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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783960453 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Elliott & Thompson |
| Publication date: | 01/08/2015 |
| Series: | Classic FM Handy Guides Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 112 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Ballet
Classic FM Handy Guides
By Tim Lihoreau
Elliott and Thompson Limited
Copyright © 2015 Classic FMAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78396-045-3
CHAPTER 1
Preface
Mikhail Baryshnikov once said, 'No one is born a dancer. You have to want it more than anything.' Whether you agree with that or the American spiritual's view that 'All God's chillun got rhythm!', one thing is certain: ballet is the artistic pinnacle of dance.
When a human hears rhythmic music, it's a primal instinct to start drumming fingers or tapping feet. Studies of sleeping newborns show that they have innate rhythm. Varying rhythms were played as they slept; irregular beats caused imitative reactions in their brains, while regular motifs soothed the breast, leading scientists to conclude that we are born with a built-in sense of rhythm – possibly adopted from the mother's heart. But do we have an innate desire for dance?
Dance does seem to be an instinct. Scientists studying the brain have identified corresponding areas of the brain that are responsible for speech production and hand and leg gestures, suggesting that movements were used as a form of expression.
Put simply, dance may have been an early form of language.
Taking this as a starting point, it is not surprising that dance has been part of our societies for thousands of years. The Bhimbetka rock shelters, for example, in what is now Madhya Pradesh in India are thought to date back to 9000BCE and show representations of communal dance, while an ancient Greek terracotta statuette (c. 3000 BCE) showing a woman dancing was found in Taranto, the birthplace of the dance we now call the tarantella.
All of this is dance, certainly. But it's not ballet. To find the earliest twitchings of ballet, we only have to go back to much more recent times.
CHAPTER 2A Brief History of Ballet
Beginnings of Ballet
As with several other forms of artistic expression that combine elements of a number of arts, it is not easy to pinpoint the moment when ballet became identifiable as a discipline in its own right.
Entertainments involving movement to music, often with over-the-top input from scene painters and costume makers, had been taking place in the courts of Europe, particularly in France and Italy, from the time of Catherine de' Medici in the mid-sixteenth century. The form, which was known as ballet de cour, came into its own in France, notably at the Burgundian court. It bore some relationship to the entremets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – no, not tasty snacks 'between courses' beloved of stylish cooks today, but ever more lavish theatrical spectacles staged during banquets and portraying such events as the capture of Jerusalem or the fall of Constantinople.
Frankly, it was a bit of a ragbag. A typical ballet de cour might involve a song to start off with, some rhymed verses, a series of dances on a single theme (known as an entrée), followed by an exuberant grand ballet finale. Ducs and comtes, keen to demonstrate their wealth, refinement and artistic sensibility, would not only assemble the necessary talent to commission their own ballet de cour, but would often take a dancing role themselves. Even the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, would perform in one every now and then.
A seminal moment in the history of dance is the establishment in March 1661 in France of the Académie Royale de Danse – a first attempt to lay down some rules for the genre and prevent it developing into an even more random and bastardised form. Thirteen experts in dance were tasked by the King 'to restore the art of dancing to its original perfection and to improve it as much as possible'. The majority of the académistes, drawn from the King's entourage, were mostly both dancers and musicians, which demonstrates how intertwined the skills related to making music and moving to it were at the time. Indeed a document entitled 'The Marriage of Music and Dance' survives from 1664.
The founding of the Académie Royale de Danse was soon followed by the establishment of the Académie Royale de Musique. Although the two groups never formally merged, many members of both committees were associated with the Paris Opera Ballet, and over time the dancers – at this period exclusively male – recruited to entertain the King were interchangeable with those of the stage company.
Rather than existing as an art form on its own, ballet during this period often seemed to be a discrete unit within other entertainments, such as plays and operas.
Pierre Beauchamp (1631–1705) was born into a family of dance masters. He taught Louis XIV dance for twenty-two years and before his involvement with the Académie Royale de Danse – he was Director from 1671 – he had been the principal choreographer for Molière's company of actors, the Troupe du Roy, providing the integrated ballets for plays such as Le bourgeois Gentilhomme and Le Malade imaginaire. Not only is he one of the first identifiable choreographers, but he is also known as one of the first people to attempt to notate dance; his system, published by Raoul-Auger Feuillet, is known as Beauchamp–Feuillet notation. He is credited with codifying the five positions of the feet – still the basis of every child's introduction to classical ballet. He is also important to our story because of his collaborations with the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687).
From 1672 onwards, the calibre of Lully's music was one of the key factors in ballet's popularity. He knew his market, and his market was, in the first and most important instance, the King. Lully always reserved a place in his operas and tragédies en musique for substantial danced sections. If the King was a fan of ballet, then Lully, the Italian servant made good, was canny enough to ensure that there was always ballet for Beauchamp to choreograph and for the King to enjoy.
