Relationships: Ballet and Dance

Ballet's narrative masterpieces take a unique position in classical music—more abstract than opera, but more programmatic than absolute instrumental music. Unlike opera, there are no more words to tell us what is happening or how the characters are feeling. Plotless ballets take this even further. This gives us a new lens through which we can approach music more generally, as interpretive choices abound when translating story—especially a well-known one—into dance.

As in previous chapters, this chapter will discuss how ballet music reveals the underlying musical elements as absolute music, with a focus on rhythm and harmony. And we'll see what happens when abstract classical music written purely for instrumentalists is brought to the ballet and interpreted via dance.

Most of the examples come from dance's ability to depict relationships, not because there aren't great moments in ballet's athletic solo male and female variations or the shapes of a larger corps de ballet, but because the two person dance (the pas de deux) is often the musical centerpiece of the ballet, and it can showcase the chemistry between two people in a way that other genres cannot.

Romeo and Juliet

Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet stands beside the ballets of Stravinsky in the classical repertoire, frequently performed as an orchestral suite without dancers at all. There are no words, but there is still a plot that is, it's safe to say, pretty familiar to audiences.

For the uninitiated, Romeo and Juliet are star-crossed lovers from the Montague and Capulet families, which, simply put, hate each other. Cue the music:

But Romeo and Juliet fall in love at first sight, and Romeo ventures into the Capulet orchard under cover of night. Juliet appears on her balcony, unaware of Romeo's presence below. It's here that Juliet speaks the lines that inspired the Caroline Shaw song from the previous chapter (What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet). Reflecting on their forbidden love, she laments that only Romeo's last name—his family identity—stands in their way:

This is the so-called “balcony scene”, aptly named for its defining characteristic: Juliet is on a balcony. Romeo is not. And this distance is not just a matter of location, but also symbolic of their impossibility as a couple. The actress Dame Judi Dench says that the physical separation of the balcony makes their interaction “awkward and clumsy”, which “forces them to use language more.” This seems like it could be a problem for a language-less production.

There are many layers in the interpretive chain of the ballet—Prokofiev's music, the choreography, and the actual playing and dancing. But before all that, there is the interpretive question of the text itself. The Juliet we just watched may have leaned towards the dreamy and lyrical, but she can also be a frustrated, fiery adolescent, or more mature, assertive, and self-assured.

In this way, classical music shares much in common with the dramatic arts. The poet T.S. Eliot wrote, “We must take into account the instability of any art—the drama, music, dancing—which depends upon representation by performers… A struggle, more or less unconscious, between the creator and the interpreter is almost inevitable. ”

How, then, can all of this language and symbolism come out in music and dance? In Kenneth McMillan's choreography, the lovers are not only silent, they are not even separated by a balcony; instead they are touching and embracing. Here's the Royal Ballet:

There's no denying that without Shakespeare's verse, the finer points might be missed: the duality between the public and private worlds these lovers inhabit, the weight of family expectations against personal desire, the risk of the moment against their joy of being together. The verbal mismatch between the florid Romeo and the practical-but-enchanted Juliet is left to the imagination.

We do get a measure of Juliet's hesitation in her momentary retreats, soft rebuttals delaying the climactic ending. But overwhelmingly, the Juliet in this segment is literally heels-over-head in love—the Juliet that proclaims, “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep; the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite.”

These are interpretive choices made not just by Prokofiev but by McMillan's choreography, the artistic director, dancers, and everyone else involved with the production (lighting, sets, costumes, etc).

Before the clip above starts, the music does give us the suspense of Romeo sneaking in, and especially in Misty Copeland and Roberto Bolle's rendition, the tension lingers; the quick escalation of their affection seems more like a train set in motion that can't be stopped in spite of Juliet's protestations. The arc of their exchange feels inevitable. But mostly the tension holds because the scene reeks of unreality, and the viewer knows what is beneath it all; darker moments in the score are momentary, just long enough to remind the listener that they exist.

Even though Romeo and Juliet are young and naive, this is not the same magical innocence of the flirting birdcatchers Papageno and Papagena that we saw in the last chapter—there's a certain gravitas and sincerity here. Whereas Shakespeare gives us tension in the form of the backdrop of Juliet's inner struggle, Prokofiev gives us the tension of tempting us to forget it.

MacMillan's choreography, like the music, is unbounded, weightless—the “balcony” seemingly expanding beyond its physical constraints, Romeo and Juliet are flying as much as dancing. Ballet critic Akim Volynsky saw ballet's characteristic verticality as metaphysical as much as aesthetic: “Soaring cathedrals, obelisks, columns, mountains — all of these draw the soul upward. As soon as a person's eyes glide from bottom to top, his emotions and thoughts, which are fixed on the earth and so often weighty and ponderous, follow his gaze and irrepressibly strive skyward.”

