Arrangements and Transcriptions, 1921–32 As a young man Elgar arranged much music, from Handel's Ariodante overture in 1878 to Wagner's Good Friday Music in 1894, scored for whatever local group he was involved with. Before radio and gramophone, the dissemination of orchestral works was mostly through arrangements or the domestic pianist. Brahms composed his Haydn Variations for two pianos and for the orchestra. In the present day, Howard Ferguson did the same for his Partita. Often the motive was the publishers’ financial reward. Salut d’amour was arranged for every imaginable combination – and some unimaginable. Karg-Elert's transcriptions of Elgar's symphonies for piano are remarkable in their own right, and Elgar's reduction of his ‘Enigma’ Variations is a delight to play.

Nowadays, when authenticity is expected, there is seen to be an aesthetic, even a moral, issue in changing the medium. In Elgar's time not even the distinction between transcription and arrangement was clear. For most of his life he did not arrange other men's music. In the 1920s and 1930s he transcribed Bach, Handel, and Chopin, telling Eugene Goossens that he depended on ‘people like John Sebastian’ for inspiration now that his wife was dead.

Long before, he had written to Ivor Atkins that Bach ‘heals and pacifies all men & all things’. In April 1921 his daughter noted that he was playing Bach fugues on the piano. Perhaps, at this sad time, his mind went back to his organist days. In April and May 1921 he transcribed Bach's C minor Organ Fugue (BWV 537) for orchestra, as his Op. 86. Eugene Goossens gave the first performance, on 27 October 1921 at the Queen's Hall. The following January Richard Strauss visited London, and Elgar gave a lunch for him and some young British composers. They discussed the Bach fugue, which Elgar had already recorded. Strauss favoured a more restrained approach than Elgar's. Elgar challenged him to orchestrate the Fantasia, but Strauss declined. So the next year Elgar did so himself, and conducted both pieces at the Gloucester Three Choirs on 7 September 1922.

Music of Wartime When war broke out on 4 August 1914, the Elgars were on the west coast of Scotland. He had almost agreed to compose the last part of his oratorio trilogy, and was taking a long holiday before starting work. When he returned home he put that idea aside, and within weeks was sworn in as a special constable.

His first musical reaction was to compose on 6 September a ‘Soldier's Song: The Roll Call’, which Clara Butt sang on 10 October 1914. But he must later have found this an inappropriate response, and withdrew it. Then, as Belgium was overrun, Elgar was invited to contribute to a fund-raising anthology by leading artists, musicians, and writers. In The Observer he found a poem (Après Anvers) by the Belgian Emile Cammaerts (1878–1953), translated by his wife Tita Brand Cammaerts, the daughter of Marie Brema, the first Angel in Gerontius. He composed it as Carillon, Op. 75, in memory of the ruined bell towers of Flanders. At Rosa Burley's suggestion, he did not set the words to music, but composed a prelude and brief entr’actes between the recited verses. The four-note bell ostinato rings out from tonic down to dominant against an upward-thrusting three-in-a-bar figure, making an effective tug of rhythmic war. To ‘cover the graves of our children’, as the dying leaves scent the autumn air, Elgar tenderly begins his carillon figure in the treble on the mediant and augments it; then inverts it against the original to usher in the hoped-for triumphant entry into Berlin – to ‘sing of hope and fiercest hate … and charity’.

Carillon was performed at the Queen's Hall on 7 December by Tita Brand (and was later taken up by Rejane). At that threatening moment it incited tremendous enthusiasm. Thomas Dunhill recalled a ‘poignant and unforgettable experience’.

At the end of 1906 Elgar was again plagued by ill-health. In December he and Alice left England for two months in Italy, spending time in Naples, Capri and Rome. In Capri he went to have his hair cut. The barber was playing a mandoline, so Elgar took up a violin, then a guitarist arrived, and the three played together. He wrote down the trio but left it unfinished. Another visit to the States (2 March to 27 April) was primarily to conduct. In New York he gave the American premiere of The Kingdom, then went on to Chicago and Pittsburgh.

In about 1906 Elgar came to know Sidney Colvin (1845– 1927) and his wife Frances. Colvin was Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, biographer of Keats and Landor, editor of Stevenson

1907–08 The Wand of Youth Suites, Op. 1a and 1b Elgar's greatest music offers nobility, strong tensions, and profound spiritual experiences. But in it too can be found shy withdrawals to an inward, tender world. The Wand of Youth Suites belong to that world, and also to the playful, fanciful side of his nature. They were published in 1907 and 1908, but he designated them Opus 1. That is explained by the subtitle, ‘Music to a child's play’. That child was Elgar himself, and the play was made up by him and his brothers and sisters. The stage was a dingle close to the cottage where he was born. He made of little Broadheath an image of pastoral innocence. Even after the family moved to Worcester, he was sent back to play on Broadheath common; and as an old man he delighted to drive close friends to see his birthplace. When he was sixtyfour he wrote: ‘I am still at heart the dreamy child who used to be found in the reeds by Severn side with a sheet of paper trying to fix the sounds & longing for something very great – source, texture & all else unknown. I am still looking for this – in strange company sometimes – but as a child & as a young man & as a mature man, no single person was ever kind to me.’

