What are your favorite dance/ballet segments in opera?

I would like to explore this area and would really appreciate your suggestions on the best place to start.

the following book comes to mind regarding opera ballets.
there are undoubtedly more works on the subject, probably more wide-ranging ones, but this one, concentrating on Verdi's ballets for his operas, is quite in depth regarding the ballets' in the premier productions of Verdi's operas.
It was released in both hard and soft-cover, if it's out of print, used copies may be for sale.

Jürgensen, Knud Arne.
Title :The Verdi ballets / Knud Arne Jürgensen.
Imprint :Parma : Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 1995.
Description:ix, 398 p., 100 p. of plates : ill. (some col.), ports ; 27 cm.
Series :Premio internazionale Rotary Club in Parma "Giuseppe Verdi" ; 4
Notes :Includes bibliographical references (p. 381-385) and indexes.

Thank you very much RG. I will follow this up.

When you have done your exploring would you kindly report some of your findings. I am curious as to how ballet would have been incorporated into an opera at its inception. Did Verdi, for example work with a choreographer or more less note that there should be ballet at some point in the staging to be determined by the AD and chosen choreographer who staged the opera. I have seen some lovely dance segments in some of his operas, but do not recall seeing actual ballet. Ballet, in my mind is a performance in itself and so for there to be ballet within an opera, it would seem to require that the opera characters attend a ballet or a ballet studio as part of the libretto. Dance, however is a whole other ball of wax and is evidenced at party scenes, balls and so on such as in La Traviata.

Some passages/sections of opera music scores sound very balletic to my untrained ears. Do other BalletTalkers have a similar response to some opera passages? Which ones? I am going to begin a list and perhaps post it in this thread.

In Zeffirelli's movie La Traviata, with Stratas and Domingo, Gabriella Borni is the gypsy dancer and Ekaterina Maximova and Vladimir Vasiliev are the Spanish dancers. The choreography is by Alberto Testa. Clips of both dances are on youtube.

If I remember correctly, George Dorris wrote about this in 'Verdi and Grand Opera', Dance Chronicle, Volume 21, Issue 1 1998 , pages 155 - 159.

Polovstian Dances is what instantly springs to mind.

I also love the Pastorale in Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades/Pique Dame. I always wondered if any of Petipa or Ivanov's MANY dances in the Imperial Russian operas survived (I believe Ivanov did the original Polovstian Dances, but of course Fokine's brilliant versions have replaced his)

Early opera expected to have dance in it. Think of all of the glorious dance music from "Orfeo ed Euridice" that Balanchine used for "Chaconne".

Opera didn't open in Paris and expect to be successful without a ballet; Wagner had to add one for the Paris premiere of "Tannhauser". That changed with most of Wagner and verismo. As far as I know, Verdi did not collaborate with choreographers, but there was dance music in a number of his middle and late operas, although none in the last two ("Otello" and "Falstaff"), except for a French version of "Otello" that is rarely performed. Examples are:

La Traviata -- Act III party scene
Don Carlo -- used by Balanchine for "Ballo della Regina"
Aida -- extended dance music in the pre-battle prayer scene and in the Act II, on Radames' triumphant return

Rigoletto has vocals over the short dance music in Act I, where the Duke seduces the Countess Ceprano, but there's no orchestral or full dance music in the opera.

Other operas with famous dance music:

Ponchielli's "La Gioconda" -- Dance of the Hours
Gounod's "Faust" -- Walpurgishnacht Ballet (used by Balanchine)

Ivor Guest recounts numerous ballets in early French opera in "The Paris Opera Ballet". Ballet didn't exist as a stand-alone in the early history of POB.

Here's Alistair Macaulay's review of the premiere of the Met production of the opera, directed by Morris. he focuses on the dance elements.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/arts/dance/04morr.html

George Martin's The Opera Companion (1961, recently reissued in paperback) has an interesting chapter on "Ballet in Opera." Martin sumerizes some of the different uses to which ballet has been put in opera, including a discussion of Balanchine's brief and ocntroversial tenure with the Metropolitan in the 1930s. I just checked and found that this chapter is available "in preview" on Google Books.

I sometimes think that "Broadway" of the last century was the marriage and dumbing down of opera and ballet and where dance and music (singing) was part of a show. Both singing and dance occupy an "interesting" niche in daily life and are recreational pursuits for most of us (non professional performers). I don't know anyone who sings to their lover etc., but perhaps some dancing with one can be seen at times (still in a recreational context).

Both singing and dance have come to represent a meta level of communication, with singing more literal of course. But it is interesting to note how we can identify musical compositions, keys, melodies, orchestrations etc. with moods and sentiments... same with gesture in dance. These abstractions provide marvelous tools for the story teller who can draw upon and interweave these meta languages to convey anything from simple story lines to abstract ideas. We are now, as the audience of such artistic creations able to immerse ourselves in these creations of fantasy of sound, movement, storyline and come away moved, motivated, inspired and the wiser for the experience.

How fortunate we are to have these wonderful creations by such talented and dedicated artists and performers who speak these meta languages to our souls.

