Download or read book Ludwig Minkus La Bayad re written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2008-12-11 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: La Bayadère was first produced at the Maryinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, on 4 February 1877. The scenario was by Sergei Khudekov and Marius Petipa, who also devised the choreography. The music was by the Austrian composer Ludwig Minkus (1827-1917), who spend most of his life working for the Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg. His music for this ballet—long scorned, never published, and endlessly re-arranged— has slowly emerged, since its revival began in the West in the 1960s, as a viable and significant musical achievement in its own right. Apart from the strongly defined melodies, infectious rhythm, and affecting harmonies, there is a powerful unity of conception and a sustained attention to mood that establishes its own unique incidental atmosphere. In its evocation of far-off times, the score conjures up an exotic Indian setting, where two spheres are set in contrast—a bright external world of colour and pomp, of ambition, rivalry and death; and an internal realm of night and dreams, of ideals, transcendent love and life—all realized most completely in the famous Kingdom of the Shades in act 3. The generous self-offering love of the temple dancer Nikia is one of the great stories of the Romantic ballet. Here for the first time is the piano score of the entire ballet. The music derives from four sources: a clear manuscript from the days of the Soviet Union; a version of Act 4 as held in the Library of Covent Garden; a beautiful Russian copy of the Kingdom of the Shades; and a potpourri from the 1880s by Johann Resch—the only music ever published from the score.
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 The White Ballets written by and published by Tundra Books. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Possibly the best-loved of all ballets are “Giselle,” “La Bayadère,” and “Swan Lake.” Known as the White Ballets, they each tell stories of ethereal maidens costumed in floating white, who seem to be lovely creatures suspended somewhere between heaven and earth. It is every ballerina’s dream to dance “Giselle.” Despite being frail, the simple peasant girl, Giselle, can’t give up dancing. She is afraid that if she dies before she weds, she will become a Wili, a spirit maiden who haunts the forests seeking revenge on young men. Though she can’t change her own fate, she finds a way to save the one she loves. Nikiya is a beautiful temple dancer, a bayadère. She fights tradition when she falls in love with the warrior Solor. Solor has already been promised to a well-born girl, but he risks everything for Nikiya. “Swan Lake” is also about recognizing true love and risking everything for it. Prince Siegfried meets Odile by the shores of a mysterious lake and he vows to marry her. But Odile is under a curse: she must spend every day in the form of a swan and is only human for a few hours during the night. If they are to spend eternity together, Siegfried has to find a way to lift the curse. Rajka Kupesic, herself a dancer, has retold the stories and set them against her breathtaking art to create a book to cherish. Notes about the ballets are included.
Download or read book Final Bow for Yellowface Dancing Between Intention and Impact written by Phil Chan and published by R. R. Bowker. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who would have guessed that one short conversation with New York City Ballet Artistic Director Peter Martins would change the course of how we approach America's favorite holiday ballet, and serve as a catalyst for changing how we talk about race in America? Phil Chan, arts advocate and co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface, chronicles his journey navigating conversations around race, representation, and inclusion arising from issues in presenting one short dance-the Chinese variation from The Nutcracker. Armed with new vocabulary, he recounts his process and pitfalls in advising Salt Lake City's Ballet West on the presentation of a lost Balanchine work from 1925, Le Chant du Rossignol.Chan encounters orientalism, cultural appropriation, and yellowface, and witnesses firsthand the continuing evolution of an Old World aristocratic dance form in a New World democratic environment. As a storyteller, Chan presents a mix of dance and Chinese American history, personal anecdotes, and best practices for any professional arts organization to use for navigating issues around race, while outlining an essential path American ballet must take in order for our beloved art form to stay alive for a growingly diverse 21st century audience.
Download or read book Marius Petipa written by Nadine Meisner and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cultural biography of the nineteenth-century ballet master Marius Petipa -- creator of The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake -- tells the full story of his life and work in the remarkable context in which he lived.