Between 1789 and 1989 Europe and then the world chased the rapidly receding hope that human society could be remade. The struggle to renew the social order reached its zenith in the years before 1945 in modernism, socialism, Freudianism, expressionism, Bolshevism, Fascism, Nazism, the New Deal, the Mexican Revolution, Peronism and Gandhian nationalism. After 1945, the world froze into two blocks in which both the West and the East feared and suppressed experimentation, hunted and imprisoned radicals and stamped out the danger represented by the “youth movements”, the last and least powerful of the great attempts to transform human nature. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states ended the French revolutionary age and its attendant “isms”. Since 1991 Western capitalism has become the universal form of economic enterprise but with unexpected consequences. The two most populous states of the world, India and China, have turned out to be very good at capitalism and now threaten the economic futures of the United States and the European Union. Globalisation has also called forth the genie of resistance from the ancient Arab bottle – Wahabi Islam has emerged to reject every aspect of the great European experiment, especially the emancipation of women, in the name of an ancient theocratic puritanism.

With this scathing critique André Levinson, the most prominent defender of the nineteenth-century balletic canon, assessed George Balanchine's Le Bal (The Ball, 1929). As anyone familiar with Balanchine's career knows, this is a surprisingly harsh treatment of the choreographer who has come to epitomise the resuscitation of classical ballet in the twentieth century. scholars invariably place Balanchine within an “apostolic succession” of ballet masters “extending back in time through Petipa, and Didelot before him, to Noverre and Lully”, the founding fathers of the genre. Often, his irreverent attitude towards classicism in his early work is dismissed as lacking the mature, pure-dance approach of his later years. Balanchine himself set the tone of this interpretation by allowing more unorthodox works, including Le Bal, to fall out of repertory – and by altering the choreography of such early ballets as Apollon musagète (Apollo, Leader of the Muses, 1928) in order to stress their continuity with the classical tradition.

In 1908, a collection of articles on contemporary Russian theatre appeared in St Petersburg. Modestly titled Theatre. A Book on the New Theatre, the volume featured contributions by the painter Alexandre Benois, theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, future Commissar of Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky, the symbolist poets Andrey Bely and Valery Bryusov, and novelist Fyodor Sologub. The diversity of this group suggests the significance of Russian theatre in St Petersburg at the turn of the century and the breadth of the quest for new forms in the arts in Russia in the early years of the twentieth century. The writers mostly advocated the latest movement in Russian theatre, shaped as it was by a fascination with emerging symbolist tendencies that sought to correct, or at least to dethrone, the naturalism of Konstantin Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre, though Stanislavsky's innovations were still relatively new.

One year after the theatre volume appeared, Sergey Diaghilev presented Russian dancers in five ballets in his Saisons russes in Paris. The fame and notoriety of this “new” dance from Russia would soon eclipse the discussion of new theatre – and outlast that earlier phenomenon. Nonetheless, Russia's new ballet owed much to the experimentation of new theatre. The new ballet emerged alongside it, and, like the new theatre, new dance was simpler to define by what it was not. However variously writers conceived of the ‘new’ ballet, one thing was clear: Marius Petipa and the large repertory he created for the Russian Imperial Ballet represented the old.

Baroque dance developed from the late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century court ballet, ballet de cour, and survived into eighteenth-century opera ballet until it was eventually displaced by the dramatic innovations of Marie Sallé and Jean-Georges Noverre. Although it disappeared entirely from European stages with the emergence of the nineteenth-century romantic ballet, the baroque made a return in the twentieth century through a series of “baroquisms” in modern dance and ballet, as well as through historical reconstructions of a scholarly and theatrical nature. There is evidence of a serious attempt to reconstruct baroque dance as early as 1910 in Germany. The creation of original or speculative baroque movement languages, however, was more prevalent until mid-century. Modern dancer Alexander Sacharoff, for example, choreographed and performed solos such as Au temps du grand siècle/Pavane royale in 1919, and Kurt Jooss choreographed Pavane on the Death of an Infanta in 1929. Oskar Schlemmer was influenced by early seventeenth-century burlesque ballet costume design in his experimental Triadic Ballet (1922). Bronislava Nijinska choreographed Les Fâcheux for the Ballets de Monte Carlo in 1924 and danced the male lead herself. Martha Graham choreographed Imperial Gesture in 1935 and José Limón choreographed The Moor's Pavane, based on Othello with a Henry Purcell score, in 1949. In all of these cases, something understood as the marker of period style was incorporated into a twentieth-century concept of dance modernism.

