Music on records

What sort of music is required for a great ballet? Is it enough that it inspire great choreography, as Minkus and Drigo did for Petipa, or must it be strong enough to survive on its own, like Tchaikovsky's three ballets, Delibes' two-and-a-half, and a number of twentieth century works? Agnes de Mille scorns Adam (Have you ever listened to Giselle, she asks incredulously as part of her standard lecture-demonstration), while praising her colleagues Trude Rittman and Morton Gould. Others raid the symphonic or even chamber repertory in search of masterpieces. A considerable difference of opinion about the muscal level of the scores for Boumonville's ballets was evident at the recent Copenhagen celebrations; some critics expressed great fondness for the music he used and others found it trite and inadequate. One distinguished critic remarked that she found the music an obstacle to a full appreciation of Boumonville's work, while others found it a perfect support for his choreographic invention. Listening to recordings of La Sylphide and A Folk Tale these questions are raised again, although repeated listenings have only reinforced my own fondness for this music and my feeling that it is indeed appropriate for these ballets. But then I am also very fond of the music for Giselle. In the nineteenth century, opera was a musically respectable form and ballet music wasn't. Outside Denmark, not one major central European composer wrote music for the ballet (not counting ballets in operas) between Beethoven's The Creatures of Prometheus of 1801 and Richard Strauss' Josefslegende of 1914, unless one excepts Johann Strauss' Cinderella (1908). This seems especially regretable when one thinks of the many choreographers who have since used Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner

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