Download or read book Don Quixote Ballet in Five Acts by Marius Petipa Piano Score written by Ludwig Minkus and published by Dance Books Limited. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complete piano score of the 1871 St. Petersburg version.
Download or read book The Ballets of Ludwig Minkus written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The composer Ludwig Minkus represents one of music’s biggest mysteries. Who was he? Hardly anything is known about him, and yet he occupied an influential position in the theatres of the Imperial ballet in late nineteenth-century Russia. He has been recognised as a predecessor of Tchaikovsky, but as a musician is commonly held to have been so feeble as to be beneath contempt. Yet despite the scorn heaped on him, and his consequent obscurity, Minkus is far from being forgotten. Since the early 1960s his name has slowly begun to re-surface. Two works, Don Quixote (1869) and La Bayadère (1877), have been presented in their entirety for the first time to new audiences all over the world. The musical and dramatic power of both ballets has taken people by surprise. The stories have a very real human appeal, the choreography attracts the admiration of balletomanes, and the music, with its rhythm, verve, and beauty of melody, holds attention and engages the heart wherever it is heard. This introduction seeks to discover something more behind the blank façade of Minkus’s life and work. What do we actually know about him as a man and as an artist? Are we able to apprehend his oeuvre as a whole, and how much can we establish from the available material? What is the nature of the music he created for those few works that have survived the years, and that have come to the fore again recently to delight those who have ears to hear? This study includes iconography from the life and times of the composer, many musical examples from his works, and a comprehensive bibliography and discography.
Download or read book Ballet Music written by Matthew Naughtin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musicians who work professionally with ballet and dance companies sometimes wonder if they haven’t entered a foreign country—a place where the language and customs seem so utterly familiar and so bafflingly strange at the same. To someone without a dance background, phrases and terms--boy’s variation, pas d’action, apothéose—simply don’t fit their standard musical vocabulary. Even a familiar term like adagio means something quite different in the world of dance. Like any working professional, those conductors, composers, rehearsal pianists, instrumentalists and even music librarians working with professional ballet and dance companies must learn what dance professionals talk about when they talk about music. In Ballet Music: A Handbook Matthew Naughtin provides a practical guide for the professional musician who works with ballet companies, whether as a full-time staff member or as an independent contractor. In this comprehensive work, he addresses the daily routine of the modern ballet company, outlines the respective roles of the conductor, company pianist and music librarian and their necessary collaboration with choreographers and ballet masters, and examines the complete process of putting a dance performance on stage, from selection or existing music to commissioning original scores to staging the final production. Because ballet companies routinely revise the great ballets to fit the needs of their staff and stage, audience and orchestra, ballet repertoire is a tangled web for the uninitiated. At the core of Ballet Music: A Handbook lies an extensive listing of classic ballets in the standard repertoire, with information on their history, versions, revisions, instrumentation, score publishers and other sources for tracking down both the original music and subsequent musical additions and adaptations. Ballet Music: A Handbook is an invaluable resource for conductors, pianists and music librarians as well as any student, scholar or fan of the ballet interested in the complex machinery that works backstage before the curtain goes up.
