Cesare Pugni: A Plea for Justice

Abstract

To be fully effective, historical literature must stir the reader's imagination, stimulating the senses so as to enable him to experience, in his mind, past events with a perspective that places these events in the context of man's development. Historians of the theatre have to achieve this by bringing the reader, so to speak, into the auditorium at their side and by giving him a vicarious glimpse of a performance whose reality vanished as soon as the curtain hid the players from view. Historians of the ballet, in particular, must activate those senses through which the original spectators enjoyed the actual spectacle, namely the visual and aural senses that respond to the movement of the dancers and the music to which they dance. There are many pictorial and documentary sources from which the visual aspect can be recreated most precisely by a notated record of the choreography, if such exists, film and video for more recent works, still photographs, prints and engravings of performances, descriptions by critics and other eye-witnesses, archival documents relating to the production, and designs for scenery, costumes and properties but the aural aspect is contained solely in the music score, aided in some cases by recorded performances. It is in the aural field that the study of ballet history has been particularly weak. Pick up any general history of ballet, and you will find that music is only incidentally mentioned. This is understandable, for musical analysis is a specialised area of study, alien to the general reader. But it is also due to the fact that much ballet music has not been of a quality to attract the interest of serious musicologists on its own merits. Such books that have appeared on ballet music have, so far as the pre-1900 scene is concerned, dealt with a handful of major scores, such as the ballet music of Lully, Handel, Rameau and Gluck, Beethoven's Prometheus, the nineteenthcentury ballet scores of Adam, Delibes and Tchaikovsky, but ignore the greater part of the music written for ballet.1 Musicologists who have turned their attention to ballet have done so only incidentally to their main studies; the musicologist prepared to devote a lifetime to examining the mass of material that lies waiting in musical and theatrical archives has not yet appeared.