THE BALLET MUSIC OF GIUSEPPE VERDI’S OPERASIn 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) andOtello (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, wellcrafted pieces of music should not be withheld from the public.