The Beauchamp–Feuillet publication Choreography, or The Art of Notating Dance gives us some inkling of what these ballets looked like. Performed exclusively by male dancers until 1681, this was movement in the service of a story. It was a language of gesture, which partly continued into the realm of the great nineteenth-century Romantic ballets, and it was enlivened by the virtuoso technique required for pirouettes and ornamented steps.
Ballet was thriving elsewhere in Europe. In Italy, which had experienced a parallel development in ballet de cour, ballets were now staged as interval entertainments, particularly in Venice.
In England, Charles II had been restored to the throne in 1660. After the restrictions on public performance, London looked to France for entertainment and cheerfully adopted French practice, even inviting Robert Cambert, whose Pomone was the first ever opera in French and who had been dislodged at the Académie by Lully, to set up a French-style Royal Academy of Music. Other musicians and dancers followed, joining and influencing English companies. The translation of the French notation books into English was a further factor in the reach and popularity of the French ballet tradition.
At his Cockpit Theatre in Drury Lane the actor Thomas Betterton staged a number of semi-operas (a mixture of spoken drama, song, dance, stage machinery and lavish spectacle) with extended ballet sections. He managed to procure the services of Henry Purcell and Jeremiah Clarke to write music for his company. Chief among his successes was Purcell's The Fairy Queen, for which the Act III dances were choreographed by the Holborn-based dancing master Josias Priest. Semi-opera as a genre, however, ran into the buffers at the turn of the seventeenth century when the Lord Chamberlain decreed that plays without music and the new genre of Italian opera should be licensed as separate entities.
French influence could be felt throughout western Europe, in Dresden, Hamburg and in Sweden. Lully's personal popularity was widespread, and enjoyment of the French style of incorporating danced sections within other genres was to lead to local commissions. By the time of his death in 1687 he was no longer enjoying the King's patronage to the extent he once had – scandal surrounding his dissolute personal life had driven him from favour and the King snubbed him publicly by not inviting him to conduct his opera Armide at Versailles. However, the status of ballet was assured and its popularity did not depend solely on the reputation of the composer who had done so much to establish it.
Enter Opéra-ballet
The next development was the genre of opéra-ballet, as dance elements became embedded into the narrative structure of opera, rather than providing complementary distraction during opera performances. The emergence of this new genre is usually dated from the composition of André Campra's L'Europe galante in 1697. While modelled on the entrée section of the ballet de cour, taking the expression of love as its theme over four acts, this work pulled together the sung and danced elements in an equal partnership.
Ballet was still growing in popularity for providing interludes in drama. It was flourishing as both a vehicle for narrative and as an abstract entertainment-within-an-entertainment in both theatres and opera houses with more and more dancers being employed across the continent. And the popularity of dance was beginning to make stars of dancers such as Jean Balon (1676–1739), who appeared in Les Horaces (see page 10) and Marie Anne de Cupis de Camargo (1710–1770), dubbed 'La Camargo'. Hailing from Brussels, she made her name with a signature move, a foursome of rapid crossed steps (the entrechat quatre); such was her fame, French restaurants names dishes after her, like the Bombe Camargo and the Soufflé Camargo.
Ballet was about to become a complete entertainment in its own right and not as an appendage – although an increasingly dominant appendage – to drama and opera.
Total Ballet
There are two contenders to be the first complete ballet. In 1714 the Duchesse du Maine commissioned two principal dancers from l'Opéra, Jean Balon and Françoise Prévost, to present an entertainment based on the final act of a tragedy by Pierre Corneille, Les Horaces. There was no singing, no speech, simply dance and mime to music. The Duchesse's guests, the intellectual elite of the day, gathered in the intimate setting of Château de Sceaux on the Île de France, were said to be deeply moved, some weeping at Prévost's performance, lamenting the death of her lover at the hands of her brother. However, this was a private performance and some would therefore discount it as the first true fully staged ballet.
The first public performance of a ballet took place on 2 March 1717 not in France or Italy but at London's Drury Lane Theatre. English choreographer John Weaver (1673–1760) produced The Loves of Mars and Venus, with French star Louis Dupré (known as 'le dieu de la danse', having performed at the Paris Opera for more than thirty-five years, well into his sixties) and English ballerina Hester Santlow as the lovers and Weaver himself as Vulcan. It made such an impact that it inspired a parody version by John Rich, the impresario behind John Gay's The Beggar's Opera.
Weaver followed this up a year later with Orpheus and Eurydice, 'a dramatick entertainment in dancing therupon'. He was responsible for a translation of the Beauchamp–Feuillet notation book and tried to set up a school of 'pantomime' – not the Christmas entertainment we think of today but a style of narrative movement, both heroic and emotional. It was an uphill struggle – in 1730 he was complaining about the public preference for 'pseudo-players, merry-andrews, tumblers and rope-dancers'.