Chinese dance is a riot of identities – court, folk, ethnic and dynastic. It has a glorious history and is a topic on its own. It draws inspiration from martial arts and “the art of sex” as the quintessential man of letters and leisure Li Yu wrote: “When people teach girls to sing and dance, they do not really teach them how to sing and dance but how to be sensual. If you want her body to be so, then you must have her dance.” Several legendary sensual dancers rose to be Senior Consorts and Empresses during the Han (206 bc–ad 220) and Tang (618–960) dynasties. Yang Yuhuan, the most beautiful woman in Chinese history, was a sensual dancer. She captivated the Tang emperor Xianzong (685–762), became his favourite consort and came to shape Chinese history. The splendid history of court dance, like Chinese dance itself, waits to be researched. Chinese dance absorbed its properties and values from many cultures, especially Central Asia, during the Han and Tang dynasties. This pattern of assimilation continued as the Mongols conquered China in 1279 and the Manchus in 1644. It developed rapidly after the Opium War (1839–42)when China began to have direct intercourse with the world beyond greater Asia. This exposure not only dramatically changed China's history but also the very fibre of Chinese culture. Dance in the form of ballet is a great example of such cultural change.

Another ballet book?

Not exactly. A Companion, a book to accompany you when you go to see ballet or when you want to know something, find a name, a date, a work; it is a book to read and a book to consult, not on everything in ballet, not a complete book, not even a complete history. A book with essays that revisit aspects of this beloved and detested art form, a book that is needed as much as ballet is needed. Yes, “needed”, as we need our bodies. Ballet shows us what the trained human body can do to make flesh become art. Ballet, the art of the body, puts our physical presence into form, into fantasy and into a deeper reality. “Needed” because in the nineteenth century ballet became a uniquely feminine enterprise, and to an extent it has retained this aspect in the twenty-first century. The great ballerina floats before us, telling us something about ourselves, our genders, our fears, hopes and, above all, prejudices. The artificiality and conventions of ballet protect our nervous sensibilities but also indirectly assault them.

Ballet is part of our history and our heritage and if we deny our past we will not comprehend the present nor grasp the future. Either in life or in dance. Ballet has a history, which reflects and refracts the social order in which it arises. A courtly society demands an art form in which the king can dance and his court revolve around him. A revolutionary society proclaims its ideals in dance; a conservative one does the same. Ballet, adored and reviled often for similar reasons, belongs to our contemporary cultural landscape as much as any other performance art. Ballet tells us about ourselves and the world we inhabit; it holds up a mirror and projects wishes and desires; it expresses our ideals and mocks our vanities; it demolishes certainties and tests limits; it creates values and sets standards; it invents the past as much as the future.

On any given morning of the year, if you were to ask a ballet dancer, “What are you going to do today?” the answer most probably would be, “First, I'll take class.” “Taking class” means the daily regimen of formalised exercises to refine, strengthen, maintain, and prepare the dancer's body for performance. This is the leçon or lesson – a process based on a codified, although ever-evolving, academic theatrical dance technique, done under the supervision of a ballet instructor. This chapter will discuss early ballet technique and training, with particular focus on developments in the eighteenth century, when the codification, the instruction, the academies and the performing companies – the professionalisation of ballet – became well established, setting the tone for decades to come and influencing the art into our own day.

At the outset, it is important to acknowledge that the historical traces of the development of ballet technique and training, as well as of ballet repertoire, are relatively rare. Unlike its sister arts, music and drama, ballet did not develop a comprehensive and universally accepted way to leave written or notated records capable of reflecting the complexities of its technique and choreographies, although in the early eighteenth century there was one valiant attempt at notation. Prior to the early nineteenth century, there were no detailed accounts of systematised training practices for professional dancers, although there are many tangential sources about training exercises from earlier periods and many later sources for corroborative material.

The Paris Opéra stood as perhaps the most influential house for ballet in nineteenth-century Europe until the ascendance of the Imperial Russian Theatres in the 1880s. Its stage attracted the talents of the great choreographers and dancers of Europe, and its audiences witnessed some of the most important phenomena in nineteenth-century ballet: the rivalry of Vestris and Duport in the first decade; the birth of the romantic style in the cloister scene of Robert le diable in 1831; the controversial failure (accompanied by the derisive whistles of the balletomaniac Jockey Club) of Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser in 1861. At the Opéra, audiences not only insisted that ballets be included within opera, but exalted independent ballets, sometimes praising them more highly than the operas with which they shared the stage. The house's directors, with their generous budgets and top-notch teams of choreographers, composers, designers and librettists, oversaw the creation of new ballets at a steady pace – including such staples of today's repertoire as the other-worldly Giselle (1841), the heroic Le Corsaire (1856) and the comic Coppélia (1870) – and by popular demand exported many of them to other houses in Milan, Copenhagen, Moscow and Philadelphia, to name a few.