Dench says that if the lovers were standing right next to each other then she doesn't believe that Juliet is so bold as to be so effusive. But Prokofiev and MacMillan show us their connection at its purest—a connection that the audience already understands even if the lovers themselves do not—that Romeo and Juliet are, in Dench's words, “smitten… past the point of no return.”

But the most striking moment in the balcony scene is the ending—the kiss that seems to break out from “art” and become purely human.

As with the Scheherazade war cries in the narrative chapter, folks new to ballet might think, “Is that allowed?” Likely a kiss would be impossible with a balcony between them, though the 2021 version of the same scene in Bernstein's West Side Story also finds a way to make it happen.

Prokofiev's music finds another kiss—raw and drawn out—in Matthew Bourne's 2019 choreography set in an asylum. Here the lovers dance like messy, passionate teenagers, and the pared down string section comes out a little less neat, a little more unhinged. The kiss becomes the focus of the scene. This ballet is obviously an extra step away from Shakespeare's original—though changing the setting of Shakespeare's works to a modern environment is quite common (the 1996 film with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes comes to mind). The argument has been that the more liberal interpretation helps connect the audience to a more fundamental meaning in the source material.

Prokofiev is not the only composer who has written music for Romeo and Juliet. In fact, in Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette—a seven-movement “symphonie dramatique” for orchestra and three choruses, with vocal solos—Berlioz invented the Tristan und Isolde theme that we heard in the last chapter, a theme Wagner would make use of in his own opera about star-crossed lovers.

But let's look, as we have in past chapters, at a purely instrumental take on this story, not intended for the stage. Even absent an explicit plot, the “love theme” from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture is unmistakable, played here by Gemma New and the London Philharmonic:

Tchaikovsky's music immediately tugs on the heartstrings in a way that Prokofiev's balcony scene does not—Tchaikovsky's energy is more smoldering than kinetic. The motions are similar, as they both reach higher and higher, but Prokofiev's has a natural buoyancy compared to Tchaikovsky's smoother curves. Interestingly, in Mats Ek's Tchaikovsky-based choreography, he actually uses a similar theme from the Fifth Symphony, rather than the piece above, to give us a Juliet and Romeo that are even more ecstatic in their love, bordering on euphoric. Despite Tchaikovsky's smoother contours, his music—like much of the classical repertoire—can be listened to with a balletic sensibility.

But Romeo and Juliet is not a story of champagne bubbliness and euphoria, and the same material that we heard and saw in Prokofiev's Balcony Scene will come back with different effect.

In the couple's other pas de deux, the bedroom scene after the lovers' secret wedding, Romeo must leave, banished from Verona, and Juliet has a premonition of seeing him dead in a tomb. Here we discover a more fervent, desperate treatment of the earlier material (especially in Bolle and Copeland's performance). The same motions find more longing and less contentment. The twisting and turning phrases have more complexity and less naïveté. The leaps are yearning and angsty as they are propelled upwards rather than effortlessly floating. And the underlying darkness never quite vanishes.

Fight

The fight begins when Tybalt, Juliet's cousin, finds Romeo in the streets of Verona. Romeo, who just married Juliet in secret, tries to avoid fighting by saying he loves Tybalt. But Mercutio, who doesn't know about the marriage, thinks Romeo is being a coward. He draws his sword and fights Tybalt instead. When Romeo tries to stop them, Tybalt stabs Mercutio under Romeo's arm. As he dies, Mercutio curses both the Montague and Capulet families.

Enraged by his friend's death, Romeo can no longer hold back. In a fit of passion, he challenges Tybalt to a duel. Here is Christian Spuck's choreography, performed by Ballet Zurich, picking up at the death of Mercutio.

The music and choreography here is less dance-y than in Tchaikovsky or even Prokofiev's balcony scene—it would work just as well in a film score as in a ballet—but it shows how even music that is primarily dramatic can still be balletic. From my first listen of this excerpt, I couldn't tell you anything about the music's melody, its harmony, or its form. The image of the orchestra in my head is of string players sawing away at their instruments, eyebrows furrowed as they aim to hit each bit exactly on time—not a moment too early or too late. If they're off by just one sixteenth note, their bows will be going opposite directions as their stand partner, and in a cramped orchestra pit, they will either impale their colleague or their bows will collide. Are they thinking about what the dancers are doing on stage? They don't have to, because they're doing the same thing! Of course, Prokofiev wrote this music knowing it was to go to a fight scene. But if he had written the music first, there is practically no other scene that could have been set to it.