With the advent of a concern for dramatic truth and narrative structure in ballet, established composers, who had up to this point provided music for danced interludes, became involved in the conception of works far more reliant on dance. Marie Sallé, a trail-blazing dancer and choreographer, who leant towards expressive, dramatic performances rather than concentrating on virtuoso display, collaborated with both Handel and Gluck. And Jean-Philippe Rameau had a great success with Les Indes galantes, an opéra-ballet, in 1735. Ten years earlier French settlers in the New World had sent six Native American chiefs to Paris, where they met Louis XV, pledged allegiance to the crown and presented three kinds of dances at the Théâtre-Italien. This provided Rameau with the inspiration for the fourth of his four entrées, Les Sauvages.
Complete ballets, half-and-half opéra-ballets, and ballets as interludes in drama and opera continued for some time side by side. It was Jean-Georges Noverre (1727–1810) who caught the zeitgeist and formulated and furthered the ballet d'action, where character and emotion were the driving forces. He concentrated on conveying feeling through the dancers' bodies and faces rather than focusing on technical expertise. He worked in Paris, Berlin, Dresden, Strasburg, Lyons and London, where the actor-manager David Garrick referred to him as 'the Shakespeare of the dance'. He could count among his friends Voltaire, Mozart and Frederick the Great. His birthday, 29 April, is now observed as International Dance Day.
Gluck, the bringer of emotional realism to opera with his reforms to opera seria, offered the same service to ballet. His Don Juan, with choreography by the Italian dancer, choreographer and composer Gaspere Angiolini, opened in Vienna in 1761. In 1766 Angiolini became Director of the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg, taking the ballet d'action to Russia.
By the end of the eighteenth century, there was an enormous public appetite for ballet. Throughout Europe and increasingly beyond, opera houses, which were still providing a home for ballet in its own right and as part of opera performance, were enlarging their companies – the Paris Opera had nearly a hundred dancers on its books at this time.
Ballet was now not a million miles from what we would recognise today on the stage of the Royal Opera House or the Bolshoi Theatre.
Romantic and Classical Ballet
In music, the eras of Classical and Romantic come in that order: Classical (1750-ish onwards) and then Romantic (1830-ish onwards). In ballet, these eras are reversed, although with very different date ranges. Romantic ballet came first, in the early to mid-nineteenth century, while what we now term 'classical ballet' had its golden age in the late nineteenth century, overlapping into the twentieth. Both, it should be said, are still very evident on ballet stages today.
Romantic ballet was muscular, almost gymnastic, for the male dancers, while the ballerinas were almost ethereal creatures, weightless, and seeming to float in the air. For plots, choreographers often turned to folklore and legend, set to music written by the greatest composers of the day. Special effects – for instance, the 'limelight' produced by gas lighting – began to be commonplace, and ballet 'skirts' were widely adopted alongside tutus. This was the period of ballet blanc, where the stage was an ocean of white skirts and bodices. The three decades from Adam's Giselle in 1841 to Delibes' Coppélia in 1870 saw Romantic ballet at its height.
Ballets were still very much in evidence in the world of opera as well. A glance at the big operas of the day reveals sometimes overlooked ballet gems. The Pas de cinq in Weber's Euryanthe; the meaty dance scenes in Glinka and Rossini (William Tell, for instance, which contained two big scenes for Italian-Swedish dancer Marie Taglioni). Wagner came a cropper when he riled the influential Jockey Club by not putting the requisite ballet in his opera, Tannhäuser, at its Paris premiere in 1861, provoking a riot.
Ballet's innovations were spreading around the world. The choreographer Auguste Bournonville moved from Paris back to his native Danish Court and began to produce a huge body of work there, but the one crucial place on the ballet circuit, which would begin to grow and grow, was Russia.
Jules Perrot, the French ballet master who had made his name in London and Naples, made the move to become the Ballet Master at the Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg, followed by the choreographer of Coppélia, Arthur Saint-Léon. Together with the Bolshoi in Moscow (originally founded as an orphanage by Catherine the Great) the two companies would pave the way for a Russian dominance of ballet, enforced by the collaboration of its greatest composer: Tchaikovsky.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ballet by Tim Lihoreau. Copyright © 2015 Classic FM. Excerpted by permission of Elliott and Thompson Limited.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,1 Preface,
2 A Brief History of Ballet,
3 Great Choreographers and Dancers,
4 Composers of Ballet Music,
5 The Ballet Hall of Fame,
6 50 Ballet Tracks to Download,
7 Where To See Ballet,
About Classic FM,
About the Author,
Index,