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In any account of the history of ballet, the ballet de cour of the French court holds a special place. The first notable entertainment of this kind, the Ballet Comique de la Reine performed at the Louvre in October 1581 upon the occasion of the marriage of the Duc de Joyeuse, is often referred to as the first ballet. The man responsible for this court spectacular is generally known to us as Balthasar de Beaujoyeux, though his name was originally Baldassare de Belgiojoso, indicating his Italian origins. However, the important point about de Beaujoyeux for present consideration is that he was involved in more than one performing discipline; as well as being a violinist he was also a composer and choreographer.

A few decades later, with the ballet de cour now well established at the centre of the daily theatre that was the court of Louis XIV at Versailles, another Italian was to make an even bigger impact in the world of music and dance. Giambattista Lulli, born in Florence in 1632, attracted attention at court as a dancer and violinist. Soon he was embarking upon his meteoric rise to an immensely powerful position in French musical life. From ‘Chamber Music composer’ and ‘Music Master to the Royal Family’ he progressed to a collaboration with Molière, their comedy-ballets including Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme in which, as Jean-Baptiste Lully, he danced the role of the Mufti. Turning to opera, the development of which in France owed much to him, Lully obtained from the King exclusive rights to arrange operatic performances in Paris. Once again, we are dealing with a man skilled in both music and dance.

Ballet as a theatre art became dependent upon opera. Though Handel provided Marie Sallé with some fine music in various works of the 1730’s, it was not necessarily the opera composer who provided music for dance. (This fact provides an intriguing parallel with Broadway Musicals, in which the dance music is generally arranged by someone other than the composer). Later in the 18th century, Mozart – who was a keen and accomplished dancer, and who wrote much dance music for social occasions - was asked to compose the ballet music for his opera Idomeneo (1780). But this was the exception rather than the rule; as Mozart commented in a letter to his father at the time, "now, all the music will be by the same composer". An indication of the influence of French taste can be seen in the fact that Mozart refers to the ballet as a Divertissement. Two years earlier, Mozart had planned an opera in French, to be called Alexandre et Roxanne. The opera never materialised, but the ballet music to be associated with it is still with us – we know it as Les Petits Riens. It was lost till 1872 when it was found in the library of the Paris Opera, but the score which was discovered is known to contain items by composers other than Mozart.

Beethoven was prevailed upon to write a more substantial ballet score at the turn of the 19th century (The Creatures of Prometheus). The work of his collaborator, the choreographer Viganò, was taken seriously by men of the theatre. Although Prometheus was produced during a spell of a few years in Vienna, it was in Milan that Viganò achieved fame with works that were admired by Stendhal and that earned him the reputation of being the creator of the ‘coreodramma’. In Milan in those days, it was customary to follow the first act of an opera with a serious ballet, and the second act of the opera with a comic ballet. According to the composer Louis Spohr, who visited Milan in 1816, he watched a serious ballet that lasted nearly an hour, by which time the first act of the opera had been forgotten!

Turning to the development of French Romantic ballet, there emerged in Paris at the time of the 1830 Revolution a new bourgeois public eager to imbibe all kinds of theatrical spectacle, much in the same way as present day audiences flocking to enjoy blockbuster musicals. The ballet of dead nuns, rising from their ruined gothic cloister in Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable (led by no less a dancer than Marie Taglioni), was typical of the kind of association of dance with the operatic stage during the heyday of French Grand Opera. Two years earlier, in 1829, the playbill for Rossini’s William Tell had included the names of the dancers (again led by Marie Taglioni) together with the singers as evidence of a spectacular production.

Eventually, ballet developed a life of its own, but the music associated with it was not always of the best quality. French music of the 19th century sometimes tended towards prettiness, and nothing was prettier than the ballet. In this context, Adolphe Adam achieved a considerable feat with the score for Giselle; although Adam’s output as a whole is that of a minor composer, the music for Giselle was studied carefully by Tchaikovsky before he settled down to writing the 3rd Act of Sleeping Beauty. Adam wrote 70 operas and several other ballets, but these days, apart from Giselle, one of his best-known compositions is probably the Christmas song, O Holy Night. It has to be acknowledged that the score of Giselle, for all its success in the theatre, has not achieved a place in the concert repertory in the manner of the best ballet scores, or suites drawn from them. A score such as Stravinsky's Petruchka, on the other hand, probably appears more often in concert programmes than in theatre schedules. Later in the 19th century, a number of French musicians declared their intention of introducing a more serious element into French music, being aware of the tendency towards lightweight compositions. A leading influence in this direction was provided by the example of César Franck, whose work helped to restore the position of ‘pure music’ in France, as opposed to the tradition of the opéra-comique.

