. Prometheus was created for the Vienna court theatre (originally as Gli uomini di Prometeo) bySalvatore Viganò (1769–1821), a Neapolitan who often composed the music as well as the scenarios for his ballets; in place of static mime interspersed with dancing, he developed a type of expressive mime-dance based on individual character (fig.12), and the dramatic use of a corps de ballet, especially after he became ballet-master at La Scala in 1811. His achievements paved the way for Carlo Blasis (?1795–1878), whose treatises on the technique of dance (Traité élémentaire, 1820; Code of Terpsichore, 1828) first codified the methods on which the teaching of classical ballet is still based.
Beethoven’s ballet score was an exception to the usual musical practice at this time of a hurriedly assembled patchwork by a musician on the theatre staff (those at the Paris Opéra included Rodolphe Kreutzer, the dedicatee of Beethoven’s Sonata op.47). It was normal to incorporate melodies from well-known operas or songs whose words would relate to the stage action at a given point; and original music, mostly confined to the set dances, was written in a facile style to fit the choreographer’s preconception of rhythm and structure. Similar conditions prevailed in Russia, where Charles-Louis Didelot (1767–1837), a pupil of Dauberval and Noverre, spent two influential periods at St Petersburg, during 1801–12 and 1816–30. However, he is credited with having paid more attention to music than most choreographers of his time, and demanded a corresponding musicality from his dancers; he frequently worked with the composer Catterino Cavos, and Soviet research (by Gozenpud and Rabinovich; see Roslavleva, C1966) suggests that Cavos was musically more successful with his ballets than his operas precisely because they were composed to a preconceived structure supplied to him.
The prevailing situation was engagingly described in memoirs published by V.A. Duvernoy in 1903:
Once the plan of the piece and the dances were arranged, the musician was called in. The ballet-master indicated the rhythms he had laid down, the steps he had arranged, the number of bars which each variation must contain – in short, the music was arranged to fit the dances. And the musician docilely improvised, so to speak, and often in the ballet-master’s room, all that was asked of him. You can guess how alert his pen had to be, and how quick his imagination. No sooner was a scene written or a pas arranged than they were rehearsed with a violin, a single violin, as the only accompaniment … Even after having done all the ballet-master required, the composer had to pay heed to the advice of his principal interpreters. So he had to have much talent, or at least great facility, to satisfy so many exigencies, and, I would add, a certain amount of philosophy.
Nevertheless, attempts were made from about 1820 to compose more homogeneous scores for ballet, especially in the work of Jean Schneitzhöffer, the second chorus master at the Paris Opéra, and his superior Hérold, whose score for a new version of La fille mal gardée (1828) remains the musical basis for present-day productions. Hérold’s successor was Halévy, and his score (1830) for a Manon Lescaut ballet by Jean Aumer (1774–1833) is thought to have been the first to use melody to identify character; it earned the grudging admiration of Meyerbeer for its skilled use of musical allusions to suggest period. The function of the scenario writer began to be separated from that of choreographer from about 1827, when Scribe anonymously provided a scenario for Aumer’s La somnambule, with music by Hérold, while from her début at Vienna in 1822 Marie Taglioni was preparing to bring about the revolution in theatrical dance that became the romantic ballet.
The ideal embodiment of the romantic image was Marie Taglioni (1804–84), who reflected in her dancing the spirit that infused the literature of Scott and Hugo and the music of Berlioz and Chopin. Her frail physique was schooled relentlessly by her father, the ballet-master Filippo Taglioni (1777–1871), to develop a style distinguished by lightness, grace and modesty, by the use of point-shoes for artistic effect, and by unusual elevation and delicacy on landing. Her freer, more graceful movement, enhanced by a new style of costume with a diaphanous, bell-shaped skirt and fitted bodice, gave a fresh purpose to the art of dance in the theatre (fig.13). It enabled it to become more poetic and imaginative, an art of illusion rather than illustration. The style was inaugurated by La sylphide, staged by Filippo Taglioni for his daughter at the Paris Opéra in 1832. This had a scenario credited to the tenor Adolphe Nourrit, with whom Marie had appeared the year before in Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, when she led the ballet of spectral nuns which constituted one of the opera’s most novel expressive scenes. (see fig.17 below)
La sylphide reflected the romantic ideal in its theme of a tragically unattainable love, and its combination of the exotic and the supernatural: a Scottish setting and an ethereal being who appears and vanishes with the illusion of flight, which Taglioni was perfectly trained to suggest. Her style of dancing was a creative triumph which has haunted the art of ballet ever since; it not only displaced the male as the dominant figure and established the supremacy of the ballerina for almost a century, but it also required that composers should emphasize the lightness and grace of the ballerina more than the ballet’s drama and situation, which is partly why much of the century’s ballet music is essentially feminine in character. Taglioni’s production of La sylphide, with music by Schneitzhöffer, carried the seeds of romantic ballet to Russia when Taglioni first danced there in 1837, but a version choreographed by Auguste Bournonville (1805–79) at Copenhagen in 1836 – the version that has survived – had a new score by H.S. Løvenskjold.
The obverse of the romantic image in dance was personified by Fanny Elssler (1810–84), a Viennese of strong dramatic character and virtuoso technique. If Taglioni was a spirit of the air, Elssler was the child of the earth, excelling in colourful character dances in which a theatrical presentation was given to such folkdances as the Spanish cachucha (fig.14) and the Polish krakowiak. Elssler first triumphed in Paris in Jean Coralli’s (1779–1854) ballet Le diable boiteux (1836) with music by Casimir Gide, and while Taglioni continued to suggest ethereal illusion in other ballets by her father, such as La fille du Danube (1836) and L’ombre (1839), Elssler dazzled with her virtuosity in La gypsy and La tarentule (both 1839). From 1840 she toured the USA for two years and achieved an artistic and financial success then unparalleled in American theatrical history, although there European ballet remained a sterile import which failed to stimulate any native dance activity in the theatre until the 20th century.
While Elssler was in the USA and Taglioni was in Russia, the Paris Opéra was conquered by a new ballerina who arrived from Naples by way of Milan: Carlotta Grisi (1819–99), a cousin of the celebrated singers Giuditta and Giulia Grisi. Carlotta was the discovery of Jules Perrot (1810–92), who had partnered Taglioni and turned to choreography when the male dancer became virtually eclipsed. A combination of talents which came together at an opportune moment comprised Perrot and Coralli as choreographers, Théophile Gautier who brought poetry to the writing of a scenario, and Adolphe Adam who extended the expressive character of ballet music: the result was Giselle, which had its première at the Opéra in 1841 (fig.15). In its contrast between the realistic peasants of the first act and the disembodied spirits of the second, the need for the ballerina to unite the essential characteristics of each, and the skill of Adam in an incipient use of leitmotifs and musical reminiscence for dramatic effect, Giselle represents the romantic ballet at its peak.
Perrot first made London an important centre for ballet during the 1840s, when he worked for six years at Her Majesty’s Theatre under Benjamin Lumley’s management. Perrot staged Giselle for Grisi (whom he had married) and went on to create some of the finest romantic ballets in Ondine (1843), La Esmeralda (1844), Catarina and Lalla Rookh (both 1846). These united the dramatic, the supernatural and the exotic in true ballets d’action where the choreography created sympathetic characters and carried the narrative forward without superfluous virtuosity, even if the music composed for each of them by Cesare Pugni did little more than embroider the rhythm and reinforce the expressive mood. Perrot also staged divertissements to display the finest dancers of the time, culminating in Pas de quatre (1845; fig.16), in which Lumley succeeded in presenting four divas simultaneously: Taglioni, Grisi, the Italian Fanny Cerrito (1817–1909) and the Danish Lucile Grahn (1819–1907).
Grahn represented another important centre of romantic ballet in Copenhagen, where Auguste Bournonville returned in 1830 from his studies with Vestris in Paris to direct the Danish Court Ballet (later the Royal Danish Ballet) for the next 47 years. As well as his own version of La sylphide, which he staged in 1836 for Grahn on the model of Taglioni’s Paris version, Bournonville created more than 50 ballets of different types for his Danish company, which continued independently of theatrical fashion elsewhere; by maintaining the prestige of the male dancer on a par with the ballerina he distinguished the Danish school of ballet from all others in Europe. Bournonville’s musical interests (which included the operas of Mozart and Wagner) encouraged native composers to provide original and homogeneous scores for his ballets. Two days before his death in 1879 he witnessed the début of Hans Beck, a dancer who carried the Bournonville ballet style into the mid-20th century with a continuity of tradition unparalleled elsewhere in Europe.