Download or read book The Complete Ballet written by John Haskell and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dark-hued, hybrid novel by a writer who “delivers our culture back to us, made entirely new” (A. M. Homes) In The Complete Ballet, John Haskell choreographs an intricate and irresistible pas de deux in which fiction and criticism come together to create a new kind of story. Fueled by the dramatic retelling of five romantic ballets, and interwoven with a contemporary story about a man whose daunting gambling debt pushes him to the edge of his own abyss, it is both a pulpy entertainment and a meditation on the physicality—and psychology—of dance. The unnamed narrator finds himself inexorably drawn back to the pre–cell phone world of Technicolor Los Angeles, to a time when the tragedies of his life were about to collide. Working as a part-time masseur in Hollywood, he attends an underground poker game with his friend Cosmo, a strip-club entrepreneur. What happens there hurtles the narrator down the road and into the room where the novel’s violent and surreal showdown leaves him a different person. As the narrator revisits his past, he simultaneously inhabits and reconstructs the mythic stories of ballet, assessing along the way the lives and obsessions of Nijinsky and Balanchine, Pavlova and Fonteyn, Joseph Cornell and the story’s presiding spirit, the film director John Cassavetes. This compulsively readable fiction is ultimately a profound and haunting consideration of the nature of art and identity.
Download or read book Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle written by Marian Smith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-09 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marian Smith recaptures a rich period in French musical theater when ballet and opera were intimately connected. Focusing on the age of Giselle at the Paris Opéra (from the 1830s through the 1840s), Smith offers an unprecedented look at the structural and thematic relationship between the two genres. She argues that a deeper understanding of both ballet and opera--and of nineteenth-century theater-going culture in general--may be gained by examining them within the same framework instead of following the usual practice of telling their histories separately. This handsomely illustrated book ultimately provides a new portrait of the Opéra during a period long celebrated for its box-office successes in both genres. Smith begins by showing how gestures were encoded in the musical language that composers used in ballet and in opera. She moves on to a wide range of topics, including the relationship between the gestures of the singers and the movements of the dancers, and the distinction between dance that represents dancing (entertainment staged within the story of the opera) and dance that represents action. Smith maintains that ballet-pantomime and opera continued to rely on each other well into the nineteenth century, even as they thrived independently. The "divorce" between the two arts occurred little by little, and may be traced through unlikely sources: controversies in the press about the changing nature of ballet-pantomime music, shifting ideas about originality, complaints about the ridiculousness of pantomime, and a little-known rehearsal score for Giselle. ?
Download or read book Landscape with Moving Figures written by Laura Jacobs and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2006-08-22 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an engaging collection of essays by dance critic, novelist, and Vanity Fair contributing editor Laura Jacobs. Ideas in the areas of dance composition, performance, production, criticism, education, history, theory presentation, anthropology, science, medicine, therapy, somatic studies, and related arts are explored.
Download or read book Swans of the Kremlin written by Christina Ezrahi and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2012-11-30 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classical ballet was perhaps the most visible symbol of aristocratic culture and its isolation from the rest of Russian society under the tsars. In the wake of the October Revolution, ballet, like all of the arts, fell under the auspices of the Soviet authorities. In light of these events, many feared that the imperial ballet troupes would be disbanded. Instead, the Soviets attempted to mold the former imperial ballet to suit their revolutionary cultural agenda and employ it to reeducate the masses. As Christina Ezrahi's groundbreaking study reveals, they were far from successful in this ambitious effort to gain complete control over art. Swans of the Kremlin offers a fascinating glimpse at the collision of art and politics during the volatile first fifty years of the Soviet period. Ezrahi shows how the producers and performers of Russia's two major troupes, the Mariinsky (later Kirov) and the Bolshoi, quietly but effectively resisted Soviet cultural hegemony during this period. Despite all controls put on them, they managed to maintain the classical forms and traditions of their rich artistic past and to further develop their art form. These aesthetic and professional standards proved to be the power behind the ballet's worldwide appeal. The troupes soon became the showpiece of Soviet cultural achievement, as they captivated Western audiences during the Cold War period. Based on her extensive research into official archives, and personal interviews with many of the artists and staff, Ezrahi presents the first-ever account of the inner workings of these famed ballet troupes during the Soviet era. She follows their struggles in the postrevolutionary period, their peak during the golden age of the 1950s and 1960s, and concludes with their monumental productions staged to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution in 1968.