By the latter part of the 19th century, when ballet had declined severely in Western Europe and Russian ballet was reaching new heights, the development of ballet music lagged severely behind the dance. The influential balletomanes associated with the Russian companies were limited and conservative in the extreme in their attitude to music. The work of House composers such as Pugni and Drigo for the Imperial Ballet was of dubious quality and appealed only to dilletante tastes. Such was the reputation of music for the dance that Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony was dismissed by a critic as sounding ‘like ballet music’. The epithet was not meant to be a compliment. Defending himself, Tchaikovsky wrote "..do you intend to say that the trio of my Scherzo is in the style of Minkus, Gerber, or Pugni? To my mind, it does not deserve such criticism....The music of ballet is not invariably bad...". That critic, Taneyev (who was in fact a pupil of Tchaikovsky) may have misunderstood some of Tchaikovsky’s aims as a symphonist, but the reputation of ballet music amongst serious musicians of the time is obvious. However, Tchaikovsky frequently gave credit to Delibes for what he achieved in his ballet scores; the Russian was always a man of severe self-doubt, and wrote that Delibes’ Sylvia was a far better score than Swan Lake, saying that his own score was ‘poor stuff’ in comparison!

Tchaikovsky was resident in Moscow when writing Swan Lake; if he had had contact with Petipa and the Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg he would have received better guidance when composing his first ballet. Although the score for Swan Lake has always presented considerable problems for directors because of its structure, and has therefore been subject to more chopping and changing than most, it set a completely new standard. Tchaikovsky produced a score containing wonderfully dramatic music, constructed with the sort of attention to musical balance that one would expect from a composer of his stature, but without the benefit of first-rate choreographic advice. The dance of the little swans in Act IV, for example, with its quintessentially Russian melody, conveys exactly the right mood for that point in the drama, providing a poignant dance movement; however, in Tchaikovsky’s original score it is submerged by a welter of action music. Tchaikovsky’s instincts were far in advance of other ballet composers of the time, but sadly he was not working in harness with a choreographer of the same talent or instincts. Nevertheless, Tchaikovsky had given ballet music the huge shot in the arm it needed.

Tchaikovsky instinctively understood dance, and was obviously drawn towards it. Petipa’s demands for the music of Sleeping Beauty are couched in the choreographer’s habitual terms, including sometimes a specified time signature and/or number of bars for specific dances, but Tchaikovsky pushed at the boundaries; a composer of his stature was not going to be limited by convention. The result was that even Petipa found it a challenging task to respond to Tchaikovsky's score. Tchaikovsky’s achievement as a ballet composer can be gauged in many ways; but perhaps it is sufficient to remember how, despite the very different aesthetics of the 1920’s and 30’s, his music remained in the forefront of the affections of both Stravinsky and Balanchine.

Diaghilev’s entry into the world of ballet has been documented many times. Here was the man who was to challenge all pre-conceived notions of the possibilities for ballet and who was to ally the most recent ideas in choreography with music by the leading composers of the day and designs by leading artists. It is at this point that we have to start asking who was leading the way – composer or choreographer.

Diaghilev’s decision to engage the young Igor Stravinsky to provide new scores for the Ballets Russes was a bold but important move. He knew that he needed music of the first quality, and he needed the composer to be part of the company, though this didn’t prevent Diaghilev commissioning scores from other leading composers of the day. After the initial heady period of pre-1914 Paris, with the impact of Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring behind them, Diaghilev met with those directly involved with the Ballets Russes to plan the company’s survival during the 1st World War. Stravinsky was among that group; Diaghilev’s inclusion of musicians in his discussions contrasts with some of the practices of present day companies.

The extraordinary relationship between Stravinsky and Balanchine started in the 1920’s, but it was Diaghilev who first gave Balanchine the opportunity of working with the music of Stravinsky. This was for a new production of The Nightingale, with the teenage Markova in the title role. However, it is with Apollo that we normally think of the cementing of the artistic partnership that was to flower when both had emigrated to the USA in the late 1930’s, though Apollo was in fact commissioned by Mrs Sprague Coolidge for performance in the Library of Congress, and was first choreographed by Bolm. However, it was the 24 year-old Balanchine whose version is remembered, and which shows such unanimity of thought with the ideas of the composer. Apollo, Balanchine declared, taught him to dare to eliminate.