In Russia the foundations laid by Didelot up to 1829 were receptive to the French romantic influences brought first by Taglioni in La sylphide to St Petersburg in 1837. She continued to appear there each year to 1842, and Elssler, Grisi, Cerrito and Grahn went there in her wake, dancing the ballets most closely associated with them. These included Giselle, which established Yelena Andreyanova (1819–57) as the first Russian romantic ballerina at St Petersburg; her Moscow counterpart was Yekaterina Sankovskaya (1816–78), who danced La sylphide and followed Andreyanova in Giselle, Elssler in La Esmeralda and Taglioni in La fille du Danube. Sankovskaya also choreographed her own production of Le diable à quatre in Moscow four years before Perrot staged it in St Petersburg; Perrot went there when London’s interest in ballet declined after Jenny Lind’s operatic successes, and remained as ballet-master until 1859, when he was succeeded by Arthur Saint-Léon, a virile dancer and Cerrito’s husband until they separated in 1851. Saint-Léon had only modest success in Russia except for The Little Hump-Backed Horse, one of the first ballets on a specifically Russian folk story which, in spite of the limited musical interest of Pugni’s score, supplemented by themes borrowed from Rossini (Tancredi in particular), remained in the repertory for many years after its 1864 première (20th-century productions by other choreographers continued to use the Pugni music until a new score was composed by Shchedrin for performance in 1960). The native Russian element in ballet was consolidated by The Fern (1867), with choreography by Sergey Sokolov, a pupil of Saint-Léon, and music by Yury Gelber, first violin and conductor of the Bol'shoy Theatre orchestra, and led directly to later balletic triumphs in association with Tchaikovsky.
Throughout the 19th century ballet retained a connection with opera, chiefly when composers incorporated dance scenes to diversify weightier emotional matters. Weber anticipated some elements of La sylphide by more than 20 years in his early opera Silvana (1810), in which his mostly mute heroine embodies the romantic woodland spirit and expresses herself in dance. Weber evoked a strong flavour of Spanish dance in his music for Preciosa; he added a newly composed pas de cinq to Euryanthe in 1825 for its Berlin production, to please Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia; and Oberon has enchanting dances woven into the musical fabric. In Russia, Glinka was an admirer of ballet who took lessons in his youth, and whose knowledge of ballet and folkdance is reflected in dance scenes which grow out of the dramatic action, notably in A Life for the Tsar (1836) and Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842). By the 1820s ballet had become a necessary element of all productions at the Paris Opéra, where Rossini, after interpolating dance movements from other sources in his earlier operas, provided two extensive dance sequences in Guillaume Tell (1829), in which Marie Taglioni first danced the well-known Tyrolean Dance.
Meyerbeer incorporated ballet to more than decorative purpose in Robert le diable (1831), his ballet of the spectral nuns serving to tempt the hero from the path of honour (fig.17), but in his later operas such as Les Huguenots, L’étoile du nord and L’Africaine his ballet sequences were more in the nature of divertissements, as were those Donizetti added to Les martyrs (the French version of Poliuto) or to La favorite and Dom Sébastien. Verdi’s adaptations for the Paris Opéra are particularly interesting in this respect; he added a ballet to I Lombardi when it was staged there as Jérusalem; he composed a ballet of the Four Seasons as an original element in Les vêpres siciliennes; he added Spanish-gypsy dances when Il trovatore became Le trouvère (including one based on the theme of the Anvil Chorus); he summoned Hecate and the witches to dance in Macbeth; and he equipped the Paris production of Don Carlos with ‘La Pérégrina: ballet de la reine’ (fig.18). He resisted blandishments to add a ballet to Rigoletto, but in 1894 provided a divertissement for Otello, his last music for the theatre.
With the decline of romantic ballet as an artistic entity after about 1850, ballets became more and more an excuse for vulgar display by individual performers or for varying degrees of elaborate spectacle. The entrenched position in Paris within ten years is illustrated by the episode of the ballet Wagner was required to add to Tannhäuser: he placed it at the start of Act 1 whereupon part of the audience, having arrived too late to witness it, created a disturbance that wrecked the opera’s prospects. French composers such as Berlioz, Gounod and Massenet took care to safeguard themselves by making due provision for ballet in their operas; others alternated between operas and ballets as complementary entertainments. When Grétry’s Zémire et Azor became a ballet in 1824, Schneitzhöffer retained much of the original music in his transcription, but when Auber turned his Marco Spada opera of 1852 into a ballet on the same subject five years later, he constructed a quite different score using themes from Fra Diavolo and his other operas.
Adam worked successfully in both genres, as did his pupil Delibes, who was responsible for two scores that raised the standard of ballet music at a time when the art itself was in decline in western Europe. The first of these was Coppélia (1870), originally choreographed in Paris by Saint-Léon, in which Delibes extended Adam’s device of associating themes with characters. The lack of difference in musical manner between the male and female dances in Coppélia is explained by the fact that the male had been so far relegated that his leading role was then, and for many years subsequently, danced by a female en travestie. Delibes further developed the leitmotif device in Sylvia (1876), and Tchaikovsky came to know and admire the music to fruitful purpose, but none of the original choreography, by Louis Mérante (1828–87), has survived.
Tchaikovsky once described his music for Swan Lake as ‘poor stuff compared with Sylvia’, but it was his score which, by treating ballet as a subject worthy of musical imagination, set new standards for the role of music in classical ballet and achieved one of its enduring masterworks. Swan Lake had its origins in a domestic entertainment by the children and friends of Tchaikovsky’s sister, performed at their home probably about 1871. It was extended to a four-act ballet on a commission in 1875–6 from the directorate of the Imperial Theatres, and was first performed at the Bol'shoy Theatre, Moscow, in 1877, with Pelagia Karpakova in the dual leading role of Odette-Odile. Nobody was credited with a scenario for Swan Lake in the original programme, but the folk story seems to have been given theatrical form by the Bol'shoy Theatre director Vladimir Begichev and the dancer Vasily Heltzor, in collaboration with Tchaikovsky and the ballet-master Julius Reisinger (who was responsible for the first choreography). The ballet achieved a modest success in spite of difficulties presented by the stronger and more organic musical element, and choreography that hardly matched the level of musical invention. A Russian dance at the first performance, and a full-scale pas de deux at the fifth, were added by Tchaikovsky at the request of the ballerinas concerned.
Nikolay Kashkin, who made the first piano transcription of Swan Lake, later recalled that the ballet ‘held its place on the stage until the scenery was worn out … Not only the décor became ragged, but the musical score suffered more and more until nearly a third was exchanged with music from other ballets, and not necessarily good ones’. In progressively more mutilated form the ballet continued in the Bol'shoy Theatre repertory through the new choreographic version made by Joseph Hansen in 1880 until it was eventually dropped in 1883. It then remained unperformed until after Tchaikovsky’s death when an entirely new version was mounted at St Petersburg in the wake of the greater successes of The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and The Nutcracker (1892).
Meanwhile in 1869 the Russian imperial ballet had come under the despotic control of Marius Petipa (1818–1910), a French-born ballet-master and choreographer whose brother, Lucien, was premier danseur at the Paris Opéra, and whose father, Jean, had taught at the Russian Imperial Academy of Dancing. Building on the existing foundations, Petipa created 46 original ballets in Russia which raised the style to a peak of spectacular grandeur; the best of them continued to influence the course of classical ballet and its teaching throughout the 20th century. Petipa had already toured in France, Spain and the USA; he first went to St Petersburg in 1847 and was premier danseur until 1858 when he became second ballet-master under Saint-Léon. In this capacity he staged his first important ballet in 1862, the three-act Pharaoh’s Daughter, with music by the ubiquitous Pugni, who at that time had the official post of staff ballet composer to the Imperial Theatres. Petipa’s mixture of pas d’action stemming from Perrot’s dramatic principles, with exotic divertissements, fantastic processions and multiple apotheoses, not necessarily germane to the narrative, constituted the first ballet à grand spectacle, a type that dominated Russian ballet for the rest of the century. The Sleeping Beauty remains the most celebrated example, more of Petipa’s choreography having survived from this than from any other, but scenes and pas de deux by him have been handed down from the 1895 revision of Swan Lake, from Don Quixote (1869) and La bayadère (1877) with music by Minkus, and from the 1899 revision of Le corsaire.
The composition of The Sleeping Beauty, described by Stravinsky as ‘the convincing example of Tchaikovsky’s great creative power’, was brought about by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, director of the Imperial Theatres, who abolished the post of staff ballet composer and engaged composers of more distinction. Vsevolozhsky prepared the scenario and designs, while Petipa mapped out in detail a sequence of dances which, far from being a hindrance to musical composition (as some commentaries have suggested), proved a practical help to Tchaikovsky, whose enthusiastic collaboration resulted in the supreme example of 19th-century classical ballet. It was first performed at the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, in 1890, and remains a cornerstone of the classical ballet repertory.
Two years later Vsevolozhsky brought Tchaikovsky and Petipa together again for The Nutcracker, which was to form part of a double bill with Tchaikovsky’s one-act opera Iolanta, but Petipa had not progressed very far before illness compelled him to yield the choreography to his assistant, Lev Ivanov (1834–1901), who alone was named on the posters for the first production at St Petersburg in 1892 (fig.19). Ivanov was further responsible for a new version of Act 2 of Swan Lake, mounted as a memorial to Tchaikovsky after the composer’s death in 1893, which led to the full new production in 1895 by Petipa and Ivanov together, from which most later versions of the ballet have stemmed. The scenario for this was modified by Tchaikovsky’s brother, Modest, and the alterations made in the musical sequence to meet Petipa’s requirements have continued to bedevil most productions of the ballet.
