Borrowings and Original Music: A Dilemma for the Ballet-Pantomime Composer

Abstract

Parisian audiences of the 1830s and 1840s were well acquainted with the custom of musical borrowing. In vaudevilles, they heard melodies taken from folk-songs along with the original tunes vaudeville conductors composed for such works.' In melodramas, they heard the strains of familiar arias in the overtures and instrumental refrains.2 At the concerts given by virtuosos, they heard, buried under the arpeggios and flourishes, wellknown tunes from both operas and folk-songs.3 At the Opera, in performances of foreign operas, they heard both the music of the opera itself and a pastiche of borrowings from other works: for the Opera's staging Don Giovanni in 1834, for example, Franqois Henri J. Blaze (better known as Castil-Blaze) was charged with the task of providing music for ' . .. the dance airs, marches, final chorus, entr'actes, in short, all of the accessories necessary for producing Don Giovanni at the Paris Opera'4 he did so by borrowing from Mozart's piano sonatas, symphonies, masses, Die Zauberflite, and La Clemenza di Tito. Parisians during this era were also much taken with the opera pastiche, a genre which consisted entirely of borrowed music. Many such works were performed in the Boulevard theatres and at the Opera as well,5 though they did not always meet with the approval of critics (Hector Berlioz even calling Castil-Blaze a 'veterinarian' for his efforts in this regard). Opera audiences also encountered borrowed music in balletpantomime scores.6 Indeed, since the breaking off of ballet from opera with the first appearance of the ballet d'action at the Opera in the 1770s, Parisian ballet composers had made free use of music appropriated from other sources. So slight is the role of original music in some of the early scores, in fact, that in several cases the identity of the composer or arranger is today difficult, or impossible, to discern.7 Though composers began to contribute more original music to ballet scores around the beginning of the 19th century, they continued to make use of borrowed music well into the 1830s and 1840s.