Agon, the final collaboration between Balanchine and Stravinsky, appears to sum up so much of their experience and perfectly reflects the aesthetic that informed the work of both. Spare and lean, their work stripped of anything inessential, the final product displays a personal distortion of classicism in both choreography and music, the former providing a perfect analogue of the latter. As Stravinsky had written many years earlier, choreography should do more than merely duplicate the rhythms of the music. Despite the complex rhythms of his compositions, Stravinsky’s music is imbued with the spirit of the dance, and it was not just in the scores written specifically for ballet that he produced ideal ballet music. A year after his death, the Stravinsky Festival presented by New York City Ballet included no less than 31 ballets to his music during a week in June 1972, a number of them new.

If Balanchine and Stravinsky are particularly associated with abstract work, Frederick Ashton also felt the need to go back to essentials when he returned to choreography after the Second World War. The choice of a mature work of César Franck, the Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra of 1885, was ideal for Ashton’s ballet of the same title first seen in 1946, constructed as it was as an antidote to the proliferation of literary and dramatic ballets produced during the War. As Ashton himself said, he pared and pared and pared until he got the kind of purity he wanted; a parallel with Balanchine’s experience over Apollo. It provided Ashton with the platform from which to build a repertoire for the emerging British ballet. He had known the music well for some time, having listened to it during the War – a period when he was unable to produce any choreography himself because of his period in National Service, though he knew what was happening on the ballet stage because, during the last part of the War, he was stationed at the Air Ministry. Ashton knew the music well – he had often listened to it during the War, and had hoped he would be able to use it one day. Using the music as his starting point, he said that he had to do a lot of experimenting to find the sort of movement that he wanted. Having presented this essay in pure dance, he was ready to build a repertoire for British ballet.

Despite the apparent differences between them, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky showed a similarity of response to commissions for ballet scores: they went beyond accepted norms and challenged the choreographers. But such was their innate feeling for dance that the music they produced took ballet to a new phase in its development. The same could be said of Prokofiev; his score for Romeo and Juliet, although a commissioned score, was at first pronounced undanceable in Russia. However, when it had been given its first production in Brno, Czechoslovakia in December 1938, it was taken up by Lavrosky whose Leningrad production followed in January 1940.

In her book The Magic of Dance (1979) which accompanied the TV series with the same title, Margot Fonteyn wrote "…I think over-dependence on concert scores is dangerous. Remembering back to the founding of ballet, when it went hand in hand with music, it would be tragic to allow the two to stray apart again; tragic, that is, for ballet. But that is just what is happening". Noting the comparatively few important new scores written for ballet, she also commented that "more consistently it is the smaller companies and modern dance groups that are thinking in terms of contemporary music". There has been a reliance on concert music for the ballet stage that has brought about mixed results. In the case of abstract ballets, the effect has sometimes been to achieve a wonderful synthesis of music and dance; you see what you hear. Such works as Ashton’s Symphonic Variations or Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements stand apart as signature works from the oeuvre of great choreographers. On the other hand, there have been attempts to choreograph concert works where you might be forgiven for wondering whether the choreographer was listening to the same music. Concert music has also been used for a ballet with a semblance of a plot. Since the music was not composed for this purpose, there are inevitably passages that might cause difficulty, unless the ‘plot’ is only suggestion, developing themes and ideas rather than relating specific events.

Marie Rambert, in her autobiography Quicksilver, expresses the wish for Terpsichore, the muse of dance, to stand on her own feet without reliance on music. She was not alone in this. During the inter-war period, when the relationship between music and dance was especially questioned among those developing the repertoire of modern dance, there were various essays in silent dance by American choreographers. Meanwhile, though the initial impetus to allow dance an existence independent of music came from the pioneers of modern dance, the world of ballet could not resist a similar development. Lifar, in common with some involved in the field of modern dance, went so far as to envisage the composition of a ballet score after the choreography had been worked out, just as a composer sets a song lyric to music, rather than the other way round.

An extreme position in asserting the independence of music and dance was achieved by Merce Cunningham in his work with the composer John Cage and the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Cunningham achieved independence for his choreography because the accidental effects resulting from the collision of these artistic disciplines in work developed separately and put together by chance was essential to the aesthetic of those involved. However, such aleatoric work is not necessarily the only way forward. It is often the case in contemporary dance that the choreography inhabits the music without mimicking its every movement even if this process is not allowed to happen by chance as in true aleatoric work; the resulting 'collisions' and counterpoint between music and dance can be especially intriguing.