Download or read book Ludwig Minkus Don Quixote written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-03-08 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ballet Don Quixote, with music by Ludwig Minkus and scenario and original choreography by Marius Petipa, is one of the most enduring creations to have emerged from the flowering of the ballet in late 19th-century Russia. Still popular, it has become a standard repertory piece in ballet companies all over the world. The work was first performed in Moscow at the Bolshoi Theater on 14/26 December 1869. The plot, in four acts and eight scenes, was based on an episode which Petipa had developed from the second part of Cervantes’s novel, relating the love story of Quiteria (known as Kitri in the ballet) and Basilio. Petipa devised the original version to suit the unsophisticated taste of Moscow's audiences. Soon after, he prepared a version for St Petersburg, using the same music and designs, but with major choreographic revisions. This St Petersburg version, premiered on 9/21 November 1871, was in five acts (eleven episodes, a prologue and an epilogue). It took into account the Imperial capital's preference for a more classical interpretation of the ballet and amounted to a new and very different version. Alexander Gorsky staged his Moscow revival of Don Quixote in 1900 using Petipa's St Petersburg scenario and some of his choreography, and reducing the work to four acts. Two years later, in 1902, the director of the Imperial Theatres, Vladimir Teliakovsky, invited Gorsky to restage an updated version of Don Quixote at the Maryinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. The ballet became a staple of the repertoires of the Moscow Bolshoi Ballet and the Leningrad Kirov Ballet and was regularly modified as it was continually restaged, ending up as three acts with a prologue and six scenes. This version of the score, containing several interpolated pieces by other repertory dance composers, is the standard performing edition used in Russia. Don Quixote was first seen outside of Russia in an edited two-act version danced by Pavlova and her company in England in 1924. The first time the full work was staged for a Western company was by the English Ballet Rambert in 1962, by Witold Borkowski. Notable productions outside of Russia to Minkus's music were those by Rudolf Nureyev for the Vienna State Opera (1966), and Mikhail Baryshnikov for American Ballet Theatre (1978), which for the most part followed the traditional versions they had performed in Russia. Another major source of publicity for the ballet came in 1976 when the iceskater John Curry’s inspired routine to music from the ballet won him a gold medal at the European Figure Skating Championship, the World Figure Skating Championship and the Winter Olympics. No standard editions of Minkus's scores have ever been produced, and no full score of Don Quixote has been published. Every ballet company usually comes up with its own arrangements of his music, the revisions by John Lanchbery being the most widely known. Lanchbery’s work, however, tampers with both the orchestration and, more seriously, the harmony, of Minkus’s music, and is often closer to a rewriting than an arrangement. The resurgent popularity of Minkus's Don Quixote and La Bayadère, as well as his additions to Deldevez’s Paquita, have revealed the innate skill and charm of his music, despite the ubiquity of the arrangements and distortions of his scores. Minkus's writing, like so much Romantic ballet, is closely allied to operatic conventions, with arias, duets and ensembles that are enacted rather than sung, and with each ballet sustaining its own special atmosphere. The Town Square, Gypsy Camp and Dream Sequence in Don Quixote are full of musical buoyancy and melodic verve, demonstrating a careful use of tonality and dramatic style. The famous Grand Pas de Deux from the finale “is lively, well-crafted and ablaze with attractive invention” (Ian Woodward). Until such times as a definitive version of the manuscript score can be established, this performing edition as used in Russia acknowledges the living tradition of this work, and the vibrancy of Minkus’s splendid music.
Download or read book Paquita Ballet Pantomime in Two Acts Grand Pas Classique by Marius Petipa and Nuit et Jour Allegorical Ballet in One Act by Marius Petpa Piano Score by Ludwig Minkus written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-03-08 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two ballets in this volume, Paquita and Nuit et Jour, represent Ludwig Minkus (1826–1917) towards the end of his career in Russia, working at the peak of his creative powers. They are respectively the thirteenth and fourteenth collaborations between the Viennese composer and the famous choreographer of the Russian classical ballet, Marius Petipa (1819–1910). The Grand Pas, written for Petipa's revival of Deldevez’s Paquita in St Petersburg in 1881, is well-known and loved, a jewel of the classical ballet repertoire in its own right. As an independent, abstract divertissement, the Grand Pas has remained popular with ballet companies and their audiences all over the world, but had not been seen outside Russia in its original context (as the climax of the concluding celebrations) before Pierre Lacotte's sensitive re-creation of the 1846 ballet in its entirety at the Paris Opéra in 2001. The Grand Pas was designed for ballerina, premier danseur, six premières danseuses and eight second soloists. Over the years, this Spanish flavoured piece has become a kind of miniature gala performance, with an array of solo variations that are particularly interesting not only for their choreography but also their occasional obbligato writing. Minkus had a talent in composing for the violin, his own special instrument—as can be seen in the sumptuous, extended adagio. His ballets also contain effective virtuoso pieces for the flute, harp, cello and cornet. The violin and harp solos were written with the talents of the famous violinist Leopold Auer and harpist Albert Zabel in mind, both of whom served as instrumental leaders in the St Petersburg theatre orchestras in the late 19th century. The contemporary manuscript piano arrangements reproduced here, repetiteur scores from the Soviet era, present a longer and a shorter version of the Grand Pas. They reflect the performing edition as it has variously evolved over the 130 years of its independent stage life on the Russian stages, and—through the agency of Anna Pavlova’s travelling company in the 1920s—as also adapted by ballet companies across the world. The less familiar Nuit et Jour was created by Petipa and Minkus to mark the accession to the throne of Tsar Alexander III in 1883. It is an interesting development of the popular contemporary genre of abstract allegorical works, illustrating the movement of time through the day and the seasons of the year. The ballet depicts the innate beauties of both night and day (created by the great ballerinas Yevgeniya Sokolova and Yekaterina Vazem respectively), the daily struggle between darkness and light, and climaxes in an achievement of harmony in a dance of the nations. This is given a patriotic resonance by reflecting ten national types from the Russian Empire in a tour de force, testing the composer’s skill in capturing the various national styles: Uzbek, Tartar, Siberian, Finnish, Cossack, Belarusian, Polish, Caucasian, and Ukrainian. The score reproduced here is the piano version published in both Hamburg and St Petersburg about 1885.