Revolutionary festivities and cultural disruption

During the French Revolution of 1789 a deep change in the representation of social communication and interaction took place. The spectrum of the new sociability reached from refashioning the national costume that replaced the old dress codes of the guild and social hierarchies to the republican, informal way of addressing each other, from imitating Roman slave haircuts to rituals of fraternisation, from frugal banquets in the open to name-giving ceremonies of newborn babies (Brutus was one of the preferred choices), from the revolutionary catechism that spread ancient Roman models of virtue to the introduction of a new, republican calendar. All these measures were intended to mark a break not only with the Ancien Régime before 1789 but with history as it had been known.

The French Revolution understood itself as a “regeneration”, a return to a social order that was close to nature. A stable political order was the goal and certainly not a permanent revolution. But the Revolution, particularly after the execution of the king, had become a threatening crisis. To the horror of many politicians, post-revolutionary France proved extremely mobile and unsettled. The movement cultures and body performances of this time can be seen as an attempt to contain the “too much” of social movement by controlling the individual body within the mass. Hence the painter David and the choreographer Gardel saw themselves confronted with the problem of convincing passionate crowds to move within ordered forms, to make a moving, yet manageable, organised, yet innocuous, collective body out of an unruly mass that threatened to explode at any moment.

On 24 May 1847 Marius Petipa, a young French-born dancer and ballet master, landed in St Petersburg. He was not the first dance artist to brave the long journey to Russia and the rigours of a Russian winter, nor even the only Petipa; only five months later, his own father signed a contract to teach the senior classes at the Imperial Ballet School. Like so many other danseurs, Petipa fils was drawn to the “Venice of the North” because of decreasing opportunities for male dancers in the West and the unusually generous terms of an imperial contract, in his case, 10,000 francs a year and “half a benefit” for the position of premier danseur. He accepted the offer with alacrity, little imagining that he would remain in Russia until his death in 1910, marry twice there (both times to Russian ballerinas), raise a family and rule the Imperial Ballet from 1869, when he became chief ballet master, to his retirement in 1903.

Petipa's long stewardship of the company had an incalculable effect on Russian ballet. He presided over the shift from romanticism to what is usually termed ballet “classicism”, laid the foundation of the modern Russian school by marrying the new Italian bravura technique to its more lyrical French counterpart and helped transform an art dominated by foreigners and identified with the West into a Russian national expression. Petipa choreographed scores of ballets and innumerable dances, codifying their structure while expanding the lexicon of their movements, and created several generations of distinguished dancers.

In 1892, when The Nutcracker premiered at the Maryinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, it received mixed reviews. Like other Imperial Russian ballets, it featured flashes of brilliance from a talented cast, but it had a rather ordinary plot about a girl who receives a magical Christmas gift. Even the Tchaikovsky score failed to win unequivocal approval because it was more symphonic than the music that usually accompanied a ballet at the time. No one suspected The Nutcracker would eventually become the most popular and most often performed ballet in the world. This transformation from the least respected of the three Tchaikovsky ballets (the other two are Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty) into the most visible and lucrative of all classical ballets, is a story of virtual immigration. There are no borders at which ballets must clear customs and The Nutcracker never actually left its homeland, as other immigrants do; nonetheless, like all successful transplants, it thrived in a new location by adapting in creative and unexpected ways. Through all the changes, the ballet has retained much of its “genetic material” – the Tchaikovsky score, a version of the original libretto, some ideas and steps from the original Lev Ivanov choreography and the aura of its distinguished ballet heritage.

Tchaikovsky's belief in the purity of ballet as well as its link to childhood lies at the core of his intent in and approach to composing ballet music. According to friend and music critic Herman Laroche, the composer welcomed writing for the ballet because, “in that magical world, it was pure fairy tale expressed by pantomime and dance”. Laroche added, “Tchaikovsky could not stand realism in ballet.” Tchaikovsky reserved ballet as the ideal genre for complete submersion into a child's fantasy world and so his Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker are all fantastic tales that draw the audience into a magical world of swan maidens, sorcerers, fairies, mouse kings, princes and princesses. In this chapter, I will show how Tchaikovsky's music for these ballets is the key that unlocks the door to a fairy-tale world. For pantomime and dance, the visual tools used to convey these stories cannot alone evoke the fantasy. It is Tchaikovsky's music, especially in his masterful choice of instruments and ways of deploying them, that transports his audience to a world of fantasy and magic.