Ivanov worked so much in the shadow of Petipa, mostly revising older ballets, that the transitory nature of unrecorded choreography has denied him much posthumous fame, but he was a talented (though untrained) musician, and the known share of his contribution to Swan Lake, still preserved in the familiar Act 2, shows him to have been a much more musical choreographer than Petipa. Besides The Nutcracker, Soviet historians also single out Ivanov’s original choreography of the Polovtsian Dances in the first production (1890) of Borodin’s Prince Igor, but at the end of his life Ivanov had to petition the Imperial Theatres for financial assistance, on the strength of 50 years’ service, and he died in poverty. Petipa, however, recovered from his illness to collaborate fruitfully in Raymonda (1896–7) and The Seasons (1899) with Glazunov, whose symphonic aspirations sadly curtailed his evident talent for ballet. A change in the administration of the Imperial Theatres soon after and the failure of Koreschenko's The Magic Mirror brought about Petipa’s retirement. His legacy was a repertory and a style on which others could build, and an ensemble of dancers and a school of training which represented an investment for the future; Sergey Diaghilev was one of the first to profit from it.
In balletic usage the term ‘classical’ continues to define old and new works performed in a style derived from the Franco-Russian danse de l’école, in contrast with ‘modern dance’ (see §4) which commonly refers to the freer style derived in the USA from Isadora Duncan, Ruth St Denis and particularly Martha Graham, and in Europe from Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigman and Kurt Jooss.
(i) Diaghilev and the Russian exiles to 1930.
(ii) Britain, the USA and elsewhere.
(iii) The USSR: a continuing tradition.
Ballet, §3: 20th century: classical
Sergey Diaghilev (1872–1929), whose touch of genius changed the face and fortune of classical dance within five years and determined its 20th-century course in the West, could neither choreograph nor compose, but was originally concerned with disseminating Russian art in all its manifestations. He first organized exhibitions of visual art in Paris and then planned a production there of Borodin’s Prince Igor with a Russian company (1909); financial reasons caused this to be restricted to a presentation of Act 2 only, and consequently the Russian dancers in the scene of the Polovtsian Dances captured as much as if not more attention than the singers. Diaghilev realized that Russian ballet could be even more successful in the West than Russian opera.
His second Paris season (1909) accordingly presented for the first time the ‘Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev’ in a repertory almost entirely choreographed by Mikhail Fokine (1880–1942), including the Polovtsian Dances as a separate item. Prompted by what he had seen of the American modern dancer Isadora Duncan, Fokine’s other works in this and following years initiated a new trend in the use of pre-existing music, not necessarily composed with dancing in mind. At first he used such music in three different ways: as an anthology of works by one composer, of which the most famous example is the orchestrated Chopin anthology first made in 1909 for Les sylphides (originally Chopiniana, a title still retained in Russia), which was followed by similar Schumann anthologies for Le carnaval (1910) and Papillons (1914); a miscellany of works by different composers for the same ballet, as in Cleopatra (1909), which used music by Arensky, Glazunov, Glinka, Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Taneyev and Tcherepnin; or the association of a new balletic narrative or theme with a single work, as in Sheherazade (1910), where Rimsky-Korsakov’s music was matched to a story different from that which prompted his composition. Diaghilev soon realized that musical integrity was no less important to dance than choreography and visual character, and the second of these categories was quickly discarded; the others have continued to furnish a wide variety of musical means for dance.
Diaghilev also continued the 19th-century practice of specially written music for dance and engaged composers of true promise or distinction, most notably Stravinsky, whose three pre-1914 Diaghilev commissions, The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913), first brought him international fame. In that period Diaghilev also engaged Debussy (L’après-midi d’un faune and Jeux), Ravel (Daphnis et Chloé), Florent Schmitt (La tragédie de Salomé) and Richard Strauss (Josephslegende). From 1917 until Diaghilev’s death these were supplemented by Satie (Parade), Falla (El sombrero de tres picos), Poulenc (Les biches), Auric (Les fâcheux), Milhaud (Le train bleu), Sauguet (La chatte), Prokofiev (The Steel Step and The Prodigal Son) and Constant Lambert (Romeo and Juliet), while the production of Apollon musagète (1928) initiated the partnership between Balanchine and Stravinsky which had far-reaching consequences for classical dance in the following decades. Diaghilev’s policy towards composers confirmed his belief that music could and should have an organic and not merely decorative part in the theatrical conception.
The choreographic interest of Diaghilev’s company centred successively on Fokine, Leonid Massine (1896–1979) and George Balanchine (1904–83), and to a lesser extent on the dancer Vaclav Nizhinsky (1888–1950), who was responsible for the first choreography of L’après-midi d’un faune (fig.20), Jeux and The Rite of Spring in versions forgotten until the last named was reconstructed in 1988, and his sister Bronislava Nizhinska (1890–1972) who created, among other works, The Wedding and Les biches, which continue to be performed in her original choreography. A member of Diaghilev’s company at the outset was Anna Pavlova (1881–1931), who broke with him after his first Paris season, formed her own company (mostly English in origin) in 1914 and began the world tours that continued until her death. She spread the interest in classical ballet in many countries where it was a complete novelty, but her inferior taste in music (using that of Aphons Czibulka, Drigo, Paul Lincke and the slighter works of more distinguished names) was also responsible for a widespread and persistent belief that ‘ballet music’ was confined to works of a trivial nature.
With the sudden death of Diaghilev in 1929 and the disbandment of his company, the conditions became ripe for the establishment of a tradition of classical dance on a more permanent basis in Britain, the USA and elsewhere. Companies calling themselves ‘Ballets Russes’, or versions of that title, continued to be active and their confused identities are described in detail elsewhere (Lynham, D1947); the first of them, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, produced the so-called ‘symphonic ballets’ by Massine, of which Choreartium (1933), to Brahms’s Symphony no.4, occasioned something of a musical scandal but was much admired when revived by Birmingham Royal Ballet in 1991. (It was not, however, the first ballet to make use of a pre-composed symphony; Aleksandr Gorsky (see §iii below) had choreographed Glazunov’s Fifth Symphony at the Bol'shoy Theatre in 1915.)
Ballet, §3: 20th century: classical
A direct outcome of the Diaghilev company’s activities, and of its first production in the West of Petipa’s St Petersburg classic The Sleeping Beauty (Alhambra Theatre, London, 1921), was the establishment of classical dance on a regular basis through resident companies in Britain and the USA. Diaghilev had recruited and trained the three women who laid the foundations of classical ballet in Britain: Marie Rambert (1888–1982), Ninette de Valois (b 1898) and Alicia Markova (b 1910). Marie Rambert began teaching in London in 1920, and in 1926 founded Ballet Rambert, renamed Rambert Dance Company in 1987. Ninette de Valois became associated with Lilian Baylis at the Old Vic from 1926, and from 1931 at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, where the Vic-Wells Ballet formed by de Valois was the basis of the Royal Ballet. Alicia Markova was the first British prima ballerina and set the high professional standards that both the Rambert and the Vic-Wells companies aimed at from the outset; she later (1935–8) toured Britain with the Markova-Dolin Ballet.
Operating on Diaghilev’s principles as far as she could, de Valois staged classics from the notebooks of the Russian régisseur Nikolay Sergeyev (Giselle, The Nutcracker and Swan Lake in 1934 and The Sleeping Beauty in 1939), and supplemented these with works of her own and others by Frederick Ashton (1904–88), who became a resident choreographer in 1935. Where possible, a collaboration was sought with British composers, including Vaughan Williams (Job, 1931; fig.21), Walton (Façade, 1931), Geoffrey Toye (The Haunted Ballroom, 1935), Gavin Gordon (The Rake’s Progress, 1935), and Bliss (Checkmate, 1937), while Constant Lambert as musical director made arrangements of music by such composers as Auber, Liszt and Meyerbeer (for Ashton’s Les rendezvous, Apparitions and Les patineurs respectively), and of Boyce for de Valois’ The Prospect before Us. The company became known as Sadler’s Wells Ballet in the late 1930s, after Markova left in 1935 to form her own company with Anton Dolin; Margot Fonteyn (1919–91) succeeded Markova in the ballerina roles, having begun dancing with the company in 1934. During World War II it was based at the New Theatre, London; it reopened Covent Garden in 1946 with The Sleeping Beauty and became the resident company there, receiving the royal charter in 1956. A second company, Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet (at first Sadler’s Wells Opera Ballet), was formed at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in 1946, and subsequently became the touring echelon of the Royal Ballet. In 1976 it returned to its former base and was officially renamed Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet. From 1990 it was based in Birmingham (as Birmingham Royal Ballet) with its own director and administration.