Download or read book Ludwig Minkus written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-04-16 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1868 the choreographer Marius Petipa planned his ballet Don Quixote for the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, and the Austrian composer Ludwig Minkus was invited to compose the music. The plot of Don Quixote was based on the adventures of Quiteria (known as Kitri in the ballet) and Basilio, which Petipa had developed from the second part of Miguel de Cervantes's novel (1605). The ballet was an enormous success, both in Moscow (14/26 December 1869) and in St Petersburg where it was represented at the Bolshoi Theatre on 9/21 November 1871 in an expanded version as Don Quichotte—with revised scenario and choreography that took cognizance of the more sophisticated expectations of the Imperial capital. Changes were made to the story, with a new fifth act in three scenes, for which Minkus wrote additional music. Don Quixote no longer regarded Kitri simply as his protégée, but now actually mistakes her for Dulcinea, and she appears as such in his Dream Scene. Provision was made for one ballerina to perform the double virtuoso role of Kitri and Dulcinea. The big classical scene for Don Quixote's dream was rewritten. Greater emphasis was now placed on this episode, where Kitri/Dulcinea was surrounded by a large corps de ballet and seventy-two children dressed as cupids. Alexandra Vergina was partnered by Basilio (Lev Ivanov), and supported by Pavel Gerdt in the last scene. The cast also included Timofei Stukolkine (Don Quixote), Nicholas Goltz (Gamache), and Alexei Bogdanov (Lorenzo). Don Quixote became established in the repertory, and its continued life on the Russian stage bears testimony to the appeal of its exuberance, “the life-asserting and life-loving nature of its dances” (Natalia Roslavleva). Generations of Russian ballet-masters and dancers preserved these dances in essence, and the ballet is still part of the Russian repertory, given today in all Russian and Siberian companies, in the Moscow version of Alexander Gorsky, in three acts and seven or eight scenes. Petipa’s version of Don Quixote, with its life-affirming music by Minkus, has during the 20th century spread throughout the world, not least because of the work of Rudolf Nureyev who made a film version of the Australian Ballet production in 1971 that became very famous. It co-starred Robert Helpmann and Lucette Aldous, and made world history in being the first ballet to be produced with full film technique, so providing wider scope for imaginative handling of the famous story. Don Quixote has become the standard ballet version of the Cervantes tale, and one of the most popular pieces of the international repertory. Much of its emotional fervour is captured in the celebrated virtuoso Grand Pas de Deux for the wedding of Kitri and Basilio in the last scene. This piece, with a spectrum of feeling enshrined in its rapturous melodies and irresistible rhythmic élan, has assumed a life of its own as a concert piece in countless renditions wherever ballet is performed. The piano score of the St Petersburg version was published as Don Quichotte (St Petersburg: Theodore Stellowsky, c. 1882). This version is reproduced here.
