Marcel Dietschy declared, early in his centenary biography La Passion de Claude Debussy, that there was a woman at every crossroads in Debussy’s life. Years later, William Ashbrook and Margaret Cobb chose to omit many of Dietschy’s ‘effusive personal comments’ about the composer’s love life from their updated, more ‘objective’ 1990 translation. In trying to navigate the avenues by which myriad ideas and cultures of dance intersect with that context, a slight reframing of Dietschy’s romantic conceit suggests a useful guiding thread. At a time when musicologists seek to complicate individualistic focus on ‘great men’ with attention to the countless Others who aided their practice, this chapter notes the central role various foreign women played, directly and indirectly, in the dance worlds that impinged upon this compositional œuvre. From the outset, it frames the œuvre against the historical evolution of several overlapping worlds of dance, beginning with Debussy’s first publication, in Moscow in 1880, which was a four-hand arrangement of three characteristic dances from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s first ballet, Le Lac des cygnes (1875–6) – a direct emergence from his youthful sojourns at the piano with Tchaikovksy’s patron Nadezhda von Meck. A few short decades after this, a last work written expressly for dance, the unfinished children’s ballet La Boîte à joujoux of 1913, serves as an illustration of the new possibilities that had by then emerged for the art form.

Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins shared mutual desires to innovate and create in their individual fields and to create truly ‘American’ art of the twentieth century. Their collaborations for ballet (Fancy Free, On the Town, Facsimile, Age of Anxiety, Dybbuk) and musical theatre and film (West Side Story) propelled each into defining their specific style and artistic voices. Their aim to synthesize classical, symphonic aesthetics with rhythms and movements of Black and Latinx vernacular dance and music; their mutual interest in translating character, intention, emotion, mood, and narrative circumstances through non-textual mediums; and their active integration of music and movement in the creative process cinched their artistic connection. Even after the two went their separate ways, their legacies are forever entwined.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was every 5′3 ½″ a lady, but she outdrank men from Montgomery to Manhattan to Marseilles. Her short stories were so good that, sometimes, they appeared under her husband Scott's name. She was a gifted painter whose work was mostly bought out of pity, lost forever because it was unsigned and often given away, and burned by a protective, possibly jealous sister. She was a gifted dancer who began in earnest too late and never got a real chance. She was an early feminist heroine. She has inspired classic fantasy-action video games, lines of clothing, agenda-driven biographies, and novels from the beautiful to the damnable. She is catnip to movies and television series and is the current subject of two major biopics, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Scarlett Johansson. The legends of Zelda go on and on, from shortly after her birth in 1900 to the present day, and surely beyond. Yet the truths of Zelda, as we can find them, are much finer and more meaningful than all the legends they still beget. It is time to realize how much they can round out, and also increase, the legend.

The authors summarise the collaborative work of Benjamin Britten (1913–76) and, in turn, artist John Piper (1903–92) and choreographer John Cranko (1927–73). Britten relied on having an early visual conception of whatever dramatic work he was undertaking. Piper’s work as a stage designer was therefore a crucial part of Britten’s creative process, as specific examples in this essay demonstrate. Britten’s inexperience with dance meant that in his largest collaboration with Cranko, the full-length ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1957), he leaned to an unusual extent on the choreographer for the overall conception and even for the character and length of individual numbers. Both working relationships reveal the extent to which Britten’s creative process was fuelled by collaboration.

Throughout much of his career, Benjamin Britten was acclaimed both as the most significant English composer in centuries and as an artist whose music embodied an innate Englishness.  Notwithstanding the subject matter and sources of many of his works, Britten himself resisted association with what were often vague – and frequently contradictory – assumptions about the very definition of that Englishness. While Britten accepted commissions from major national institutions throughout his career, he was also openly suspicious of prevailing attempts to align contemporary creative expression with a proudly English or British identity. This essay explores the origins of those attempts in the nineteenth century and traces some of their most prominent, influential manifestations in the institutions and artistic practices of the twentieth century.

The inevitable pairing of the names of Britten and Purcell, a pairing promoted by Britten himself, was one in which he was linked to Britain’s ‘only’ composer. In response, Britten willingly took on the mantle of hope for English composition. At the same time, there is no doubt that the Britten felt an affinity with the earlier composer, and drew considerable strength and inspiration from his works. However, although Britten’s response is often presented as a personal one, this article suggests that his engagement with Purcell’s music was part of an earlier and broader picture of the use and reuse of earlier English music in the first decades of the twentieth century. His engagement with Purcell’s music, which included realisations of his songs and the use of forms and techniques associated with the composer, was at its most intense in 1945, and was focused on the period round 21 and 22 November, the dates of the Wigmore Hall concerts which saw the premieres of Britten’s Quartet No. 2 and The Holy Sonnets of John Donne. The reception of Britten’s ‘Purcell’ works was sometimes mixed, but this article concludes that for Britten, it was a matter of supreme enjoyment.