Rambert’s sphere of operation was more circumscribed, her company never acquiring a regular base for performance, but it complemented that of de Valois by consistently acting as a forcing-house for choreographic talent. Having brought to light Frederick Ashton, whose first ballet, A Tragedy of Fashion, to music by Eugene Goossens, inaugurated the Rambert dancers’ first appearance (Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 1926), Rambert subsequently developed the talents of Antony Tudor (who became a significant influence on classical dance in the USA), Walter Gore, Andrée Howard and Frank Staff, followed in the postwar period by several more, notably Norman Morrice and Christopher Bruce. Rambert encouraged a broadminded and relatively adventurous approach to music which enabled Tudor to create The Planets (to part of Holst’s suite, 1934) and Dark Elegies (to Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, 1937), and which also ranged from Schubert (Howard’s Death and the Maiden, 1937) to Poulenc, Honegger and Prokofiev before World War II.
Meanwhile Balanchine, who worked in Copenhagen, Paris and London for short periods after the Diaghilev company disbanded, was approached in 1933 with a plan to establish a base for classical dance in New York, to parallel developments in modern dance, and he opened the School of American Ballet there the next year. From it there appeared, as opportunity and funds allowed, a succession of companies including the American Ballet, Ballet Caravan and Ballet Society, and a growing team of dancers trained in Balanchine’s style (which he extended to numerous Broadway and film assignments in the 1930s and 40s). These activities brought about American subjects for dance and the participation of American composers; an example is Eugene Loring’s Billy the Kid with music by Copland, first staged by Ballet Caravan in 1938. Ballet Society, formed in 1946, was in due course invited to make its home at New York City Center, where it became the foundation of the New York City Ballet in 1948 and where it continued to flourish until it was installed at the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center in 1964.
Other major companies to establish the classical tradition in the USA include the San Francisco Ballet (from 1937) and the American Ballet Theatre, originally formed at New York City Center in 1940, with which Tudor became closely associated from the outset, and whose later notable choreographers include Jerome Robbins. From the 1950s classical companies of varying standards proliferated in large cities and regional areas. In Canada a modest ballet school opened at Winnipeg in 1938, became a professional company from 1949 and received a royal charter in 1953 as the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. It was followed by the National Ballet of Canada based in Toronto (1951) and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, based in Montreal (1952).
In Europe the once supreme Paris Opéra Ballet declined into the doldrums, from which it was partly lifted by a former Diaghilev principal Serge Lifar (1905–86); it regained much of its old prestige under the direction of Rudolf Nureyev (1938–93). However, the Paris-based company Les Ballets Suédois was influential in experimental work (1920–25), as was Les Ballets des Champs-Elysées in maintaining the Paris Opéra tradition in the period 1945–50. In Copenhagen the Royal Danish Ballet continued on its course undisturbed by the rest of the balletic world and unaffected by Diaghilev (except for brief visits from Fokine in 1925 and Balanchine in 1930), and was rediscovered internationally after 1945 as the repository of the Bournonville style and method, virtually unchanged for a century. More recently, under Flemming Flindt (b 1936), the Danish company has sought to maintain a balance between the Bournonville tradition and new developments in classical dance, notably commissioning original music from Maxwell Davies for Flindst’s two-act ballets Salome (1978) and Caroline Mathilde (1991). Flindt left in 1978 to form his own independent company and was succeeded by former principal dancer Hemming Kronstam, and then in 1996 by Maina Gielgud, the first woman to direct the company and the first non-Dane for 180 years. But she found the position untenable and left after one year.
Ballet, §3: 20th century: classical
Between the retirement of Petipa from St Petersburg in 1903 and the revolution of 1917, the focus of classical ballet moved to Moscow, where Aleksandr Gorsky (1871–1924) was appointed ballet-master at the Bol'shoy Theatre in 1900. He staged new versions of several Petipa ballets, including five progressive versions of Swan Lake, making them more dramatic and less formal; he was the first choreographer to make use of a pre-existing symphony for dance (Glazunov’s Symphony no.5, 1915); and he introduced The Nutcracker to Moscow in 1919. His style of dance-drama was found to accord with the new Soviet aims for classical dance after 1917 when, instead of being swept away as a symbol of imperial decadence (as many activists wanted), it was defended by the first Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatol Lunacharsky, as a national asset that deserved to be made worthy of the proletariat.
With the classical tradition preserved and nurtured by outstanding teachers such as Agrippina Vaganova in Leningrad and Vasily Tikhomirov in Moscow, the new Soviet ballet passed swiftly through a phase of post-Revolutionary experiment to cultivate a new harvest in the classical tradition. Tikhomirov was the joint choreographer with Lev Lashchilin of the first successful ‘socialist ballet’, Glier’s The Red Poppy (1927; fig.22), which established socialist realism as a balletic theme and which is still in the repertory. The Golden Age (1930) was a fiercer but more controversial satire on capitalist principles, with music that helped to make Shostakovich more widely known; one of its choreographers, Vasily Vainonen (1898–1964), went on to create in The Fire of Paris (to Asaf'yev’s pastiche of 18th-century French music, 1932) the emotional human drama against a revolutionary political background which continued to be a prominent theme in Soviet ballet.
Gorsky’s naturalistic style of dance-drama reached its peak in the work of Leonid Lavrovsky (1905–67), who began choreography in the 1930s at Leningrad where the former imperial company now took its name from the Kirov Theatre (formerly the Mariinsky Theatre). Lavrovsky’s Romeo and Juliet in 1940 to Prokofiev’s score (the first version was by Vanya Psota at Brno in 1938) was his major achievement; he also choreographed The Stone Flower in 1954 to Prokofiev’s last ballet score, after the composer’s death. Lavrovsky’s counterpart and predecessor at Moscow was Rostislav Zakharov (1907–84), whose ballets The Fountain of Bakhchisaray (1933, music by Asaf'yev) was the first of several on Pushkin subjects. He also choreographed the first version of Cinderella (1945) to Prokofiev’s other major ballet score, when the title role was taken by the most celebrated of Vaganova’s pupils and the outstanding Soviet ballerina of the mid-20th century, Galina Ulanova (1910–98).
A later version of Cinderella in 1964 had choreography by Konstantin Sergeyev (1910–92), another Leningrad dancer who had earlier made the first ballet on race relations in The Path of Thunder (1958), with music by Karayev and based on a novel by the South African writer Peter Abrahams. The classic tragedy of Spartacus, with music by Khachaturian, has furnished successive ballets by Igor Moyseyev (1958), Leonid Jacobsen (1966) and in 1968 by Yury Grigorovich, who became director of the Bol'shoy Ballet in 1964, remaining in the post until his resignation in 1995. His productions have modified naturalistic dance-drama by reasserting the supremacy of the classical style, but used with more freedom of imagination, as in his versions of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker.
The Lavrovsky production of Romeo and Juliet, led by Ulanova and Yury Zhdanov, opened the Bol'shoy Ballet’s first season at Covent Garden in 1956 and initiated an influence on classical dance in the West which was continued in later tours by the Bol'shoy and Kirov companies (the latter first appeared at Covent Garden in 1961). Ulanova’s embodiment of a total commitment to a dramatic role, with musical phrasing to heighten emotional expression, and a technique that was broader in outline and more impassioned in character than that attempted by Western dancers, brought about a new focus of style in classical dance, as did Soviet dancers who left the USSR to settle and work in the West, notably Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Barïshnikov. The underlying conservatism of music in Soviet dance, however, has been less fruitful elsewhere.
With the advent of political and economic reform (perestroika) promoted from 1985 under the government leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, leading to the disintegration of the USSR, the major state ballet companies found themselves confronted by artistic and economic problems. Subsidies were reduced, and the greater freedom of the individual allowed more dancers to seek lucrative engagements in the West, chiefly as guest artists for limited seasons. However, some obtained full-time contracts, such as Irek Mukhamedov from the Bol'shoy Ballet who joined London's Royal Ballet as a principal from 1990. A state of flux on the Russian ballet scene left standards in decline, and a season by the Bol'shoy Ballet in London in 1993 was so poorly received and adversely reviewed that a planned return the next year had to be cancelled for lack of public response. The company's artistic director of 30 years, the despotic Yury Nikolaiyevich Grigorovich (b 1927), described in some quarters as a ‘Soviet fossil’, was forced to resign in 1995, and was replaced by Vladimir Victorovich Vasiliyev (b 1940), a former dancer and a fierce critic of Grigorovich. From the company's summer season in London in 1999 it appeared that standards were improving, although the repertory and musical character were still stagnant. Similarly in St Petersburg, the Kirov Ballet director of 20 years, Oleg Mikhailovich Vinogradov (b 1937) resigned in 1997, and control was taken by the conductor Valery Gergiyev, artistic director of the Kirov Opera, assisted by a committee of ballet advisers including principal dancers.