Stravinsky was always aware of evolving ideas concerning the relationship between music and choreography, and had his own very strong conception of what he expected choreographers to achieve with his scores. In the 1920 revival of The Rite of Spring, he compared what he regarded as Massine’s ‘incomparably clearer’ approach to the Rite of Spring with Nijinsky’s version of 1913. Massine had, of course, the benefit of approaching the work when it had become an accustomed part of the concert repertory. Working in a different era to Nijinsky, when ideas concerning the relationship between music and movement had moved on, Massine’s appreciation of phrase in the music was evident to Stravinsky. Nijinsky had had a struggle with this momentous new score, and yet – despite Levinson’s later comment that Nijinsky’s dancers were ‘hounded by rhythm’ - Marie Rambert, who (because of her Dalcroze training) was brought in by Diaghilev to assist Nijinsky, said that she watched Nijinsky again and again teaching the Sacrificial Dance to Maria Piltz; “her reproduction was very pale by comparison with his ecstatic performance, which was the greatest tragic dance I have ever seen”. Recent reconstruction of Nijinsky’s work for the 1913 première has shown immensely powerful images in that final desperate dance. The score has continued to challenge choreographers ever since. As Nijinsky wrestled with the complexity of this score which was taking dance into unknown territory he was not afraid to push the boundaries of ballet as he sought to respond to the savage sounds of the orchestra. Nevertheless, it remains intriguing that the one choreographer who understood Stravinsky, both man and music, unlike any other never staged the composer’s most famous score; George Balanchine preferred to let The Rite of Spring continue to enjoy its success in the concert hall.

After a lifetime of work for the ballet, Stravinsky probed new territory in Agon (1957) both in his musical idiom and the resultant challenge to his great friend, George Balanchine. When the ballet reaches the intensity of the pas-de-deux, the fiercely concentrated music appears to be disjointed. It invites movement during moments of silence; conversely the dancers may remain still at important points in the music. But, as Balanchine wrote about Stravinsky’s idiom, “There are no blind spots. A pause, an empty space, is never empty space between indicated sounds. It is not just nothing. It acts as a carrying agent from the last sound to the next one. Life goes on within each silence”.

The growing independence, as well as the traditional inter-dependence, of music and dance during the last century is a vast area, but its study is surely fundamental to the future of music for dance; composers of ballet music for the future need to be aware of the way in which the freedoms associated with modern dance have informed choreographers in ballet during the last hundred years.

Ruth St Denis (1879-1968) said that "the music of the dance of the future…must be a different music than any we have yet heard. It must be composed for the dancers by composers who understand the fundamentals of the dance…..a condition which I need not remind you does not exist today". The question is "where are these composers?". I have suggested that the art of ballet has been advanced when a composer with an innate feeling for dance has taken the basic demands of the choreographer and then pushed at the boundaries, challenging the choreographer’s resourcefulness. We live in an age when there is a great deal of conservatism in the arts, and it will not serve the art of ballet well if scores for new story ballets are produced in a mass-market sub-Tchaikovskian fashion. (It is interesting to compare new scores with the achievement of Vaughan Williams in Job, first staged by the Camargo Society in 1931 in days of infancy for British ballet). On the other hand, the business of assembling a score for a three act ballet from snippets of concert music has limited viability, for all the skill of some of the arrangers. Simply compare the results of some of these scores with the overall design of a Prokofiev score and the contrast is clear; the work of the first-rate ballet composer is crafted like a symphony, whereas the score assembled from unrelated parts can sound dangerously close to a whole evening’s divertissement.

There will no doubt continue to be fine abstract work to existing concert scores; perhaps there will also be more outstanding original works to follow in the path of Agon. There will also no doubt be successful examples of ballets using concert music to accompany a scenario such as Tetley’s Sphinx (Martinu – concerto for piano, timpani, and double string orchestra) or Robbins’ The Cage (Stravinsky – Concerto in D), unlikely though some of these marriages might seem. However, the fully developed story ballet is another matter, especially now that we expect more in terms of real insight into character, with real human beings rather than the characters of fairy stories. There needs to be a repertoire of full length ballets after the tradition of MacMillan with music composed by leading contemporary musicians, requiring both choreographer and composer to explore character in depth.

The future of ballet is partly in the hands of choreographers whose knowledge of music and whose musicality needs to be sufficiently developed to enable them to understand fully the work of their contemporaries in the field of musical composition. Likewise, I believe, the future of ballet is in the hands of composers with a feeling for dance as great as that of Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev; composers who are keen to accept a commission and challenge the boundaries of choreographic art; composers who do not, like Tchaikovsky’s critic, speak dismissively of ‘mere ballet music’.