Flavia Pappacena_Noverre's Lettres sur la Danse - Acting Archives

AAR Acting Archives Essays Supplement 9 – April 2011
of the illusion. 81 The contribution of the composer, Noverre added, became truly
effective if he abided by the indications of the choreographer, as had been the case
when Gluck composed the characteristic air of the Ballet des Sauvages for the
production of Iphigénie en Tauride at the Opéra in 1779. 82
Scholars investigating Noverre have often wondered to what extent these
affirmations are conditioned by his wish to portray himself in the best possible light,
or by a vein of nostalgia for times past, or again what they really mean in technical
terms, and indeed whether the compositions of Deller, Rodolphe, Starzer, Aspelmayr
and Louis de Baillou really were so impressive. 83 In 1760 Noverre argued that the
maître de ballets should have a knowledge of music that extends to practical music
making. In the Programmes he refers to moments in productions involving specific
requisites for the action on stage which would inevitably have placed strict conditions
on the composer (to give just one example, the specification of silences and
suspense). Moreover, we can find more than one passage in the Programmes which
indicate Noverre’s competence in music (for example, the scene described at the
beginning of the Programme of Psyché in which Psyche is slumbering on a couch
surmounted by a baldachin with the curtains half open, looped up with diamond
bows, surrounded by Graces and Nymphs, allegories of Playfulness, Laughter and
Pleasures, where Noverre suggests the employment of mutes, pizzicati, flutes and
oboes). Even if Noverre’s knowledge of music could not compare with that of
Angiolini, Maximilien and Pierre Gardel or Carlo Blasis, he could nonetheless count
on the solid grounding provided as part of dance training. And finally, it should be
borne in mind that when Noverre had to modify the music written for an earlier
ballet, he was not obliged to completely alter its structure to leave the composer a
free hand.
The affinity between dance and painting constitutes, as we have seen, the main
Leitmotiv of the Lettres, and one of the cornerstones of Noverre’s aesthetics.
Drawing a parallel between choreographer and artist meant on one hand underlining
the importance of taking a global vision of the stage, and on the other envisaging the
use of the compositional techniques of painting, namely perspective, use of colour,
81 See the entry ‘Ballet’ in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, Duchesne Veuve,
1768) published by Carlo Blasis in 1820 in his Traité élémentaire théorique et pratique de l’Art de la danse and
thereafter in The Code of Terpsichore: ‘The music of a dance or ballet must be livelier, and of a stronger
accent and cadence, than vocal music; and as it is required to signify a greater variety of things, it
ought also to be much more diversified. It is music alone that can inspire the dancer and mimic with
that warmth of expression which a singer derives from his words. Music supplies, in the language of
the soul, all that dancing, by its attitudes and gestures, cannot make known to the spectators’ (Carlo
Blasis, The Code of Terpsichore: a Practical and Historical Treatise on the Ballet, Dancing, and Pantomime; with a
Complete Theory of the Art of Dancing, transl. by R. Burton, London, James Bulcock, 1828; repr. New
York, Dance Horizons, 1976, p. 57).
82 The collaboration between the maître de ballets and the composer is amply discussed as early as Letter
V (1760). In the Foreword to the 1803 edition of the Lettres Noverre affirms the total subordination of
composer to choreographer (p. 3).
83 Florian Johann Deller and Johann Joseph Rudolph composed the music for the ballets created in
Stuttgart; Joseph Starzer and Franz Aspelmayr those in Vienna; Louis de Baillou collaborated with
Noverre in Milan.
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