Ballet (music) - History

History

Until about the second half of the 19th century the role of music in ballet was secondary, with the main emphasis on dance, while music was simply a compilation of danceable tunes. Writing "ballet music" used to be a job for musical craftsmen, rather than for masters. For example, critics of the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky mentioned his writing of ballet music as something demeaning.

From the earliest ballets up to the time of Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687), the music of ballet was indistinguishable from ballroom dance music. Lully created a style that was separate, wherein the music told a story. The first "Ballet d'action" was staged in 1717. This was a story told without any words. The pioneer was John Weaver (1673–1760). Both Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote "opera-ballets", where the story was partly danced and partly sung, but ballet music became gradually less important.

The next big step occurred in the early years of the nineteenth century, when principal dancers changed from using hard shoes to ballet pumps. This enabled a more free-flowing style of music to be used. In 1832 Marie Taglioni (1804–1884) is credited with being the first famous dancer to dance "en pointe". This was in La Sylphide. It was now possible to have music that was more expressive. Gradually, dancing became more daring, with men lifting the ballerinas into the air.

Until the time of Tchaikovsky, the composer of ballets was considered to be separate from the composer of symphonies. Ballet music was an accompaniment for the solo and ensemble dances. Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake was the first musical ballet piece to be created by a symphonic composer. Following the initiative of Tchaikovsky, ballet composers were no longer writing simple, easily danceable pieces. The focus of a ballet was no longer solely the dance; the compositions behind the dances began to take an equal prevalence. In the late 19th century, Marius Petipa, Russian ballet choreographer and dance, worked with composers such as Cesare Pugni to create ballet masterpieces that boasted both complex dance and complex music. Petipa worked with Tchaikovsky as well, whether through collaboration with Tchaikovsky on his work The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, or indirectly through revision of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake after the composer’s death.

In many cases ballets were still short scenes within operas, to enable scenery or costume changes. Perhaps the best-known example of ballet music that is part of an opera is "Dance of the Hours" from Amilcare Ponchielli's opera La Gioconda (1876). There was a violent change in mood when Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring (1913) was performed. The music was expressionistic and discordant, and the movements were highly stylized. In 1924 George Antheil wrote "Ballet Mécanique". This was actually for a film of moving objects, not for dancers, but it was pioneering in the use of jazz music. From this point ballet music split into two directions—modernism and jazz-dance. George Gershwin attempted to bridge this gap with his ambitious score to the film Shall We Dance (1937), composing over one hour of music that spanned from the cerebral and technical to foot-stomping jazz and rumba. One scene was composed specifically for the ballerina Harriet Hoctor.

Many say jazz-dance is best represented by the choreographer Jerome Robbins who worked with Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story (1957). In some respects this is a return to "opera-ballet", since the story is mostly told in words. Modernism is best represented by Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. Here the story is pure ballet, and there is no influence from jazz, or any kind of popular music. Another strand in the history of ballet music, is the trend towards creative adaptations of old music. Ottorino Respighi took works by Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) and strung them together into a ballet called La Boutique fantasque, premiered in 1919. The audience for ballet generally prefers romantic music, so new ballets are confected by a marriage of old works with new choreography. A famous example is "The Dream"—music by Felix Mendelssohn, adapted by John Lanchbery.