Ballet, §3: 20th century: classical
From being concentrated in a few centres and touring companies, classical dance in the latter part of the 20th century became an element of national or civic cultural prestige throughout the world. Whether funded from government, commercial or private sources, full-time companies devoted wholly or mainly to classical dance are active in almost all European countries, Russia and neighbouring republics, the Middle East, North and South America, Cuba, China, Japan, Australasia and South Africa. In many countries two or more companies perform in direct or complementary competition, and it has become a regular practice for tours to be made from one country to another on a continuing basis of cultural exchange, a practice virtually initiated by the successful visit of Sadler’s Wells Ballet from Covent Garden to New York in 1949 and repeated for many successive years until costs became prohibitive.
Classical companies involve larger numbers of dancers than their modern-dance counterparts, and their success depends fundamentally on at least one resident choreographer or director whose works give the company a corporate personality, and on schools of ballet where teachers of distinction can provide, year by year, a flow of intensively trained young talent to the professional companies. Basic repertories generally include at least one of the five main ‘classics’: the three Tchaikovsky ballets, Giselle and Coppélia, to which a Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev) is often added. These are supplemented by the works of the resident choreographers and others, who may be invited to produce their more successful ballets in other countries. Some choreographers work in peripatetic fashion for any company wishing to engage them, and works from the Diaghilev repertory continue to be revived after more than 50 years. Forms of notation have enabled older works to be re-produced, and new systems of notation (‘choreology’) can provide a more lasting record of new works, although it is frequently felt that productions staged from notation alone lack the personality their creators would have given them.
The ‘dance explosion’ of the 1970s and 80s was a world phenomenon, helping in Britain to raise the profile of dance as an art and an entertainment in both professional and community contexts. The fragments of fallout from this explosion of activity have tended to coalesce into numerous small groups, usually of a modern or postmodern character, who come together in performance for a few days, weeks or months, at the behest of any self-styled choreographer who can obtain public funding, commercial sponsors or a mixture of both, and whose awareness of music is often limited to ‘staining the background’ with sound, usually on tape and sometimes electro-acoustic.
There are, of course, honourable exceptions, whose choreographic work has reflected an understanding of the creative contribution that music can make to a dance conception and has thus encouraged more composers to realize that new music for dance can bring, as well as artistic fulfilment, more financial reward through repeated performances than much concert work can offer. Financial constraints usually limit new work, whether in the classical or modern category, to single-act length of from 15 to 60 minutes. A large national company may stage four to eight such works a year, unless some special occasion enables the number to be increased; the most memorable example was New York City Ballet’s tribute to Stravinsky (1972), when 31 ballets to his music (of which 20 were entirely new works) were staged within a week by Balanchine and six other choreographers.
In postwar economic conditions the full-evening ballet with music specially composed, the most usual kind of work a century earlier, became very rare. The first three-act score by a British composer was Britten’s The Prince of the Pagodas (1957), created by John Cranko (1927–73) for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden; others of musical distinction have been Henze’s Undine (1958) for Ashton and the Royal Ballet, and three ballets by Peter Darrell (1929–87): Sun into Darkness (1966; music by Malcolm Williamson) for Western Theatre Ballet; and Beauty and the Beast (1969; music by Thea Musgrave) and Mary, Queen of Scots (1975; music by John McCabe), both for Scottish Ballet. Original scores for David Bintley’s Hobson’s Choice (Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, 1989) and Far from the Madding Crowd (Birmingham Royal Ballet, 1996) were composed by Paul Reade (1943–97).
Other full-length ballets have been staged to pre-existing music. Some have tried to remodel 19th-century prototypes with new arrangements of the music as well as new choreography, such as Don Quixote (Minkus, arranged by Lanchbery), La fille mal gardée (Hérold, arranged by Lanchbery; fig.23), and Beatrix (Adam, arranged by Horovitz). Various musical compromises have enabled operas and operettas to furnish balletic subjects: Cranko’s Onegin (1965) for the Stuttgart Ballet and Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon (1974) for the Royal Ballet use anthologies of smaller works by Tchaikovsky and Massenet respectively, unconnected with the operas of either, but Darrell’s The Tales of Hoffmann (1972), Cinderella (1979) and Carmen (1985) for Scottish Ballet, and Ronald Hynd’s The Merry Widow (1975) for the Australian Ballet, are based on transcriptions of the opera scores by Offenbach, Rossini, Bizet and Lehár. Music may occasionally be derived from more than one composer within the same ballet, as in MacMillan’s Anastasia (1971), where Martinů is preceded by Tchaikovsky to point up the difference in time between pre- and post-Revolutionary Russia, or the awkward and less justified juxtapositions of Haydn and Joseph Lamb’s ragtime in Twyla Tharp’s Push Comes to Shove (1976), and of Ravel and Christopher Rouse in Lila York’s Sanctum (1997), both works by American choreographers.
Thus music for classical dance is a flexible matter. Most new ballets use pre-existing music, ranging from a single work to an anthology. Massine’s ‘symphonic’ ballets of the 1930s have had little direct influence, and Roland Petit’s matching of a dramatic narrative to Bach’s Passacaglia in C minor (three times repeated) in Le jeune homme et la mort (1946) was controversial, but it can reasonably be claimed that Ashton’s Symphonic Variations (1946, to César Franck) constitutes one of his choreographic masterworks, no less an achievement than his Enigma Variations (1968) or MacMillan’s The Song of the Earth (1965). Narrative associations have tended to become tenuous or have been discarded, not least in the later works of the long and fruitful association of Balanchine and Stravinsky from Apollon musagète (1928) to Duo concertant (1972); their collaboration includes in Agon (1957) and Movements (1963) what many regard as the deepest interpenetration of music and dance ever achieved. With or without new music, Stravinsky’s dictum holds good: ‘Choreography must realize its own form, one independent of the musical form though measured to the musical unit. Its construction will be based on whatever correspondences the choreographer may invent, but it must not seek merely to duplicate the line and beat of the music’ (Memories and Commentaries).
Where pre-existing music is used, the effect of the resulting ballet is governed by a single crucial principle: that the level of choreographic imagination should never be less than that of the music. A ballet (or a modern dance) can be better than its music, but it can never afford to be worse. Sometimes a ballet can legitimately and successfully change a musical conception, as was achieved by Fokine with Rimsky-Korsakov in Sheherazade (1910) and by Darrell in setting a digest of Othello (1973) to the first movement alone of Liszt’s Faust Symphony. Occasionally a musical work engages the attentions of several different choreographers independently, as happened in the 1960s with Berio’s Sinfonia and in the early 1970s with George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children.
However, the plethora of small-scale, mostly modern or postmodern dance work found in most European countries and North America, and greatly fostered in Britain by the Arts Councils in a policy of encouraging the wider dissemination of dance in the community, unsupported by either the knowledge or the resources to involve a creative contribution from music, has served mainly to demonstrate the rarity of true choreographic talent. It is a remarkable generation that produces more than two or three new choreographers of distinction anywhere and, while dancers generally were becoming increasingly expert in technical proficiency, choreographers in the 1990s were finding more and more difficulty in keeping pace with them, much less inventing new ways to challenge them and entertain their audiences.
Three factors militate against the more frequent use of specially composed music for dance: the cost of commission fee, copying, extra rehearsal and performing rights; the time taken to compose a score, generally longer than it takes to compose choreography and often longer than production schedules can allow; and the contrasting approaches of the two forms of creative work: the choreographer creates in fragments, discarding and building, while the ballet composer, unlike his 19th-century counterpart, usually begins with a total concept and fills in the detail. Nevertheless, the responsive collaboration of choreographer and composer remains the best means to dance creation, as the ideal ‘perfect analogous concord between what we see and what we hear’ recommended by Blasis in the early 19th century.
The term ‘modern’, or ‘contemporary’, dance is applied to any of the styles and techniques of theatrical dancing, intended for independent presentation, that grew up during the 20th century as an alternative to the strict disciplines of classical ballet. In America its pioneers were Isadora Duncan (1878–1927), who took ancient Greek art as her inspiration, and Ruth St Denis (1877–1968), who modelled her work primarily on Eastern sources. Duncan’s influence was worldwide as a result of her many tours, and the impression she made on Fokine during a visit to Russia particularly influenced the course of classical ballet. Her revealing costumes, flimsy draperies and bare feet were regarded as daring, but introduced a valuable reform of dance costumes in general (for illustration see Duncan, Isadora). Musically her great innovation was the use of any score that inspired her; she danced to symphonies by Beethoven, Schubert and Tchaikovsky, and appeared at the Bayreuth Festival in 1904 in some of her interpretations of Wagner’s music. Previously dancing had been largely confined to inferior music, and the greater freedom of choice she introduced gave the opportunity for many subsequent developments. Her personal qualities as a performer inspired in many others an interest in dance, but although she devoted much time to founding dance schools for children, the direct influence of her technique remains curiously limited.