Here's Theodor Currentzis conducting the fight music by itself:

This balletic sensibility underlies much of Prokofiev's absolute music (alongside Ravel, Debussy, and any number of other composers). In his third piano concerto, the hands constantly cross over each other “like the 2 hands fighting” says pianist superstar Lang Lang, taking a Mortal Kombat stance. Here the fingers joust for the 77-years-young Martha Argerich in her signature piece.

The similarities between this passage and the duel in Romeo and Juliet are fairly clear: the notes scamper up and down, running over each other, but still maintain a distinct trajectory towards the climax. But are they exactly the same story? And—who's to say that the concerto is a story at all? Would the concerto definitely be a fight scene? Would it be humans fighting, or a leopard hunting its prey? Or would its more definitive upwards line better represent the first airplane taking off? Or perhaps it's a child's pent-up energy that they can no longer contain, finally erupting.

Rhythm

There is no dance without rhythm, the fifth of the six foundational components of music, alongside form, timbre, counterpoint, melody, and harmony. Arguably, rhythm came first, even before music, because rhythm starts with pulse—the heartbeat that every living person has. It is the job of rhythm to act on the pulse. Faster music with running notes in perpetual motion like in the Prokofiev we just heard will quicken a heartbeat—at least metaphorically, but often even literally; slower music with long held notes as in Tchaikovsky's love theme might relax you—or the opposite if they are withholding the resolution you desire.

For this reason, the choice of tempo (speed) is one of the most important decisions an interpreter can make. Even when composers indicate a tempo, it can be inscrutable like Schubert's Molto moderato (“Very moderately”… is that faster or slower than just “moderately”?), or Ives' nonsensical “Fistiswatto”, or the always exasperating Tempo giusto, which just means “the right tempo”.

Atypical rhythms that disturb the pulse—so-called “syncopations”—lie at odds with our desire for a regular heartbeat, and keep the listener on their toes, guessing what will happen. Take, for instance, the fight theme from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, which has the same scurrying of strings as Prokofiev's, but with syncopated cymbal crashes which could be the parrying of swords:

If those cymbal crashes simply landed with the pulse rather than disturbing it, the scene would lose its effect, the fight feeling more choreographed than real—a device that Bernstein uses to the same effect for the Rumble scene in West Side Story.

Rhythms, the instruments they're played on, and their surprises have added quite a bit more complexity in the 100+ years since Tchaikovsky. In Steve Reich's “phasing” music, the musicians start playing in sync, and then some speed up so that they are no longer playing together—and then lock in together exactly one 16th note off from where they started. Here is one “phase” from Drumming:

What makes Reich's trance-like music work—even in ballet, like Elisa Monte's Treading—is the steady pulse—the presence of which is grounding and hypnotic, and the disturbance of which causes a discomfort from which we require resolution. As a musician playing Reich's Piano Phase, that discomfort for me has often become straight-up fear that my colleagues and I will never sync up again—but the longer the musicians can sit in the chaotic “off-phase” the greater the effect on the audience. (There is an extreme. Ligeti's ironic Symphonic Poem for 100 Metronomes sounds significantly more chaotic, and is as much a thought experiment as actual music, a critique of the avant-garde “radicals” who would take it seriously and a troll of “the petit-bourgeois” who dismiss modern music out of hand. “Both wear the blinkers of the narrow-minded,” he said.)

Pulse vs. Breath, Heart vs. Lungs

The push and pull against our bodies' desire for a nice, stable pulse is the central question that rhythm poses. As much as we love a stable pulse, any human knows that our hearts aren't actually steady. Our heart rate is variable, even more so when the body is relaxed, and it is especially susceptible to the effects of the breath, which speeds up the pulse as we inhale and slows it down as we exhale.

A steady beat allows the body to move more efficiently—to swing an axe or march or run or otherwise move one's arms and legs in time. The flexibility of the breath allows us to sing and express ourselves through cadence and phrasing in our speech. We can see both side-by-side in Frederic Rzewski's “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues”, which takes the eponymous folk song sung by 1930s textile workers and places it next to the relentless churning of the cotton mill.

For the first few minutes, the hellish noise of the cotton mill builds up, at times even requiring the pianist to use their entire forearm, until it finally—improbably—coalesces into a bluesy accompaniment figure.

Says @sshuck in a YouTube comment (as good a place for analysis as any): “for those people who don't like the way this piece sounds, imagine listening to it 12 hrs a day, seven days a week for 5 cents an hour.” But finally, the oppressive background snaps, giving way to the workers' song, soulful and completely free of “beats” and “pulses”—Rzewski's symbolism is clear.

