Mozart and Dance - Dance in Mozart's Operas

Dance in Mozart's Operas

Mozart included a substantial ballet at the end of his opera Idomeneo (1781); he was going against precedent at the time to write the ballet music himself rather than delegating it to another composer.

The Marriage of Figaro (1786) includes a crucial dance scene in which Susanna passes a feigned love note to Count Almaviva during a fandango. The dance scene was one resisted by the theatrical management at the premiere, and Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte prevailed only with difficulty in including it.

Perhaps the most elaborate dance scene in Mozart's operas is a party scene at the end of the first act of Don Giovanni (1787): guests at his party dance three dances simultaneously, each to its own music in interlocking rhythm. As Lindmayr-Brandl (2006) describes it, the dances are assigned to characters systematically: the social class of each character is matched with the traditional class associations of his or her dance. Thus "the representatives of the nobility —Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, Don Ottavio, with Don Giovanni— begin a minuet, then Don Giovanni invites Zerlina to dance a contradanse; and finally the servant Leporello dances a German Dance with the peasant Masetto."