Download or read book Musique Dansante and the Art of Ballet written by Rebecca Amie Schwartz-Bishir and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Catalogue of Printed Music in the British Library to 1980 written by British Library. Department of Printed Books and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The British Catalogue of Music written by and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Harvard Dictionary of Music written by Don Michael Randel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2003-11-28 with total page 1020 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic reference work, the best one-volume music dictionary available, has been brought completely up to date in this new edition. Combining authoritative scholarship and lucid, lively prose, the Fourth Edition of The Harvard Dictionary of Music is the essential guide for musicians, students, and everyone who appreciates music. The Harvard Dictionary of Music has long been admired for its wide range as well as its reliability. This treasure trove includes entries on all the styles and forms in Western music; comprehensive articles on the music of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Near East; descriptions of instruments enriched by historical background; and articles that reflect today’s beat, including popular music, jazz, and rock. Throughout this Fourth Edition, existing articles have been fine-tuned and new entries added so that the dictionary fully reflects current music scholarship and recent developments in musical culture. Encyclopedia-length articles by notable experts alternate with short entries for quick reference, including definitions and identifications of works and instruments. More than 220 drawings and 250 musical examples enhance the text. This is an invaluable book that no music lover can afford to be without.
Download or read book Music Books on Music and Sound Recordings written by and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians written by Don Michael Randel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2002-10-30 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new compact guide to the history and performance of music is both authoritative and a pleasure to use. With entries drawn and condensed from the widely acclaimed The New Harvard Dictionary of Music and its companion The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, it is a dependable reference for home and classroom and for professional and amateur musicians. This concise dictionary offers definitions of musical terms; succinct characterizations of the various forms of musical composition; entries that identify individual operas, oratorios, symphonic poems, and other works; illustrated descriptions of instruments; and capsule summaries of the lives and careers of composers, performers, and theorists. Like its distinguished parent volumes, The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians provides information on all periods in music history, with particularly comprehensive coverage of the twentieth century. Clearly written and based on vast expertise, The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians is an invaluable handbook for everyone who cares about music.
Download or read book Ludwig Minkus and L o Delibes written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-02-19 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reproduces the piano score of the ballet La Source, a joint composition by Ludwig Minkus and Léo Delibes. After the success of Néméa (1864), the Paris Opéra ordered a new grand ballet from the famous choreographer Arthur Saint-Léon to a libretto based on a Persian legend by Charles Nuitter. Saint-Léon involved his musical collaborator in St Petersburg, Ludwig Minkus, in the project, securing for him a hand in the composition of the first and fourth scenes of the of this new work, La Source, a fantastic ballet in three acts. The composition of the other two scenes (the second and third) were entrusted to the young, unknown Léo Delibes, thirty at the time, who had drawn favourable attention to himself in the preparation of the ballet music for the première of Meyerbeer’s posthumous L’Africaine in 1865. The first performance of La Source was on 12 November 1866 at the Théatre Impérial de l’Opéra, with the principal dancers Guglielmina Salvioni (Naila), Eugénie Fiocre (Nouredda) and Louis Mérante (Djemil). The ballet as a whole was very successful, with 73 performances until 1876. Saint-Léon immediately began planning another work with Nuitter and Delibes—Coppélia—one which would crown the young French’s composer’s success with triumph. This was premiered on 25 May 1870, the last of Saint-Léon’s work, and the last great success of the French Romantic ballet at the Salle Le Peletier before the crisis of the Franco-Prussian War, and the end of the Second Empire. As regards the music of La Source, Delibes’s contribution to the score, his first essay at ballet music, was noted for its vigour and many delightful melodies. In Jouvin’s opinion, his music was “vivacious and especially lively,” and contrasted effectively with the plaintive melodies of Minkus. “The style of the two composers,” observed the critic of La France Musicale (18 November 1866), “is essentially different and easily recognizable at a first hearing. M. Minkus's music has a vague, indolent, and melancholic character, full of grace and languor. That of M. Delibes, fresher and more rhythmic, is much more complicated in orchestration, and sometimes a little more ordinary. I should add that this difference in style is perfectly justified by the: contrasting character of the two parts of the ballet.”