The piece will eventually end with the return of the cotton mill, but in the upper register, fading away.

Most music does not lie on these extremes, but somewhere in between, where both breath and pulse can live as one—neither completely free nor completely constrained. The heartbeat is regular, the expectation established, but occasionally withheld when the melody's lyricism demands it.

Dances like a Waltz or a Minuet must be danceable when there are dancers trying to dance to them. But often these pieces are just inspired by the dances, and so a solo pianist—or a very good ensemble—can take liberties, moving at will along the continuum from song to dance and back again. If you tried to clap along at a steady rate you'd find yourself quite far off what the pianist does, but at the same time you also always know where the pianist is feeling the beat.

Use the performance selector below to choose between an encore performance from Yuja Wang and a choreographed and orchestrated version of the same waltz in Fokine's, Les Sylphides (not to be confused with the narrative ballet, La Sylphide, which also features air spirits, “sylphs”).

In an interview on Ben Laude's Chopin podcast, pianist Jerome Lowenthal discusses performers of the Chopin Mazurkas, which are based on a Polish dance. Describing the recordings of the legends, Lowenthal says, “Cortot was all song. Friedman was all dance.”

We'll see more music titled after dances—music more abstract than ballet—in a future chapter. But now, one more step towards abstraction.

Ballet from Existing Music

Just like film music takes existing classical music for use in film, lending new interpretations to both the music and the visuals, the same thing happens in ballet.

When dance is added to music, multiple layers of interpretation from the choreographer, dancers, and production team are added with it. Usually, this means that the space of potential interpretations for a listener is narrowed. I've found that with several Mozart concertos I've seen adapted to ballet, the choreographer's interpretation of the piece excluded my own, and I felt disappointed. But a great choreography can also elucidate something that you never would have found by yourself.

During the COVID pandemic, I was fortunate enough to perform his Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra and conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya. For all the struggles with streaming video and sound quality, this short clip brought me joy—my six-year-old friend here was able to watch the performance from across the country and immediately understand how the piece's protagonist feels.

I agree with my friend Rella's interpretation—it's so sad. A version of this character from The Magic Flute would sing a lament to the same lilting rhythm. There are many types of sad, of course. But I would not have gone to the sensual interpretation that choreographer Angelin Preljocaj gives us in his ballet, Le Parc, set to the same piano concerto.

Pianist and author Charles Rosen wrote, “In all of Mozart's supreme expressions of suffering and terror … there is something shockingly voluptuous. Nor does this detract from its power or effectiveness: the grief and the sensuality strengthen each other, and end by becoming indivisible, indistinguishable one from the other.” I never quite understood this interpretation until I saw Le Parc. Now I can't see Mozart any other way, and I see it in plenty of other composers as well.

Le Parc is a much more abstract ballet than Romeo and Juliet. Like the previous choreography we saw, this is again about a pair of lovers, and again centers around a kiss. But this time there is no accompanying text or staging to tell us the story of this couple. That does not mean it is devoid of storytelling. Instead, like much abstract music, it bypasses our desire to interpret it literally and forces us to engage with the emotions directly. It's true that this ballet does preclude the viewer from hearing the music as truly mournful—but it suggests its own interpretation in such a convincing way that I don't really mind.

Christopher Wheeldon's “After the Rain”, set to Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in Mirror) gives us yet again a more abstract depiction of a relationship, danced here by Beatriz Stix-Brunell and Reece Clark at The Royal Ballet.

The Alvin Ailey Dance Company and husband-wife couple Linda Celeste Sims and Glenn Allen Sims take it quite a bit faster than the Royal Ballet above, giving the intimacy a slightly different flavor. The same story, but for different people.

In both cases, it is the purity and innocence of Pärt's music that draws the listener in. He wrote, “Just like the composer has to reduce his ego when writing the music, the musician too must put his ego aside when performing the piece.” The simplicity of Pärt's music, according to the Arvo Pärt Center, is an “'escape into voluntary poverty' filled with humility.”

The dance, too, strives to be pure and egoless—but by adding the intrinsic messiness of a human relationship, it poses the question of to what extent this is possible. The title, Mirror in Mirror, actually describes the structure of the melody—a rising phrase then a falling phrase, a note added each time—but I doubt audiences usually notice, instead reading the title metaphorically, thinking about looking themselves in the mirror and reflecting on their own lives.