As a dance form, the contredanse is ostensibly anti-hierarchical, since its figures require cooperation between all participants and remove the hierarchical distinctions that were present in eighteenth-century society. While this would seem to make the dance suited for the mixed-class environment of the public ballroom, in Viennese dance culture figure dances such as the contredanse and the ecossaise were primarily danced in private settings. In the larger public dancing venues such as the imperial ballrooms, the contredanse tended to feature mainly as a presentational dance, in which a group of elite dancers performed to a public spectatorship. This performing context enforced social hierarchies rather than removing them, which has implications for the social connotations of the contredanse as a dance topic in the Viennese Classical style

More than any other twentieth-century composer, Stravinsky stands out within ballet modernism. He wrote more scores for dance or for theatre events with a significant dance element (eighteen in total) than any other major composer of his time. It was dance too, primarily Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which gave Stravinsky the key platform from which to launch his career, including the opportunity to work with the modernist choreographer George Balanchine (1904–83). Together, Stravinsky and Balanchine formed the most celebrated composer–choreographer collaboration of the century.

Wayne Heisler Jr addresses ‘song-ballets’ from the 1960s and 70s, choreography set to Lieder by Gustave Mahler, in order to explore inter-relationships between music, dance and the written word. He pursues the historical implications of his subject matter, considering social, cultural and philosophical discourses, and their appeals to music and the body with an aim to expanding interpretive pathways, suggesting ways in which dance can refuel Mahler’s music, repurposing its expressive vocabulary. Through critical readings of both live and recorded performances, Heisler suggests the resonance of Mahler’s danced songs with the composer’s biography and musical personality, as well as their impact on characterization, drama and musical structure. In doing so, Heisler acknowledges the inter-disciplinary methods underpinning his analysis, noting in particular the relevance of both performance studies and phenomenology.

While noting the usual scholarly snubbing of ‘excessive’ and ‘insubstantial’ dance tunes, Carlo Caballero explores dance’s significance and popularity – not only with audiences, but also with ‘serious’ composers. Writing about late nineteenth-century French musical culture, Caballero examines a vogue for the sixteenth-century pavane (with reference to examples by Saint-Saëns, Delibes, Fauré, Ravel and Debussy, amongst others), considering how and why the genre of the pavane became emblematic of a constellation of contemporary cultural strains of influence. As Caballero recounts, dance took on new significance during the period, aligned with historical prestige, antique exoticism, the French aristocracy, musical nationalism and modernity itself. Guided by this case history, Caballero reminds us of the cultural embeddedness of both dance and musical practices, and why we need ways of understanding these practices as both socially conditioned and conditioning.

This chapter by Thomas Grey presents a focused yet far-reaching account of the significance of dance to Richard Wagner. First, it explores how Wagner theorized the roles of dance, music and text in his ‘total artwork’; then it considers historical practice – examples of the actual dances (and also what the author calls the ‘sublimated choreography’) in several Wagnerian music dramas, especially Tannhäuser, with its infamous Venusberg ‘Bacchanal’. Wagner’s feelings towards dance were double-edged. On the one hand, the composer acknowledged the importance of movement and gesture in the creation of his ideal artwork. Indeed, as Grey suggests, Wagner sought to play up the two, emphasizing the role of the erotic, sexualized body onstage. On the other hand, Wagner liked to ridicule contemporary ballet. But, to Wagner, ballet’s problematic status did not relate to its explicitly bodily and human aspects. Instead, it was the genre’s association with an institutional context – ballet as produced and consumed at the Paris Opéra – that troubled the composer.

The international fate of the archetypal Parisian and ‘southern’ opera Carmen was significantly influenced by a German translation first performed on 23 October 1875 in Vienna. Already before Bizet’s untimely death on 3 June of the same year, Franz Jauner, the newly appointed director of the Vienna Court Opera, had commissioned an adapted version of the opera for the Viennese stage. This first revival was subsequently performed 476 times at the Court Opera between 1875 and 1932, with several generations of performers spanning the decades. Today it is easy to forget, that the German translation of Carmen by Julius Hopp played a central role in the work’s subsequent reputation and diffusion, providing reference points for generations of critics and spectators throughout and beyond the German-speaking regions. This chapter looks at Carmen in transition between Paris and Vienna, between the Opéra-Comique and the Court Opera, discussing some of the discourses and materials involved in this transfer. It also considers how the Germanic Carmen moved within Vienna and beyond, crossing both urban and transnational borders in the first decades of its reception history beyond Paris.