Giannandrea Poesio's Weblog

There are Wilis in the Kingdom of Denmark

What do music critics do when they want to slag some musical composition that is not of their liking? They call it “ballet music”. This is what at least three eminent writers called the score of Ambroise Thomas’ 1868 opera Hamlet, performed not so long at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London. And I cannot help feeling sorry for them, given that at that at beginning of the twenty-first century they have still to recur to such obsoletes clichés, synonymous of mental fossilization as well as bad writing practice. Ok, Thomas’ oom-pah-pah French operatic adaptation of the sacred Shakespearean text is not as musically shattering as Wagner’s Parsifal or Tristan, but is no more “horrid” than other and historically revered compositions from the same time, in which medieval warriors fought to the tune of a silly quadrille, consumptive heroines spat blood to a catchy waltz and villainous conspirators plotted their deeds to light-hearted ballroom music.

Yet, this is not a defence of Thomas’ music, for what I am taking exception to here is the parallel to “ballet music” to indicate the lesser quality of any musical compositions. Like 19th-century opera, 19th-century ballet had good and bad music; the generalisations my eminent music colleagues like to indulge in, therefore, betray a rather embarrassing ignorance of what there are talking about. First of all, which “ballet music” are they referring to? Certainly not that composed by true innovators such as Adolphe Adam, who was among the first French composers to rely on the use of the Romantic leitmotiv in his 1841 score for the ballet Giselle, and whose compositional qualities for dance have been recently and deservedly re-assessed by some eminent musicologist in the light of a less blinkered approach to “ballet music”. Certainly not the ballet music composed by any of Ambroise Thomas’ illustrious contemporaries, such as Léo Delibes, whose name appears fairly regularly in music history manuals, where he is referred to as an “ingenious and innovative” composer. Probably, they are referring to the catchy tunes composed by some of their much loved opera composers, forced to insert a “ballet” in their creation to abide by the rules of a debatable performance tradition. Still, would anyone call the music of the Tyrolienne from Gioacchino Rossini’s William Tell, or that of any of Giuseppe Verdi’s ballets – the subject of a recent and much acclaimed academic study - “cheap” music? Musicologists certainly don’t, in the same way as they never dare to slag the ballet music found in operas by Charles Gounod, Jules Massenet or Camille Saint-Saens. So why use the term “ballet music” as synonymous of circus-like stuff?

Moreover, what they also seem to ignore is how much does opera owe to ballet. Had those eminent writers done a bit of homework and ventured into dance history - which they never do for fear of contamination – they would have probably discovered that the composers they revered so much did not quibble that much about establishing parallels and links with ballet. On the contrary, they were all too keen to create connections with that tremendously popular – that is, in the 19th century – art form. Take for instance what happens in Thomas’ Hamlet.

Dazzled by the vocal virtuosity of splendid soprano Natalie Dessay, arguably one of the most exiting singers one can listen to these days, none of the eminent music colleagues seems to have noticed the literary/dramatic oddity on which relies Ophelia’s mad scene in Act IV of Thomas’ opera. In her vocally virtuosistic ballad, Ophelia invokes what, according to the English surtitles of the Royal Opera House is a "nymph", but in the original French libretto is a “Willis au regard de feu” or a “Wilis with fiery eyes” who “dort sous l’eau profonde” ( literally “sleeps beneath the deep waters”). There, always according to the growingly insane heroine, not-so-faithful husbands are lured to death. Does it sound familiar? Well of course it is straight out of the Giselle, the quintessential Romantic ballet, is it not? But how did un-dead bloodthirsty virgins from the Rhine Valley end up near the Danish castle of Elsinore? The answer is simple. By 1868, the year the opera in question was premiered, Giselle was still a popular title in France and at the Paris Opéra, more in particular - even though it is said that after that year the ballet disappeared from every Western European stage. It is not surprising, therefore, that Thomas’ librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré decided to create a mythological reference that, though geographically wrong – the legend of the Wilis originate from the Slavonic regions - would have sounded pleasantly familiar to various members of the audience. Indeed, opera and ballet relied greatly on this sort of familiar references, for a “familiar” content was regarded as a key factor in granting accessibility to the performed work and, consequently, in securing its success. What is more fascinating, is that Ophelia’s mad scene – and I am intentionally steering away from the topic of mad scenes in ballet and operas, a topic that could fill volumes – is preceded in Thomas’ Hamlet by a Danse Villageoise which is terribly similar to the “peasant dances” found in the first act of Giselle. It is a pity that in the recent Royal Opera House production the ballet was removed altogether, for it would have provided the blinkered anti-ballet colleagues of mine with another chance to utter their discontent and to embark on some other ill-informed generalisation.

The sad thing, however, is that the interaction between opera and ballet will always be overlooked as far as opera houses will accept, more or less tacitly, the alleged superiority of opera over ballet. And yet, the case discussed above is but one of the many examples of how opera and ballet must be considered together if we really want to appreciate the numerous nuances of a constantly surprising and rich epoch of theatre history.

© Giannandrea Poesio, 2003

Posted by Giannandrea at August 9, 2003 04:32 PM