Ballet Music

Music written for dance that became independent orchestral music in the nineteenth century.

Related

RomanticBallet MusicHarp

Ballet music is written for dancing, and from the nineteenth century it also became orchestral music that stands alone.

Origins and era

The Ballet comique de la reine, staged in France in 1581, joined dance, music and poetry. Under Louis XIV, Lully fixed the forms and overture of court ballet. Romantic ballet rose in the nineteenth century; La Sylphide in 1832 and Giselle in 1841 made pointe work and white tutus its emblems. Tchaikovsky wrote Swan Lake in 1877, Sleeping Beauty in 1890 and The Nutcracker in 1892, raising ballet music to symphonic scale.

What you hear

Music is tied to steps, and waltzes, mazurkas, Spanish and Arabian dances appear as character dances. Scene music sets place and atmosphere, while characters carry motives that change with the plot. The orchestra is full, with harp, celesta and brass for the fantastic. Numbers can be extracted as a suite.

Key figures

Lully established French court ballet, and Adam and Delibes wrote the core Romantic scores. Tchaikovsky gave ballet music symphonic structure, and Stravinsky changed its rhythm and sound in The Rite of Spring. Ravel, Prokofiev and Copland carried it into the twentieth century.

Lineage

Court dances, opera ballet scenes and Romantic ballet feed in; symphonic ballet, musical-theatre dance and film scoring come out.

Common misunderstandings

Ballet music is not mere background, since it often supplies the structure of the work. It is not only Tchaikovsky, as twentieth-century scores differ widely. A dance is not automatically ballet, and ballet music can exist offstage.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry Ballet（Oxford University Press），用于核对芭蕾音乐的分期
• The Cambridge Companion to Ballet, edited by Marion Kant（Cambridge University Press, 2007），用于核对浪漫芭蕾与俄罗斯芭蕾

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.