AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts sunday morning 173
the other for indigenous Christian schools. Eventually, to strengthen a strict paternalistic rule
of the converts, the LMS missionaries presented these two new hymn books without Malagasy
consent or contribution. LMS control of hymn composition and publishing became an
incredibly effective way to assert technological dominance over Malagasy Christians.
eighteenth-century viennA
Mary hunter, Bowdoin college, chair
“…LES DANSES CONFéDéRéES”: MULTINATIONAL
BALLETS ON THE VIENNESE STAGES, 1740–1776
Bruce Alan Brown
University of Southern California
In a 1773 pamphlet on ballet published in Venice, the anonymous author (Sara Goudar?)
criticizes the vogue for exotic ballets, and then lists eleven European nationalities and their
choreographic stereotypes, adding “J’éviterois les danses confédérées, surtout les pas de trois”;
such a dance (she says) would result in a confusion of styles, and adversely affect the overall
plan of a ballet. Yet multinational ballets were common during the eighteenth century, nowhere
more than in Vienna, the capital of a multi-ethnic realm bordering on the Ottoman
Empire. The Viennese ballet repertoire of the middle decades of the century (from the ascension
of Empress Maria Theresia to Noverre’s final Viennese engagement) is vast, with musical
sources, descriptions, and visual depictions surviving in sufficient numbers for one to be able
to analyze the phenomenon of multinational ballets with some precision, at least locally.
From such a study several characteristics and trends emerge as regards these ballets’ subject
matter, construction, and musical treatment. While hardly devoid of stereotypes, national
ballets in Vienna could be highly specific (in contrast to those of which Goudar complained),
judging from contemporary praise for the accuracy of their settings and costumes, and surviving
stage designs. Multiple nationalities were sometimes announced in a ballet’s title (as
in Salomone and Starzer’s Le Pilote anglois dans le port hollandois, of 1754/5), but are often
evident only from programs or other accounts. Conspicuous among such works are ballets
set in fairs, markets, or ports, which naturally attracted persons from different nations (as in
Hilverding and Starzer’s La Foire de Zamoysck of 1757/8, with its encounters between Polish fur
merchants, Jews, and a Cossack). One port/market ballet by Giuseppe Salomone, performed
in Vienna’s German theater (Kärntnertortheater) in August of 1763, can be identified as the
subject of Jean Pillement’s painting “Market Scene in an Imaginary Oriental Port” (now at
the Getty Museum). Its depiction of Moorish and Chinese dancers performing together may
conflate separate dances within the work (the music of which is lost), but the conjoining of
two exotic nationalities is symptomatic of the Viennese habit (described recently by Michael
Yonan) of subsuming artworks of various non-European countries under the single rubric of
“indianisch.” Another key work is Hilverding and Starzer’s Spanish/gypsy ballet La Force du
sang (1757), with its pas de trois featuring three simultaneous sentiments (closely analyzed in a
contemporary newspaper account) at the crux of the action.
Far from being avoided, “confederated dances” were avidly cultivated in Vienna, not only
by Joseph Starzer (and his choreographic collaborators) but also by Christoph Gluck, his successor
as ballet composer. Multinational ballets were not without effect on Gluck’s operas—as