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The Opera Quarterly 22.1 (2007) 22-37

Golden Calves:
The Role of Dance in Opera
Daniel Albright

Imagine a performance of Swan Lake in which Odette waves her arms up and down and runs in circles while a puzzled Prince Siegfried looks on, scratching his head. Eventually the exasperated ballerina simply stops, turns to him, and says, "Don't you get it? —I'm supposed to be a swan!" There are few rules in any art form more stringent than the rule in classical ballet that dancers cannot talk. Long ago, I saw at Covent Garden a performance of Kenneth MacMillan's ballet Song of the Earth in which Anthony Dowell made a megaphone of his hands in front of his wide-open mouth, as if he were going to shout something. It turned out to be only a mime of a scream, but the strong implication of taboo-breaking makes it one of the most memorable moments in the whole history of ballet, comparable to the end of Balanchine's La Sonnambula, when a woman picks up a man and carries him offstage.

But, even if speech and song are off-limits to dancers, dance is perfectly acceptable for operatic singers, even in the case of singers constitutionally unable to dance: a happy soprano surprised by an expensive present from her lover might skip with joy, a cunning mezzo might raise her skirt and clack her castanets, a dying bass in his dragon suit might even get a little choreography for his final spasms. Often in opera the dancing is quite unobtrusively integrated into the drama, as in the ballroom scenes in La Traviata and Eugene Onegin. What interests me, however, is another kind of operatic ballet, in which there is a certain strain or even fracture related to the co-presence of dancing and singing, in which the conventions of opera and conventions of ballet jostle uncomfortably, in which a composer may have been forced to provide a ballet against his will—works where there is little sense of Gesamtkunstwerk but a strong sense of Zerstückelnkunstwerk (shattered work of art).

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The great master of the inconsequential ballet was of course Giacomo Meyerbeer, who thought it a fine thing to provide, in his 1849 Le Prophète, a little relief for the bloodthirsty, war-torn Anabaptists in the form of a delicious ballet: provisions-sellers on ice-skates, simulated by that newfangled contrivance the roller skate, take a break from their capitalist enterprise and dance. Wagner considered a Meyerbeer [End Page 22] opera a series of effects without causes, "a monstrous, piebald, historico-romantic, diabolico-religious, fanatico-libidinous, sacro-frivolous, mysterio-jaunty, sentimento-knavish dramatic hodge-podge."1 One might get the impression that Wagner disapproved, but you have only to read Wagner's words to understand that Meyerbeer's time in fact has come: no pithier description of the post-modern sensibility exists. Rauschenberg's goat plugged into an automobile tire, Serrano's Piss Christ, Schnittke's Dr. Faustus, the whole canon of Damien Hirst—what are these but more recent manifestations of the piebald, diabolico-religious, sacro-frivolous, mysterio-jaunty? Perhaps Meyerbeer is the patron saint of our age.

We can take Le Prophète as a sort of limit-point of un-relatedness between a ballet and the opera in which it is included. At this degree of delimitation, there can be no critique of one medium by another: one moment you are watching an opera, the next a ballet, and you forget all about the first when watching the second. But few composers possessed Meyerbeer's godlike indifference to dramatic propriety. Typically some relation, however tenuous, can be found between opera and ballet, and in this relation there is often something disturbing, challenging—something that calls into question our usual ease at accepting the conventions of either ballet or opera.

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I think I should try to categorize the sorts of relations a ballet might have to its surrounding opera. Before I do that, however, I need to discuss...

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