In 1915 St Denis and her dance partner Ted Shawn (1891–1972) – a successful propagandist against the misconception that dancing was an effeminate career for men – formed a school, known from 1917 as Denishawn, which produced most of the next generation of American modern dancers. Prominent among them were Doris Humphrey, who devised means of teaching the art of choreography, Charles Weidman, who pioneered specifically American themes, and Martha Graham (1894–1991). It was Graham more than anyone else who successfully devised a technique of modern dance that could be taught as the basis for the dancer’s own personal use in different styles. The aim of modern dance has always been expression rather than display, with a consequent emphasis on innovation and a personal style, but the success of the Graham School in New York (founded 1941) prevented the ill-informed charge (analogous to attacks made on modern painters) that modern dancers’ style stemmed merely from lack of technique. Graham’s own ballets, often based on mythological or psychological subjects, have a theatrical power that established her internationally as the leading modern dancer of her generation and helped to popularize modern dance where it had formerly been resisted (fig.24).
Graham’s pupils and partners often went on to form their own companies and soon demonstrated that the technical training they had in common was no bar to strikingly individual development. Among them Merce Cunningham (b 1919), in collaboration with his musical director John Cage and artistic directors Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, had the greatest influence, pioneering a dissociation of music and dance in which, though presented concurrently, each aimed at self-sufficiency instead of the dance taking its rhythms and structure from the music (see Cage, John, fig.2). Cage and some of his fellow musicians greatly affected the course of American modern dance, not only by their collaboration with Cunningham but also by their participation in the many and often completely anarchic dance experiments that took place in Judson Memorial Church, New York. In return, the musicians benefited through their scores having earlier and more frequent performances than if they had waited for concert presentation, and they were heard by an audience in sympathy with radical experiment.
In pre-war Europe modern dance was most successful in Germany, where Rudolf von Laban (1897–1958) and Mary Wigman (1886–1973) were the leading exponents. Laban’s pupil Kurt Jooss (1901–79, active in the 1920s in Münster and Essen) created the most successful single work of the German school, The Green Table (1932, Paris), with a specially written score for two pianos by F.A. Cohen; because of its perennially relevant theme of anger at political machinations leading to war, this has entered the repertories of several companies, including some based on classical ballet technique. Jooss fled from the Nazis and spent many years in England; he re-founded his school in Essen in 1949, but after the war the slightly heavy style with which he was associated became less popular in central Europe. In Britain it was the success of visiting companies from the USA that revived interest in modern dance and led to the foundation of new companies, of which the London Contemporary Dance Theatre became the most flourishing, under the direction of another of Graham’s former partners, Robert Cohan (fig.25).
In spite of increased interest among European dancers and audiences, most innovations in modern dance have continued to come from its American practitioners. Paul Taylor (b 1930) developed fresh qualities of humour and lyricism in a form previously tending to be a little dry, and Alwin Nikolais’s imaginative use of lighting won much admiration. Nikolais (b 1912) also composed his own music, with the aid of a synthesizer, and some other modern-dance choreographers have made their own accompaniments, generally using either percussion or magnetic tape; modern dance has been associated with the full spectrum of contemporary music of all qualities.
The many experimental approaches to both modern and classical dance among the youngest generation of choreographers calls into question the future of both forms. A considerable overlap has developed between the two styles, which at one time regarded each other with hostile caution. The Nederlands Dans Theater pioneered a style combining elements of both forms, and in Britain the established Ballet Rambert was reorganized on similar lines. Some of the best choreographers, led by Glen Tetley (b 1926) from the USA, who trained and performed in both styles, now work in a way that could lead to classical and modern dance becoming historical, joint precursors of a new kind of dance combining the brilliance of one, the expressiveness of the other and fresh elements inspired by new developments in theatre and music.
A General. B 17th and 18th centuries: (i) Writings: contemporary sources (ii) Later studies: France (iii) Later studies: outside France. C 19th century. D 20th century: classical: (i) Individual artists (ii) General studies. E Modern dance: (i) General studies (ii) Individual artists.
GroveO (‘Dance’; C.B. Schmidt, R.J. Wiley)
Les spectacles à travers les âges: musique, danse (Paris, 1932)
L. Kirstein: Dance: a Short History of Classic Theatrical Dancing (New York, 1935/R, 3/1969)
J. Gregor: Kulturgeschichte des Balletts (Vienna, 1946)
P. Nettl: The Story of Dance Music (New York, 1947/R)
B. Kochno: Le ballet en France du quinzième siècle à nos jours (Paris, 1954)
F. Reyna: Des origines du ballet (Paris, 1955; Eng. trans., 1965, as A Concise History of Ballet)
G.B.L. Wilson: A Dictionary of Ballet (Harmondsworth, 1957, 3/1974)
R. Fiske: Ballet Music (London, 1958)
H. Searle: Ballet Music: an Introduction (London, 1958, 2/1973)
J. Lawson: A History of Ballet and its Makers (London, 1964)
P. Brinson: Background to European Ballet (Leiden, 1966)
L. Kirstein: Movement & Metaphor (New York, 1970, repr. 1984 as Four Centuries of Ballet: Fifty Masterworks)
P. Migel: The Ballerinas: from the Court of Louis XIV to Pavlova (New York, 1972)
Dictionary Catalog of the Dance Collection of the Performing Arts Research Center of the New York Public Library (Boston, 1974; annual suppls., Bibliographic Guide to Dance, 1975–; CD-ROM cumulation, 1994, as Dance on Disc; available online 〈www.catnyp.nypl.org〉
S.J. Cohen, ed.: International Encylopedia of Dance (New York, 1998)
for dance-specific writings see Schwartz and Schlundt (1987); for notated choreographies see Little and Narsh (1992) and Lancelot (1996)
F. Raguenet: Paralèle des italiens et des françois (Paris, 1702; Eng. trans., 1709/R; Eng. trans. also in MQ, xxxii (1946), 411–36)
J.L. Le Cerf de la Viéville: Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique françoise (Brussels, 1704–6/R)
J.B. Dubos: Réflexions critiques sur la poésie, la peinture et la musique (Paris, 1719, 6/1755/R; Eng. trans., 1748/R)
L. Riccoboni: Réflexions historiques et critiques sur les différens théâtres de l’Europe (Paris, 1738/R; Eng. trans., 1741, 2/1754/R, as A General History of the Stage, from its Origin)
C. and F. Parfaict: Histoire de l’Académie royale de musique depuis son établissement jusqu’à présent (MS, c1740, F-Pn n.a.fr.6532)
A. de Léris: Dictionnaire portatif des théâtres (Paris, 1754)
C. and F. Parfaict: Le dictionnaire des théâtres de Paris (Paris, 1756)
J.B. Durey de Noinville andL. Travenol: Histoire du théâtre de l’Académie royale de musique en France (Paris, 2/1757/R)
G. Gallini: A Treatise on the Art of Dancing (London, 1762/R)
P.J.B. Nougaret: De l’art du théâtre (Paris, 1769/R)
AnthonyFB
T. de Lajarte: Bibliothèque musicale du théâtre de l’Opéra: catalogue historique, chronologique, anecdotique (Paris, 1878)
H. Abert: ‘J.G. Noverre und sein Einfluss auf die dramatische Ballettkomposition’, JbMP 1908, 29–95
P.-M. Masson: ‘Les “symphonies” de danse’, L’opéra de Rameau (Paris, 1930/R), 367–422
