THE BALLET MUSIC
OF GIUSEPPE VERDI’S OPERAS
In nineteenth-century Italian operas, a ballet was not part of the
composition, but was performed either between the acts or after the
opera – and was usually a work created by a ballet composer with little
or no connection to the operatic work in question. The strict convention
at the Paris Opéra, however, was that an extended dance interlude was to
be included by the composer as a divertissement in the third act of a grand
opéra (in addition to the short ballet usually scheduled for the second
act). So if an Italian opera composer wanted to have his works performed
in Paris (and who would not, given the international importance of the
great opera house in Europe’s leading musical metropolis), ballet music
had to be included. In the case of works originally written for the Paris
Opera, the ballet was included in the French-language libretto from
the outset. And for all the works that already existed, a piece of ballet
music had to be adapted later on. Gioachino Rossini worked under these
conditions when he adapted his Mosè in Egitto (1818) into Moïse et Pharaon
(1827) and Maometto II (1820) into Le siège de Corinthe (1826); and also
for his last opera, Guillaume Tell, which was originally written for Paris
and premiered at the Opéra (Académie Royale de Musique) on August
3, 1829. The same can be said of Gaetano Donizetti’s works composed
for Paris, with his La favorite (December 2, 1840), Dom Sébastien, roi
de Portugal (November 13, 1843) and the reworking of his Poliuto (1838)
into Les martyrs (April 10, 1840), the original version of which was first
performed in an Italian opera house in 1848. Italian opera composers
were hardly ever enthusiastic about the French preference for extensive
dance interludes in the third act; they merely submitted to it, more or less
reluctantly. In music written under these conditions, it is not uncommon
to hear composers audibly struggling with the task. It cannot always have
been easy for them to invent and develop ballet music, and it usually
lacked a close, dramatic and/or dramaturgical relationship to the action
of the opera.
Verdi, too, had strong opinions about this convention. Nevertheless, like
his fellow Italian composers before him, he faced up to the difficult task
and tried to accept it as an artistic challenge. With catchy melodies, lively,
pointedly accentuated rhythms, chromatic effects and vivid gestures, and
above all with the incredibly colourful scoring of his dance compositions,
he succeeded in giving new impetus to contemporary ballet music. Even
in the works of outstanding ballet composers such as Léo Delibes and
Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky, references to Verdi are clearly audible. In terms of
quantity, Verdi wrote the most opera ballets for the Paris Opéra: between
1847 and 1894, he composed a total of seven divertissements, some of
them extensive – for Jérusalem (1847), Les vêpres siciliennes (1855), Le
trouvère (1857), Macbeth (1865), Don Carlos (1867), Aida (1871/1880) and
Otello (1894).
Jérusalem was the first stage work that Verdi originally composed for a
premiere at the Paris Opéra. Unable to present a new work due to his
tight schedule, he revised his I Lombardi alla prima crociata, which had
been performed at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala in 1843. Jérusalem was first
performed at the Opéra (Salle Le Peletier) on November 26, 1847. Its
ballet music is one of the most extensive Verdi ever wrote, second only
to the music for Les vêpres siciliennes. The ballet, which is not based on a
dramatic plot, was staged by Joseph Mazilier, the leading choreographer
of the time; the extraordinarily varied and colourfully orchestrated pas
serve to create an exciting depiction of the situation.
Verdi’s second work composed for a Paris premiere – Les vêpres
siciliennes – was performed at the Opéra (Académie Impériale de
Musique) on June 13, 1855. The ballet music Les quatre saisons, composed
during rehearsals in April 1855, was dramaturgically linked to the action
on stage. During a masked ball in the palace of the governor of Sicily,
it serves as a moment of delay before a planned but ultimately foiled
assassination attempt on the host, heightening the dramatic tension. The
allegorical ballet, choreographed by Lucien Petipa, was also performed
separately from the opera and became a popular work in the repertoire.
With his next opera ballet, a dance sequence created for the reworking
of Il trovatore (Rome, January 19, 1853), Verdi also sought to create a close
musical-dramaturgical link with the action on stage. The divertissement
between the soldiers’ chorus and the trio in the third part, which partly
uses musical material from the gypsy scenes of the second part, was
again choreographed by Petipa. Le trouvère had its French premiere
on January 12, 1857 at the Paris Opéra (Salle Le Peletier). This ballet
music by Verdi also proved its worth as independent dance music in the
ballroom.
For his reworking of Macbeth (the original version had been performed
at the Teatro alla Pergola in Florence on March 14, 1847), Verdi composed
a rather extensive three-movement ballet score for the second scene of
the third act, illustrating the Hecate scenes of Shakespeare’s drama. At
the premiere in the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris on April 21, 1865, however,
the audience was less than enthusiastic – the drama was too much
at odds with the dance tastes of the Second Empire, which favoured
lightweight, virtuoso diversions. Verdi, however, was convinced by the
concept and insisted on retaining it in the new Italian production in Milan
(1874), which met with unexpected success.
In the third act of Don Carlos – the opera was first performed at
the Paris Opéra (Théâtre Impérial de Musique) on March 11, 1867 – a
ballet de la Reine entitled La Pérégrina is performed in the gardens of
Queen Elisabeth to celebrate the coronation anniversary of King Philip
of Spain the following day. The title of the ballet – also the name of the
famous pearl – probably alludes to the Florentine intermedi for Girolamo
Bargagli’s comedy La pellegrina (1589). By early December 1866, the
score of the entire work was complete, except for the ballet. When
choreographer Lucien Petipa began work on January 28, 1867, Verdi had
also completed the music for the ballet (except for the transcription of
the viola d’amore solo into a violin part, which was done only during
rehearsals). Although it met with a remarkably cool reception (Théophile
Gautier wrote scathingly of this divertissement in his review of the
premiere), the music found its way into ballrooms and domestic (dance)
salons, mainly in arrangements.
For the premiere of Aida on December 24, 1871 in Cairo, there were
no requirements for the design of the dance interludes, so Verdi probably
came closest to his ideal of linking the dances as directly as possible to
the action of the opera. The first of the three dance scenes, the sacred
dance of the priestesses, is characterised by a sacred, oriental-sounding
melody. The lively, cheerful theme of the dance of the little Moorish slaves
(flute, oboe and clarinet in unison) resounds to the sound of triangle,
timpani and cymbal beats. The Ballabile in the ensuing triumphal scene
(extended by a Pas de trois to roughly double its length for the premiere at
the Paris Opéra on March 22, 1880) is played by the full orchestra.
Verdi’s shortest ballet music was composed in August 1894 for the
reworking of Otello (the original version was performed at the Teatro
alla Scala in Milan on February 5, 1887), the first performance of which
took place at the Paris Opéra on October 12, 1894. The short, mostly
oriental-sounding sections of the ballet music inserted in the sixth scene
of the third act come one after the other; as a lively contrast, they are
interrupted by a Venetian sailors’ dance called La muranese, which is,
however, a typical Neapolitan tarantella.
Although Verdi had initially reacted with incomprehension and even
contempt to the conventions of the Paris Opéra, even he could not avoid
adding ballet music later on to the productions of his operas there, and
incorporating divertissements as dance interludes in his latest new
compositions. The venerable maestro even composed a ballet for the
Paris premiere of Otello. For a long time after that, ballet music was
generally omitted from productions of Verdi operas (with the exception of
Aida), but it has recently been revived and also linked to the dramaturgy
of the opera by means of a newly invented plot. These beautiful, well�crafted pieces of music should not be withheld from the public.
