Favorite Mozart Ballets?

[Bill]

Does anyone have any favorite ballets associated with Mozart, who has a big birthday (or anniversary of his birth date) today? It would be easy to start with Mr. B's Mozartiana - of course, Mozart didn't write the music!

[Helene]

Divertimento No. 15.

BTW, Google's logo has been decorated in honor of Mozart's birthday. One day -- 27th January (PST?) -- only!

http://www.google.com/

[drb]

For Mozatiana, Tchaikovsky orchestrated a Gigue and Minuet from set of 12 pieces Mozart composed in 1789, the Preghiera from the motet Ave verum K. 618 as transcribed by Liszt, and Ten Variations on "Unser dummer Poble meint", K. 455 that Mozart based on a theme of Gluck. For me it is enough Mozart to count as a Mozart ballet. Since it is tied for first on my all-time Farrell/Balanchine list, it gets my vote. But I plan to enjoy Divertimento 15 tonight. Happy Birthday, Wolfie!

[Pamela Moberg]

Indeed I have a memory. At fifteen, my first appearance as an adult dancer, I took part in the beginning of the third act of Marriage of Figaro. It was a little fandango.

Pehr Christian Johansson also made his debut on the stage in that fandango.

Talk of coincidences - now he is the object of my research.

[Farrell Fan]

I plan to enjoy Divertimento No. 15 tonight as well, and am grateful it is in the repertory of both NYCB and the Suzanne Farrell Ballet. But it would have been nice if someone had thought to revive Balanchine's Symphonie Concertante from 1947 (original cast: Tanaquil LeClercq, Diana Adams). John Martin called it "perhaps Balanchine's most boring work." But then, he also famously failed to appreciate another work on tonight's program: Bizet's Symphony in C.

[Helene]

I plan to enjoy Divertimento No. 15 tonight as well, and am grateful it is in the repertory of both NYCB and the Suzanne Farrell Ballet. But it would have been nice if someone had thought to revive Balanchine's Symphonie Concertante from 1947 (original cast: Tanaquil LeClercq, Diana Adams). John Martin called it "perhaps Balanchine's most boring work." But then, he also famously failed to appreciate another work on tonight's program: Bizet's Symphony in C.

I saw Symphonie Concertante when ABT revived it. I wouldn't say it was Balanchine's most boring work -- I found it far more interesting than Gounod Symphony, one of the few Balanchine ballets during which I found it hard to stay focused -- but as a proclaimed teaching ballet, in my opinion, it didn't approach the heights of Divertimento No. 15, even factoring for ABT's stylistic differences.

[bart]

And then there's Caracole, Balanchine's 1952 setting of Divertimento No. 15. The cast list in the Taper book is incredible: Diana Adams, Melissa Hayden, Tanaquil Le Clerq, Maria Tallchief, and Patricia Wilde. And that's just the women. It's interesting that in the 1956 premiere of the current version, the women are the same -- except that Tallchief is out and Allegra Kent is in. Truly an embarrassment of riches for Balanchine and the audience!

"Mozart" made me think of Mark Morris's work, which has so many of the qualities of variety, lightness-with-depth and joyousness I associate with the composer. I checked the list of Morris's ballet on his company's website and was surprised to find only 4 ballets listed: Fantasy (to Fantasia in C for Piano), Fugue and Fantasy, Rondo (to Rondo in A Minor for Piano), and the dances for Act III of Peter Sellar's production of Nozze di Figaro.

"Rondo" rang a bell -- but not Morris's bell. So I checked further and found that Jerome Robbins did a ballet for Kyra Nicholos and Stephanie Saland around 1980. I'm pretty sure I saw this at the time. Is it still in the NYCB rep?

I also found a 2002 Ballet Talk thread -- asking posters to select their favorite ballet composers from a list -- in which Paul Parrish makes the following comment.

QUOTE: "OF the composers NOT on the list, I'd have to say that Bach is very danceable, Mozart is not."

This raises several questions. I wonder why there seem to be relatively few Mozart ballets compared to -- say -- Bach, Handel and even Haydn. The difficulty of expressing Beethoven in dance I can understand. But I would have thought Mozart was a natural. (He could write lovely dance music -- Don Giovanni's party scene, for instance.) What is the difficulty choreographers -- and/or dancers -- seem to find?

[carbro]

Balanchine said that Mozart always defeated him, except for Divert. I think Symphonie Concertante is a case in point. Even in the great performance by SAB students that opened NYCB's first Balanchine festival (a cast led by Tara Keim and Rachel Rutherford), the ballet never reaches the sublime heights that the music does. Even superbly trained bodies, even in Balanchine's hands, have expressive limitations that keep them in this realm and not in some non-material one.

When done by ABT, Symph Con always looked very academic and dry. I thought then that it was the only way to approach this work due to the (literally) heavenly references in the music. It didn't look academic on the SAB kids, and it worked much better.

Divert is a lesser piece of music (lesser Mozart is such a bad thing?!), so the challenge was less unmeetable.

When I listen to Mozart and start to imagine the inevitable dancing figures, they quickly fade, because the music needs no visual expression. It epitomizes transcendence.

PS. I should note that I am judging Balanchine by Balanchinian standards. If a work of SC's caliber poured from a choreographer today, I'd be ecstatic.

[Hans]

I enjoy the music to Les Petits Riens, the only ballet Mozart ever wrote.

[Mel Johnson]

I have always been fond of "Secret Places", Gerald Arpino's pas de deux set to the slow movement of the Piano Concerto #21.

[Joseph]

"La Petite Mort", choreo by Juri Kylian

[Bill]

I see that The Winger has a photo related to Divert. No. 15 at the following link:

http://www.phontographer.com/winger/archiv...t_deco_sty.html

An Art Deco tribute to Mozart.