J.R. Anthony: ‘The French Opera-Ballet in the Early 18th Century: Problems of Definition and Classification’, JAMS, xviii (1965), 197–206
J.R. Anthony: ‘Some Uses of the Dance in the French Opéra-Ballet’, RMFC, ix (1969), 75–90
G. Seefrid: Die airs de danse in den Bühnenwerken von Jean-Philippe Rameau (Wiesbaden, 1969, 2/1971)
Jean-Philippe Rameau: Dijon 1983 [incl. G. Sadler: ‘The Paris Opéra Dancers in Rameau’s Day: a Little-Known Inventory of 1738’, 519–31; also 5 articles on dance in Rameau operas]
S. Pitou: The Paris Opéra: an Encyclopedia of Operas, Ballets, Composers, and Performers, i–ii (Westport, CT, 1983–5)
N. Lecomte: ‘Jean-Baptiste François Dehesse, chorégraphe à la Comédie Italienne’, RMFC, xxiv (1986), 142–91
J.L. Schwartz and C.L. Schlundt: French Court Dance and Dance Music: a Guide to Primary Source Writings, 1643–1789, Dance and Music, i (Stuyvesant, NY, 1987) [incl. sources from across Europe pertaining to dance in the French manner]
J. Chazin-Bennahum: Dance in the Shadow of the Guillotine (Carbondale, IL, 1988)
J. de La Gorce: ‘Guillaume-Louis Pécour: a Biographical Essay’, Dance Research, viii/2 (1990), 3–26
M.E. Little and C.G. Marsh: La danse noble: an Inventory of Dances and Sources (New York, 1992)
T. Betzwieser: Exotismus und ‘Türkenoper’ in der französischen Musik des Ancien Régime (Laaber, 1993)
R. Harris-Warrick and C.G. Marsh: Musical Theatre at the Court of Louis XIV: ‘Le mariage de la Grosse Cathos’ (Cambridge, 1994)
C.G. Marsh: ‘French Theatrical Dance in the Late 18th Century: Gypsies, Cloggers, and Drunken Soldiers’, Border Crossings: Dance and Boundaries in Society, Politics, Gender, Education and Technology: Toronto 1995 (Riverside, CA, 1995), 91–8
S.L. Foster: Choreography and Narrative: Ballet’s Staging of Story and Desire (Bloomington, IN, 1996)
I. Guest: The Ballet of the Enlightenment: the Establishment of the Ballet d’Action in France, 1770–1793 (London, 1996)
F. Lancelot: La belle danse: catalogue raisonné (Paris, 1996)
R. Legrand: ‘Chaconnes et passacailles dansées dans l’opéra français’, Le mouvement en musique à l’époque baroque, ed. H. Lacombe (Metz, 1996), 157–70
S. McCleave, ed.: Dance and Music in French Baroque Theatre: Sources and Interpretations (London, 1998)
M.K. Whaples: ‘Early Exoticism Revisited’, The Exotic in Western Music, ed. J. Bellman (Boston, 1998), 3–25
R. Haas: ‘Die Wiener Ballet-Pantomime im 18. Jahrhundert und Glucks Don Juan’, SMw, x (1923), 6–36
R.-A. Mooser: Opéras, intermezzos, ballets … joués en Russie durant le XVIIIe siècle (Geneva, 1945, 3/1964)
G. Croll: ‘Ballet und Pantomime um 1750’, IMSCR X: Ljubljana 1967, 168–71
L. Tozzi: Il balletto pantomimo del Settecento: Gaspare Angiolini (L’Aquila, 1972)
M.H. Winter: The Pre-Romantic Ballet (London, 1974)
K.K. Hansell: Opera and Ballet at the Regio Ducal Teatro of Milan, 1771–1776 (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1980)
K.K. Hansell: ‘Ballet in Stockholm during the Later 18th Century and its Relationship to Contemporary Trends on the Continent’, STMf, lxvi (1984), 9–42
R. Ralph: The Life and Works of John Weaver (New York, 1985)
K.K. Hansell: ‘Il ballo teatrale e l’opera italiana’, SOI, v (1988), 175–306; Eng. trans. in The History of Italian Opera, ed. L. Bianconi and G. Pestelli (Chicago, 1998)
B.A. Brown: Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna (Oxford and New York, 1991)
S. Dahms: ‘Das Repertoire des “ballet en action”: Noverre–Angiolini–Lauchery’, De editione musices: Festschrift Gerhard Croll, ed. W. Gratzer and A. Lindmayr (Laaber, 1992), 125–42
S. McCleave: Dance in Handel’s Italian Operas (diss., U. of London, 1993)
I. Alm: ‘Pantomime in Seventeenth-Century Venetian Theatrical Dance’, Creature di Prometeo: il ballo teatrale dal divertimento al dramma: studi offerti a Aurel M. Milloss, ed. G. Morelli (Florence, 1996), 87–102
I. Brainard: ‘The Speaking Body: Gaspero Angiolini’s rhétorique muette and the ballet d’action in the Eighteenth Century’, Critica musica: Essays in Honor of Paul Brainard, ed. J. Knowles (Amsterdam, 1996), 15–56
S. Dahms: ‘Das Mannheimer Ballet im Zeichen der Ballettreform des 18. Jahrhunderts’, Mannheimer Hofkapelle im Zeitalter Carl Theodors (Mannheim, 1992), Ballet Music from the Mannheim Court, i, ed. F.K. Grave (Madison, WI, 1996), pp.ix–xxiii
S. Dahms and S. Schroedter, eds.: Tanz und Bewegung in der barocken Oper: Salzburg 1994 (Innsbruck, 1996)
C. Turocy: ‘Reflections on Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia and Dance Conventions of the Eighteenth Century’, Reflecting our Past, Reflecting our Future: New York 1997, ed. L.J. Tomko (Riverside, CA, 1997), 311–21
I. Alm: Theatrical Dance in Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera (Chicago, forthcoming)
GroveO (‘Bournonville, Auguste’, M.N. Costonis; ‘Didelot, Charles-Louis’, R.J. Wiley; ‘Grahn, Lucile’, M.N. Costonis; ‘Ivanov, Lev Ivanovich’, R.J. Wiley; ‘Mérante, Louis’, I. Guest; ‘Taglioni, Filippo’, M.N. Costonis [incl. information on Marie Taglioni and illustration])
M. Steuer: Review of M.L. Becker: Der Tanz (Leipzig, 1901), Die Musik, ii/4 (1902–3), 122–3 [incl. reflections on the history of 19th-century dance]
C.W. Beaumont: The Romantic Ballet as seen by Théophile Gautier (London, 1932/R) [incl. trans. extracts from Gautier’s reviews]
N. Legat: The Story of the Russian School (London, 1932)
Yu. Slonimsky: Mastera baleta (Leningrad, 1937)
A.L. Haskell: Ballet (Harmondsworth, 1938/R and later rev. edns)
L. Moore: Artists of the Dance (New York, 1938/R)
S. Lifar: Carlotta Grisi (Paris, 1941; Eng. trans., 1947)
L. Vaillat: La Taglioni (Paris, 1942)
C.W. Beaumont: The Ballet called Giselle (London, 1944/R)
C.W. Beaumont: The Ballet called Swan Lake (London, 1952/R)
I. Guest: The Ballet of the Second Empire (London, 1953–5/R)
I. Guest: The Romantic Ballet in England (London, 1954/R)
I. Guest: Fanny Cerrito (London, 1956, 2/1974)
L. Moore, ed.: Russian Ballet Master: the Memoirs of Marius Petipa (New York, 1958/R)
Yu. Slonimsky: Didlo: vekhi tvorcheskoy biografii [Didelot: landmarks in a creative biography] (Leningrad, 1958)
Yu. Slonimsky: ‘Lebedinoye ozero’ P. Chaykovskogo [Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake] (Leningrad, 1962)
V. Krasovskaya: Russkiy baletnïy teatr vtoroy polovinï XIX veka [Russian ballet theatre from the second half of the 19th century] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1963)
R. Neiiendam: Lucile Grahn (Copenhagen, 1963)
I. Guest: A Gallery of Romantic Ballet (London, 1965)
I. Guest: The Romantic Ballet in Paris (London, 1966, 2/1980)
N. Roslavleva: Era of the Russian Ballet (London, 1966)
I. Guest: Fanny Elssler (London, 1970)
Teatervidenskab elige studier/Theatre Research Studies, ed. Institute for Theatre Research, U. of Copenhagen, no.2 (1972)
J. Warrack: Tchaikovsky (London, 1973)
R.J. Wiley: Tchaikovsky’s Ballets (London and New York, 1985)
M.E. Smith: Music for the Ballet-Pantomime at the Paris Opéra, 1825–1850 (diss., Yale U., 1988)
S. Pitou: The Paris Opéra: an Encyclopedia of Operas, Ballets, Composers, and Performers, iii (Westport, CT, 1990)
R.J. Wiley, ed. and trans.: A Century of Russian Ballet: Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1810–1910 (London and New York, 1990)
M.E. Smith: Ballet-Pantomime and its Kinship with Opera in the Age of Giselle (forthcoming)
V. Svetloff: Anna Pavlova (Paris, 1922/R)
T. Karsavina: Theatre Street (London, 1930, rev. 1950)
P.D. Magriel, ed.: Nijinsky, Pavlova, Duncan: Three Lives in Dance (New York, 1946–7/R)
A. Dolin: Markova: her Life and Art (London, 1953/R)
C. Barnes: Frederick Ashton and his Ballets (Brooklyn, NY, 1961)
A.E. Kahn: Days with Ulanova (London, 1962)
Yu.I. Slonimsky, ed.: M. Fokine: Protiv techeniya: vospominaniya baletmeistera [Against the flow: reminiscences of a ballet-master] (Leningrad, 1962, 2/1981; Eng. trans., 1961, as Memoirs of a Ballet Master)
S. Cohen: Antony Tudor: the Years in America and After (Brooklyn, NY, 1963)
J. Percival: Antony Tudor: the Years in England (Brooklyn, NY, 1963)
B. Taper: Balanchine (New York, 1963, enlarged 1974)
L. Massine: My Life in Ballet, ed. P. Hartnoll and R. Rubens (London and New York, 1968)