Harmony

Pärt's style, called “tintinnabuli” from the Latin for “bell”, typically involves just two voices—a melodic line (the violin in the previous example) and an accompaniment line (the piano). When two notes are played at the same time, the result is a harmony. ^💬

In a casually poetic class on his piece Für Alina, sitting at an electric keyboard with students standing behind him, Pärt says, “It's not so much the tune that matters here. It's the combination [with the accompaniment]. It makes such a heart-rending union. The soul yearns to sing it endlessly.”

He wants the listener to meditate on each moment, just listening to one “union” of sound at a time—in other words, the harmony, not the melody. As he puts it: “so that every blade of grass would be as important as a flower.”

Harmonic study can get quite analytical—an approach to classical music that is in itself another “way in”—but this is the heart of it: listening to the sounds that multiple notes make when played at the same time, as opposed to one after another.

Often, musicians will classify harmony as consonant, “pleasant sounding”, versus dissonant, “harsh and unpleasant” sounding. But how two notes sound is a matter of context and interpretation. Kids are taught to think about “happy” major harmonies and “sad” minor harmonies—but this rule is broken regularly. Schubert's saddest moments are in major keys. When we listen to harmonies in unfamiliar music, we should go back to first principles and instead think, “how do these notes sound together?”

Visions of Spring

Let's look at two portrayals of spring in ballet. It is true that one has primarily consonant harmonies and the other has dissonant harmonies, but the effects are so much more specific than that.

Stravinsky's Rite of Spring is essentially composed of dissonances. In many parts, the notes crunch so hard that we almost stop processing them and just hear the rhythms instead. In this section, the listener can really bask in the soupiness of notes as the texture thickens:

All the elements of music are at play here—the interplay between the instruments, the repetition of the theme, growing in insistence each time. The rhythm and melody are regularly irregular, like waves lapping ashore. But for me it's the juiciness of the harmony that makes me want to take a crisp bite out of the tension. When I breathe, the air is heavy and dense. As the violins and violas pull their bows across the strings, I myself am stretched, wanting the sound to resolve to something easier to listen to—but just as much wanting it to be drawn out as much as possible. When I played this in the piano duo version, I couldn't help but play those chords over and over again, savoring them.

Now, let's hear some of Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, written 30 years after Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The harmony is just a bit more consonant.

Once again, we hear a theme that repeats and builds in intensity as it repeats. The rhythm contributes the excitement as it doubles or halves its speed. ^💬 The melody gently undulates—perhaps familiar to some (“'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free”). And we hear the 13 instruments on stage converse as they pass the theme between each other.

But what makes this music comforting, heard next to the Stravinsky, is the harmony. If the Stravinsky feels like being pulled apart, the Copland puts you back together. The tension falls out of you; with each phrase you can breathe a pure, clear air.

Both of these are narrative ballets with stories about spring—neither of which I knew for the first twenty years of listening to them. Copland's tells the story of a young couple building their new home in the Pennsylvania hills, celebrating their wedding day with their community. The bride moves between moments of joy and apprehension as she contemplates her new life.

Like the season of spring, it is about creation and newness. Stravinsky arrives at creation and newness with a different tack. Leonard Bernstein describes The Rite succinctly, “This piece is all about sex.” A virgin is sacrificed to the gods of fertility, and she dances herself to death. And Bernstein reminds us, this is all danced by adolescents.

The passage we heard above, says Bernstein, is our deep, “beastly” memories of the primordial land. One can imagine what the choreography to such a piece might look like—and indeed, its premiere with Nijinsky's choreography incited an actual riot.

Today, both pieces are better known in their concert hall versions than their ballet versions. Yes, the Stravinsky is more dissonant and the Copland is more consonant. But those terms hardly scratch the surface.

Romeo and Juliet

So we come back around to Romeo and Juliet, and to the final scene of the ballet. Romeo finds Juliet's lifeless body, not knowing that she has faked her death so she can run away with him. We hear the same themes and even see them attempt some of the same choreography as the balcony scene, but, devastatingly, Romeo is essentially dancing by himself. We can now watch and listen with a few different angles—the harmonies pulling apart the viewer in angst, the rhythm of the ballet steps, and the interpretation of music as dance.

And just as there are a number of ways for actors to do the ending of Romeo and Juliet, there are just as many for dancers. Use the dropdown menu to explore some below.

I first read Romeo and Juliet in middle school, and the focus was mainly on figuring out what Shakespeare's English meant in the first place. In the years since then, Romeo and Juliet was for me like the Mona Lisa—a cultural touchstone that I knew about only in a cold, factual way. It was the ballet that unlocked for me its full emotional potential—it was only then that my heart actually broke for the two star-crossed lovers.