Ballet.

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.
1. 1670–1800.
2. 19th century.
3. 20th century: classical.
4. Modern dance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
REBECCA HARRIS-WARRICK (1), NOËL GOODWIN (2,
3), JOHN PERCIVAL (4)
Ballet
1. 1670–1800.
(i) The 17th century in France.
(ii) The 17th century outside France.
(iii) The 18th century.
Ballet, §1: 1670–1800
(i) The 17th century in 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
balletsfollowing 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.
Ballet, §1: 1670–1800
(ii) The 17th century outside France.
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.
Ballet, §1: 1670–1800
(iii) The 18th century.
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
simpleinterspersed 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.
Ballet
2. 19th century.
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.
(iii) Ballet in opera.
(iv) The classical ballet in Russia to 1900.
Ballet, §2: 19th century
(i) The transition to romantic ballet, 1800–1830.
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.
Ballet, §2: 19th century
(ii) The romantic ballet and its influence.
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.
Ballet, §2: 19th century
(iii) Ballet in opera.
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.
Ballet, §2: 19th century
(iv) The classical ballet in Russia to 1900.
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.
Ballet
3. 20th century: classical.
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.
(iv) Main trends since 1945.
Ballet, §3: 20th century: classical
(i) Diaghilev and the Russian exiles to 1930.
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
(ii) Britain, the USA and elsewhere.
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
(iii) The USSR: a continuing tradition.
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
(iv) Main trends since 1945.
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.
Ballet
4. Modern dance.
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.
Ballet
BIBLIOGRAPHY

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.

a: general

b: 17th and 18th centuries

c: 19th century

d: 20th century: classical

e: modern dance
Ballet: Bibliography

a: general
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;
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S.J. Cohen, ed.: International Encylopedia of Dance (New
York, 1998)
Ballet: Bibliography
b: 17th and 18th centuries
(i) contemporary sources
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)
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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)

(ii) later studies: France

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-
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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
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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–
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manner]
J. Chazin-Bennahum: Dance in the Shadow of the
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J. de La Gorce: ‘Guillaume-Louis Pécour: a Biographical
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T. Betzwieser: Exotismus und ‘Türkenoper’ in der französischen
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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
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H. Lacombe (Metz, 1996), 157–70
S. McCleave, ed.: Dance and Music in French Baroque Theatre:
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M.K. Whaples: ‘Early Exoticism Revisited’, The Exotic in Western
Music, ed. J. Bellman (Boston, 1998), 3–25
(iii) later studies: outside France
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Angiolini (L’Aquila, 1972)
M.H. Winter: The Pre-Romantic Ballet (London, 1974)
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Milan, 1771–1776 (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1980)
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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
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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)
Ballet: Bibliography
c: 19th century
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)
Ballet: Bibliography
d: 20th century: classical
(i) individual artists
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)
(ii) general studies
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)
Ballet: Bibliography
e: modern dance
(i) general studies
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
(ii) individual artists
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)