I believe Chaconne is actually a version of the dances Balanchine choreographed for Rolf Lieberman's production of the opera, originally shown in Hamburg and later in Paris where Ghislane Thesmar and Michael Denard took the leads.
And don't forget the wonderful Polish dances in Glinka's A Life for the Tsar which used to be a Bolshoi showpiece - there is a video of them dating from the 1950's , though I don't know if it is commercially available.
The dances in the Polish scene of Boris Godounov were attributed to Lopukov and there are a number of dance scenes in Ruslan and Ludmilla, some of which are very interesting. Petipa speaks in memoirs of arranging the Lezginka in Ruslan,which also formed part of the dances which made up Le Festin, though I think nowadays all the choreography of Ruslan is attributed to Fokine. Again, an entire production of the opera has been recorded complete with the ballets.
Much more recently Michael Tippett's Midsummer Marriage has important dance elements which form an essential part of the plot, and these were originally choreographed by John Cranko.

The history of Balanchine and Chaconne via Orfeo is outlined in the following by Anna Kisselgoff. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...757C0A962948260

Sometimes ballets were imposed upon composers.
In the case of Francesco Cavalli the outstanding Italian composer, he had two operas staged in Paris that were written without ballet scenes. Commissioned to write an opera as part of Louis XIV’s marriage celebration, he failed to complete the opera on time and his earlier work Xerxes was given. As it was di rigeur in France at that time(1660) to have ballets in operas, Cavalli found that Jean Baptiste Lully was asked to provide ballet interludes in the opera. When Cavalli’s originally commissioned opera, ‘Hercules in Love’ was staged in Paris in 1662, Lully once again provided music for the ballets.

'Hercules in Love' was last month given a production by Nederlands Opera which included the Lully music but regettably, was not staged in the manner of the Sun King era.

Zefferelli's flm Young Verdi contains one of the great comic dance sequences of all time. The opera is Aida, performed in Rio de Janeiro in the presence of the Emperor of Brazil. The scene: the Triumphal March.

The aging prima ballerina, in black face and baggy white tights, lurches through what I recall as small temps leves from side to side, obtaining the tiniest of elevation by means of wild arm flapping. The audience goes WILD !

I'm afraid this astonishing peformance has influenced my idea of 19th-century opera ballet in general and has led me to suspect that its demise was probably a good thing.

I take exception to "dumbing down" as a huge Broadway fan--certainly a work like Sondheim/Lapine's Sunday in the Park with George is as sophisticated and moving as any modern opera or ballet I can think of. There's some difference too--musical theatre places a lot more emphasis on lyrics that progress the story than on opera where lyrics are pretty much unimportant, and the dance tends to be more integrated whereas often times the ballet in opera was completely divorced from the opera (at its least essential often merely a pretty divertissement)

Of course us ballet fans owe a lot to dance from opera--wasn't it the Ballet of the Dead Nuns from Meyerbeer's Robert le Diablo opera that many feel led tot he whole Romantic Ballet craze in France? It's interesting too when ballet and opera have been combined--I know there's a DVD of Rimsky Korsakov's "Ballet-opera" Mlada, which wasn't a big success when it premiered, that I'd like to see.

Of course as Helene mentioned early opera integrated ballet to a much larger extent--it was part of the presentation. Opera in itself was largely created to try to recreat the Greek Tragedies which were all done to music originally--and to which we know dance also played a huge part, so I guess the intertwining of opera and ballet really goes back YEARS before the birth of Christ.

Interesting about Dance of the Hours--the piece seems to be more famous than the opera it's from--I'm nto too knowledgeable about opera but have never even heard of it performed anymore. Are there other examples of this? I have seen Prince Igor (on DVD) and I knwo the Russian companies stills tage it but surely the Polovstian Dances are more famous than most of the opera as well.

I just learned in an opera-related debate about cuts in opera, that Verdi's Macbeth and Il Trovatore both have ballet music that is almost always cut. I don't know about early Verdi.

It's interesting that you mention Macbeth. I have a recollection of seeing a witches' ballet from this opera, in a clip shown on Classical Arts Showcase. I gather that the long ballet was added for a performance in Paris, where such things were expected and required.

I just looked it up in Philip Gossett's Divas and Scholars. He describes the following, from a performance in Parma. The ballet occurs during the witches' second encounter with Macbeth (act 3).

Among the outraged comments from the audience: "If we wanted a movie, we'd have gone to the movies."

The version I saw in video, which I believe was from another Italian opera house, was more conventional: lots of writhing, arm waving, etc. Far from classical, but definitely a "ballet" of a sort. I enjoyed it.

I can't imagine where the ballet was in Trovatore -- possibly the gypsy camp scene (as in Don Q)?

Helene, I'm a bit too lazy to check for sure but I believe Verdi wrote the ballets for insertion in the versions used for the Paris premiere of both these pieces.
Trouvere followed the Italian Trovatore within months but I don't think Macbeth made it to Paris until Verdi revised the 1847 version in 1965, which then was presented in Paris. I believ in Macbeth the ballet was an extended version of the second appearance of the witches. (Hopefully my memory isn't too rickety)

Yes and yes -- Macbeth, for the witches, and for Il Trovatore, in the gypsy camp!

In the Seattle Opera production from a couple of years ago, the witches were dressed in black and white, as brides and widows. If I remember correctly, there were a few dancer witches, but I don't remember any purses

Thanks so much for that link and Kisselgoff's delightful remark about Peter Boal being a young dancer to watch.

Mr. Balanchine also choreographed Orpheus and Euridice in 1936 at the Metropolitan Opera. Here is the link to the entry in the Balanchine Foundation's catalog.

If that doesn't work, it is entry #170 in the catalog of works. This is the version where he had the singers in the pit and the dancers on stage. The Met did not like this.