Download or read book 101 Stories of the Great Ballets written by George Balanchine and published by Anchor. This book was released on 1975-05-20 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authored by one of the ballet's most respected experts, this volume includes scene-by-scene retellings of the most popular classic and contemporary ballets, as performed by the world's leading dance companies. Certain to delight long-time fans as well as those just discovering the beauty and drama of ballet.
Download or read book Five Ballets from Paris and St Petersburg written by Doug Fullington and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-26 with total page 889 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers something entirely new: detailed scene-by-scene descriptions of the action and dancing of Giselle, Paquita, Le Corsaire, La Bayadère, and Raymonda, bringing the reader far closer to what the audience saw when the curtain went up on these five classic story ballets than has heretofore been possible. Drawing on archival documents, the authors show that these ballets were like today's pop entertainment: funnier, more violent, more spectacular, and with female characters far stronger than one might expect. This rigorously researched book fills huge gaps in dance history and is bound to be of interest to practitioners, scholars, and devotees of ballet and the arts.
Download or read book Movements of Interweaving written by Gabriele Brandstetter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Movements of Interweaving is a rich collection of essays exploring the concept of interweaving performance cultures in the realms of movement, dance, and corporeality. Focusing on dance performances as well as on scenarios of cultural movements on a global scale, it not only challenges the concept of intercultural dance performances, but through its innovative approach also calls attention to the specific qualities of "interweaving" as a form of movement itself. Divided into four sections, this volume features an international team of scholars together developing a new critical perspective on the cultural practices of movement, travel and migration in and beyond dance.
Download or read book Le Guide Musical written by and published by . This book was released on 1883 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Apollo s Angels written by Jennifer Homans and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-11-02 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY For more than four hundred years, the art of ballet has stood at the center of Western civilization. Its traditions serve as a record of our past. Lavishly illustrated and beautifully told, Apollo’s Angels—the first cultural history of ballet ever written—is a groundbreaking work. From ballet’s origins in the Renaissance and the codification of its basic steps and positions under France’s Louis XIV (himself an avid dancer), the art form wound its way through the courts of Europe, from Paris and Milan to Vienna and St. Petersburg. In the twentieth century, émigré dancers taught their art to a generation in the United States and in Western Europe, setting off a new and radical transformation of dance. Jennifer Homans, a historian, critic, and former professional ballerina, wields a knowledge of dance born of dedicated practice. Her admiration and love for the ballet, as Entertainment Weekly notes, brings “a dancer’s grace and sure-footed agility to the page.”
Download or read book The Harmonicon written by and published by . This book was released on 1826 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Opera in Paris from the Empire to the Commune written by Mark Everist and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-11-21 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies in the history of French nineteenth-century stage music have blossomed in the last decade, encouraging a revision of the view of the primacy of Austro-German music during the period and rebalancing the scholarly field away from instrumental music (key to the Austro-German hegemony) and towards music for the stage. This change of emphasis is having an impact on the world of opera production, with new productions of works not heard since the nineteenth century taking their place in the modern repertory. This awakening of enthusiasm has come at something of a price. Selling French opera as little more than an important precursor to Verdi or Wagner has entailed a focus on works produced exclusively for the Paris Opéra at the expense of the vast range of other types of stage music produced in the capital: opéra comique, opérette, comédie-vaudeville and mélodrame, for example. The first part of this book therefore seeks to reintroduce a number of norms to the study of stage music in Paris: to re-establish contexts and conventions that still remain obscure. The second and third parts acknowledge Paris as an importer and exporter of opera, and its focus moves towards the music of its closest neighbours, the Italian-speaking states, and of its most problematic partners, the German-speaking states, especially the music of Weber and Wagner. Prefaced by an introduction that develops the volume’s overriding intellectual drivers of cultural exchange, genre and institution, this collection brings together twelve of the author’s previously published articles and essays, fully updated for this volume and translated into English for the first time.
Download or read book The Musical World written by and published by . This book was released on 1855 with total page 856 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
