Smithsonian Associates: Ballet Music – The Soul of Movement, Lecture 3 – Diaghilev, the Dream Weaver

Audiences love the spectacle and the sets, adore the costumes, and thrill to the brilliance and beauty of the choreography and the performers, and above all we are moved and exalted by the music. While dance is as old as we are, ballet is a much more recent evolution. By tracing ballet’s rapid journey from French courtly dance to an internationally beloved artform, we find its path travels directly through the magnificent scores of composers like Debussy, Stravinsky, Copland, and of course, Tchaikovsky.

In a 4-session series, speaker and concert pianist Rachel Franklin uses her unique live piano demonstrations and historic and contemporary film clips to illustrate how the music from such ballet masterpieces as Giselle, Swan Lake, Daphnis and Chloë, Le Sacre du Printemps, and Appalachian Spring became a treasured part of our cultural landscape.

British-born Franklin has been a featured speaker for organizations including the Library of Congress and NPR, exploring intersections among classical and jazz music, film scores, and the fine arts.

———————————————————————————————————————————————

He didn’t dance, choreograph, or compose, but nonetheless Serge Diaghilev was a ballet alchemist. From his command post in Paris he gathered extraordinary talents together from across the artistic universe to create new, epochal ballet events that would shape dance up until the present day. Despite stormy relationships with most of them, Diaghilev managed to persuade luminaries such as Ravel, Debussy, Manuel de Falla, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev to compose an unparalleled collection of scores for his legendary Ballets Russes.