 |
This article or section needs copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone or spelling. You can assist by editing it now. A how-to guide is available.(July 2007) |
Apollon musagète is a ballet, since re-titled Apollo, in two tableaux composed between 1927 and 1928 by Igor Stravinsky. While the subject refers to antiquity, the ballet's treatment was contemporary. It reinvented balletic tradition because the inspiration is classical, even post-baroque, while the orchestra is simplified (there are only string instruments). The music is in neoclassical style.
Contents |
The work
The ballet was commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge in 1927. Like Oedipus Rex, Stravinsky again chose to take as a starting point a subject from Greek mythology and retains the subject of Apollo infusing the Muses with their art.
Instrumentation
The ballet was scored for 8 first violins, 8 second violins, 6 violas, 4 first violoncellos, 4 second violoncellos and 4 double basses.
Composition
Stravinsky wrote for only string instruments, replacing the contrasts in timbre tin Pulcinella by contrasts of volume. As later with Agon, this ballet took as a starting point the French music of the seventeenth century and particularly of Lully. With its pointed rhythms, the prologue is in the style of a French overture a fundamental underlying rhythm is present from the start , which is transformed by subdivisions of successive values made increasingly complex.
Form
The characters are Apollo and three Muses: Calliope (muse of poetry), Polyhymnia (muse of rhetoric), and Terpsichore (muse of the dance). The ballet is divided into two tableaux:
- First tableau
- Prologue: The birth of Apollo
- Second tableau
- Variation of Apollo
- Pas d'action (Apollo and the three Muses)
- Variation of Calliope
- Variation of Polymnie
- Variation of Terpsichore
- Second variation of Apollo
- Pas de deux
- Coda
- Apotheosis
Premiere And Choreography
The ballet premiered in Washington on April 27, 1928 in the choreography of Adolph Bolm and it was performed again by the Ballets Russes in Paris on June 28, 1928 choreographed by George Balanchine, conducted by Stravinsky himself. Balanchine imagined a young and wild Apollo,an exaltation of the male dance. The choreography is sober and clean,in harmony with Stravinsky's music. The choreographer changed the costumes little by little, adapting parts and personalities of the new interpreters. Apollon wore a toga with a cut along the diagonal, a belt, and laces. The Muses wore a traditional tutu. The decoration was baroque ,befitting its neoclassical style.
See also
New York City Ballet repertory
NYCB repertory including links to individual ballets
References
- Translated from the French Wikipedia article