Download or read book Ludwig Minkus Fiammetta N m a written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-03-08 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aloysius Ludwig Minkus (1826–1917), famous for his ballets Don Quixote (1869) and La Bayadère (1877), was born in Bohemia, and grew up in the dance capital Vienna. He hoped to establish a reputation as a violinist and composer, and by 1853 had emigrated to St Petersburg where he became the conductor and solo violinist of the private orchestra of Prince Nikolai Yusupov. In 1861 he was appointed violin soloist and, a year later, conductor of the Moscow Bolshoi Orchestra. He began a happy collaboration with the great French choreographer Arthur Saint-Léon (1821–1870), who was a real friend and inspiration to Minkus, and more than anyone else, helped to launch his career as a theatrical composer, producing five works in association with him in St Petersburg and Paris. Minkus’s first ballet, the three-act Plamya lyubvi, ili Salamandra (The Flame of Love, or the Salamander, also called Fiammetta), was given its premiere on 13 February 1864 at the Bolshoi Kamenny Theater in St Petersburg (with Marfa Muravyeva in the leading role). The scenario and the choreography were by Saint-Léon, the most important dance master of the day in both Paris and Russia. Saint-Léon’s influence secured this work production in the French capital, and it was perhaps for this occasion that Minkus accompanied Saint-Léon to Paris to mount the work at the Académie Royale de Musique. Reduced to two acts, and re-christened Néméa, ou l’Amour vengé (with a scenario adapted by Henri Meilhac & Ludovic Halévy), the ballet was performed at the Paris Opéra on 11 July 1864, with considerable success (again with Marfa Muravyeva, and with Eugénie Fiocre as Cupid). It remained in the repertoire for seven years, attaining 53 performances by 1871. Théophile Gautier remarked on the atmospheric quality of Minkus’s music, its “haunting, dreamy quality.” Roqueplan singled out Saint-Léon's choreography for its “imagination and originality, his ability to handle masses.” Some of the Airs de Ballet were almost immediately published by Henri Hegel (1865), and are reproduced here. By now Minkus was becoming known internationally. So when five years later the Paris Opéra ordered a new grand ballet from Saint-Léon to a libretto by Charles Nuitter, Saint-Léon involved Minkus in the project, securing for him a hand in the composition of the first and fourth scenes of this new work, La Source. The other two scenes were entrusted to the young Léo Delibes, thirty at the time, who had drawn favourable attention to himself in the preparation of the ballet music for the première of Meyerbeer’s posthumous L’Africaine in 1865. The first performance of La Source on 12 November 1866 was great success for Delibes, whose bold and colourful composition was praised at the expense of Minkus’s subtler contribution. Saint-Léon immediately began planning another work with Nuitter and Delibes, and one which would crown the young French’s composer’s success with triumph, Coppélia. Saint-Léon nevertheless continued to work with Minkus, despite his busy engagements in Paris. The choreographer’s greatest ballet for Russia was his work with Cesare Pugni, Koniok-Gorbunok (The Little Humpbacked Horse) (1864), based on a Russian fairytale. He now tapped into the same folk material in a new work with Minkus, Zolotaya rybka (The Golden Fish), based on Alexander Pushkin’s Legend of the fisher and the little fish. On 20 November 1866, for the celebration of the Tsarevitch’s wedding, Saint-Léon oversaw the production of a one-act version of this new ballet, Le Poisson doré, at the Bolshoi Kamenny Theater in St Petersburg. The work was then developed as a three-act ballet for the same theater a year later (8 October 1867). Minkus’s music was very well received. As with La Source, it was carefully adapted in form and mood to the scenario, remarkable for its panache and beautiful writing for solo instruments (violin, flute, cello, cornet), and for reflecting the nature of the fairytale scenario in the appropriation of national folk styles (Polish, Kazak, Cossack). The score was considered worthy of full publication in piano reduction by the St Petersburg house of Stellowsky (c. 1870), and is reproduced here. The last collaboration between Minkus and Saint-Léon followed two years after that, a partial arrangement of La Source, given in St Petersburg as Liliya (Le Lys) in 1869.
Download or read book Don Quixote written by L. Minkus and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music written by Don Michael Randel and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gives biographical information for over 2,000 composers, as well as entries on compositions, instruments, and terms.
Download or read book Dancing Times written by and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