Z. Dominic and J.S. Gilbert: Frederick Ashton: a Choreographer and his Ballets (London, 1971)
J. Percival: The World of Diaghilev (London, 1971, rev. 1979)
M. Rambert: Quicksilver (London and New York, 1972) [autobiography]
O. Kerensky: Anna Pavlova (London, 1973)
K. Money: Fonteyn: the Making of a Legend (London, 1973)
M. Fonteyn: Autobiography (London, 1975)
J. Percival: Nureyev: Aspects of the Dancer (New York, 1975)
D. Vaughan: Frederick Ashton and his Ballets (London, 1977)
R. Buckle: Diaghilev (London, 1979)
A. Testa: ‘Bartók nell'estetica del balletto moderno in generale e nell'opera di Milloss in particolare’, RMI, xv (1981), 227–40
A. von Milloss: ‘Bartóks Bedeutung für die Balletästhetik des 20. Jahrhunderts’, Béla Bartók: zu Leben und Werk, ed. F. Spangemacher (Bonn, 1982), 27–38
Choreography by George Balanchine: a Catalogue of Works (New York, 1983) [pubn of the Eakins Foundation]
E. Thorpe: Kenneth MacMillan: the Man and his Ballets (London, 1985)
A. Vaganova: Osnovi klassicheskogo tantsa (Leningrad, 1934, 4/1963; Eng. trans., 1946, as Fundamentals of the Classic Dance, 2/1969 as Basic Principles of Classical Ballet)
C. Lambert: ‘Music and Action’, Footnotes to the Ballet, ed. C. Brahms (London, 1936), 161–74
N. de Valois: Invitation to the Ballet (London, 1937/R)
C. Beaumont: The Diaghilev Ballet in London (London, 1940, 3/1951)
A. Benois: Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet (London, 1941/R)
D. Lynham: Ballet Then and Now (London, 1947)
J. Slonimsky and others: The Soviet Ballet (New York, 1947/R)
G. Amberg: Ballet in America: the Emergence of an American Art (New York, 1949/R)
E. Denby: Looking at the Dance (New York, 1949, 1968)
M. Lederman, ed.: Stravinsky in the Theatre (New York, 1949/R)
P. Noble, ed.: British Ballet (London, 1949)
S.L. Grigor'yev: The Diaghilev Ballet 1909–29 (London, 1953/R)
M. Clarke: The Sadler’s Wells Ballet: a History and an Appreciation (London, 1955/R)
Yu. Slonimsky: The Bolshoi Theatre Ballet (London, 1956, 2/1960)
W. Terry: The Dance in America (New York, 1956, rev. 1971)
N. de Valois: Come Dance with me: a Memoir, 1898–1956 (London, 1957/R)
P. Brinson, ed.: The Ballet in Britain (London, 1962)
M. Clarke: Dancers of Mercury: the Story of Ballet Rambert (London, 1962)
H. Read and S.J. Cohen: Stravinsky and the Dance (New York, 1962)
E. Denby: Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets (New York, 1965)
N. Roslavleva: Era of the Russian Ballet [1770–1965] (London, 1966) [incl. Russ. bibliography]
E.W. White: Stravinsky: the Composer and his Works (Berkeley, 1966, 2/1979)
M.G. Swift: The Art of Dance in the USSR (Notre Dame, IN, 1968)
O. Kerensky: Ballet Scene (London, 1970)
V. Krasovskaya: Russkiy baletnïy teatr nachala XX veka [Russian ballet theatre of the early 20th century], i: Khoreografi [Choreographers] (Leningrad, 1971); ii: Tantsovshchiki [Dancers] (Leningrad, 1972)
L. Kirstein: The New York City Ballet (New York, 1973, enlarged 2/1978 as Thirty Years … the New York City Ballet)
R. Shead: Constant Lambert (London, 1973)
N. Goldner, ed.: The Stravinsky Festival of the New York City Ballet, 1972 (New York, 1974)
A. Croce: Afterimages (New York, 1977)
N. de Valois: Step by Step (London, 1977)
N. Goodwin: A Ballet for Scotland (Edinburgh, 1979)
J. Warrack: Tchaikovsky Ballet Music (London, 1979)
P. Brinson and C. Crisp: Ballet and Dance: a Guide to the Repertory (Newton Abbot, 1980)
J. Anderson: The One and Only: the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (London, 1981)
A. Bland: The Royal Ballet: the First Fifty Years (London, 1981)
K. Sorley Walker: De Basil’s Ballets Russes (London, 1982)
L. Garafola: Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes (Oxford and New York, 1989)
M. Bremser, ed.: International Dictionary of Ballet (Detroit and London, 1993)
J. Pritchard, ed.: Rambert: a Celebration: a Survey of the Company’s First Seventy Years (London, 1996)
R. Taruskin: Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (London, 1996)
J.E. Crawford Flitch: Modern Dancing and Dancers (London and Philadelphia, 1913, 3/1921)
H. Brandenburg: Der moderne Tanz (Munich, 1917)
E. Blass: Das Wesen der neuen Tanzkunst (Weimar, 1921, enlarged 2/1922)
S. Enkelmann: Tänzer unserer Zeit (Munich, 1937)
J. Martin: ‘Dance as a Means of Communication’, The Dance (New York, 1946)
M. Lloyd: The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance (New York, 1949)
W. Terry: ‘Modern Dance’, The Dance Encyclopedia, ed. A. Chujoy (New York, 1949, 2/1967)
W. Sorell, ed.: The Dance has Many Faces (New York, 1951, 3/1992)
D. Humphrey: The Art of Making Dances, ed. B. Pollack (New York, 1959)
L. Horst and C. Russell: Modern Dance Forms in Relation to the Other Modern Arts (San Francisco, 1961)
A.J. Pischl and S.J. Cohen, eds.: Composer/Choreographer (Brooklyn, NY, 1963)
S.J. Cohen, ed.: The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief (Middletown, CT, 1966)
J. Martin: ‘American Modern Dance’, The Dance Encyclopedia, ed. A. Chujoy (New York, 2/1967)
W. Sorell: The Dance through the Ages (New York, 1967)
J. Percival: Modern Ballet (London, 1970, rev. 1980)
D. McDonagh: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance (New York, 1970, rev. 1990)
J. Percival: Experimental Dance (London, 1971)
T. Borek: The Connecticut College American Dance Festival, 1948–1972 (New York, 1972)
M.B. Siegel: Watching the Dance go by (Boston, 1977)
J. Murray: Dance Now (Harmondsworth, 1979)
O. Norlyng: ‘Ny dans: ny musik’, DMt, lviii (1983–4), 98–107
A. Robertson and D. Hutera: The Dance Handbook (Harlow, 1988)
M. Clarke and C. Crisp: London Contemporary Dance Theatre: the First 21 Years (London, 1989)
K. Teck: Music for the Dance: Reflections on a Collaborative Art (New York, 1989)
K. Teck: Movement to Music: Musicians in the Dance Studio (New York, 1990)
S. Jordan: Striding Out: Aspects of Contemporary and New Dance in Britain (London, 1992)
H. Züllig: ‘Das Jooss-Ballett im englischen Exil’, Musiktradition im Exil: zurück aus dem Vergessen, ed. J. Allende-Blin (Cologne, 1993), 205–21
M. Gradinger: ‘Bewegungs-freiheit: Ausdruckstanz und Modern Dance: Wege zu einer emanzipierten Weiblichkeit’, NZM, Jg.155, no.4 (1994), 18–21
M. Allan: My Life and Dancing (London, 1908)
L. Fuller: Quinze ans de ma vie (Paris, 1908; Eng. trans. 1913/R)
C. Stewart Richardson: Dancing, Beauty and Games (London, 1913)
M. Desti: The Untold Story: the Life of Isadora Duncan 1921–1927 (New York, 1929)
K.S. Dreier: Shawn the Dancer (New York, 1933)
R. St Denis: An Unfinished Life (New York, 1939)
B. Morgan: Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs (New York, 1941, rev. 1980)
A.V. Coton: The New Dance: Kurt Jooss and his Work (London, 1946)
T. Shawn: Every Little Movement: a Book about François Delsarte (Pittsfield, MA, 1954, 2/1963)
W. Terry: The Legacy of Isadora Duncan and Ruth St Denis (Brooklyn, NY, 1959)
J.J. Martin: Days of Divine Indiscipline (Brooklyn, NY, 1961)
C.L. Schlundt: The Professional Appearances of Ruth St Denis & Ted Shawn: a Chronology and an Index of Dances 1906–1932 (New York, 1962)
Irma Duncan: Follow Me! (Brooklyn, NY, 1965) [autobiography]
C. Tomkins: The Bride & the Bachelors: the Heretical Courtship in Modern Art (New York, 1965; London, 1968, as Ahead of the Game: Four Versions of Avant-Garde; enlarged 2/1968 as The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde)
D. Humphrey: New Dance: an Unfinished Autobiography (New York, 1966)
L. Leatherman: Martha Graham: Portrait of the Lady as an Artist (New York, 1966)
L. Warren and others: The Dance Theater of Lester Horton (New York, 1967)
S.J. Cohen, ed.: Time to Walk in Space: Essays, a Biography and a Chronology about Merce Cunningham (New York, 1968)
M. Cunningham: Changes: Notes on Choreography, ed. F. Starr (New York, 1968)
M.B. Siegel, ed.: Dancer’s Notes (New York, 1969)
C.L. Schlundt: Into the Mystic with Miss Ruth (New York, 1971)
M.B. Siegel, ed.: Nik: a Documentary (New York, 1971)
S.J. Cohen, ed.: Doris Humphrey: an Artist First (Middletown, CT, 1972)