Music & Ballet How ballet music took centre stage | Page 8

Going further out
Perhaps the most fertile symphonic work to be mined by ballet
choreographers, however, is Felix Mendelssohn’s music for
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Starting life as a
concert overture composed when Mendelssohn was just 17, it was
eventually reborn as a full programme of incidental music for a
production of the play toward the end of the composer’s life. But it
didn’t end there. In 1962 George Balanchine choreographed a two-
act ballet of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (for the New York City
Ballet) using Mendelssohn’s incidental music along with other works
in the composer’s oeuvre. And just two years later, Sir Frederick
Ashton choreographed Mendelssohn’s music to another ballet
adaptation of the play, simply entitled The Dream.
While the story of classical composers turning to ballet music is an
interesting one, it is also worth noting that ballet librettists also
looked to the pre-existing classical canon for inspiration. Debussy’s
symphonic poem Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un Faune was so
persuasive in its evocation of classical myth that it inspired a ballet
of the same name, choreographed by the Russian ballet master
Vaslav Nijinsky in 1912 (watch the Essen Philharmonic perform the
orchestral work here). In 1919, Ottorino Respighi used music by the
Romantic-era composer Gioachino Rossini to form a new ballet
named La Boutique Fantasque. In 1936, Benjamin Britten would also
repurpose Rossini’s work, using music from the Italian Composer’s
opera William Tell to write a score for a ballet named Soirée
Musicales, which was choreographed by George Balanchine.