Le Conservatoire

Last updated April 17, 2019

Le Conservatoire, or A Marriage by Advertisement (Konservatoriet eller et Avisfrieri) is a two-act vaudeville ballet created by the Danish choreographer and ballet master August Bournonville in 1849 for the Royal Danish Ballet. The ballet's setting is a dance studio at the Conservatoire de Paris. Bournonville studied at the Paris Conservatoire in the 1820s with the renowned dancer Auguste Vestris. The ballet launched the career of prima ballerina Juliette Price. A divertissement within the larger work called "The Dancing School" (Pas d'école) permitted Bournonville to display the basics of his style and raise them to the level of enduring art.

Vaudeville is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment born in France at the end of the 18th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a kind of dramatic composition or light poetry, interspersed with songs or ballets. It became popular in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s, but the idea of vaudeville's theatre changed radically from its French antecedent.

Ballet is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread, highly technical form of dance with its own vocabulary based on French terminology. It has been globally influential and has defined the foundational techniques used in many other dance genres and cultures. Ballet has been taught in various schools around the world, which have historically incorporated their own cultures and as a result, the art has evolved in a number of distinct ways. See glossary of ballet.

Ballet Master is the term used for an employee of a ballet company who is responsible for the level of competence of the dancers in their company. In modern times, ballet masters are generally charged with teaching the daily company ballet class and rehearsing the dancers for both new and established ballets in the company's repertoire. The artistic director of a ballet company, whether a male or female, may also be called its ballet master. Historic use of gender marking in job titles in ballet is being supplanted by gender-neutral language job titles regardless of an employee's gender.

Summary

The first act is a recreation of a Vestris dance class of the exact type attended by Bournonville during his Paris sojourn in the 1820s. In the second act, Monsieur Dufour, an inspecteur at the Conservatoire, writes a matrimonial advertisement in the newspaper but ends up marrying his housekeeper, Mademoiselle Bonjour. Typical of Bournonville’s ballets, the plot provides opportunities for introducing different dance divertissements. In the second act, for example, the pupils of the Conservatoire make a fool of Monsieur Dufour by disguising themselves as attractive women.

Marie-Jean-Augustin Vestris, known as Auguste Vestris, was a French dancer.

Music

The vaudeville genre relied on a particular musical practice that made conscious use of well-known melodies that were suitable to establish period and local color and to facilitate the audience's understanding of the extensive mime. The ballet's composer Holger Simon Paulli attempted to evoke Paris in the 1820s and 1830s. The ballet opens with Paulli's orchestrated version of Weber's concert waltz, Invitation to the Dance . Later in the score Paulli utilised Chopin's Grande valse brillante in E-flat major and Paisiello's aria Nel cor più non mi sento from the opera La Molinara. The divertissement in act 1 (Pas d'école) relies heavily on musical borrowings and the well-known pas de trois employs nearly all of Pierre Rode's Violin Concerto No.7, Op.9 from 1800, a concerto that was used as an examination piece for young violinists at the time Bournonville was living in Paris and studying with Vestris.

A melody, also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity. In its most literal sense, a melody is a combination of pitch and rhythm, while more figuratively, the term can include successions of other musical elements such as tonal color. It may be considered the foreground to the background accompaniment. A line or part need not be a foreground melody.

Holger Simon Paulli was a Danish conductor and composer.

Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber was a German composer, conductor, pianist, guitarist and critic, and was one of the first significant composers of the Romantic school.

History

The complete two-act ballet was performed by the Royal Danish Ballet from 1849 until 1934, when it disappeared from the repertoire, perhaps because it was considered old-fashioned. In 1942, Harald Lander, the Royal Ballet director at the time, extracted "The Dancing School" (Pas d'école) from the larger work and staged it as a one-act divertissement.

Harald Alfred Bernhardt Stevnsborg Lander was a Danish dancer, choreographer and artistic director of the Royal Danish Ballet.

In 1995, the Royal Danish Ballet brought the complete two-act version back into the repertoire with the help of three Bournonville experts: Kirsten Ralov, former Assistant Director and principal of the company, principal dancer Niels Bjørn Larsen, and teacher Dinna Bjørn, Larsen's daughter.

Kirsten Ralov was a Danish ballerina.

Niels Bjørn Larsen was a Danish ballet dancer, choreographer and balletmester. He was admitted to the Royal Danish Ballet school in 1920 and debuted in a production of Gudindernes Strid in 1933. In 1942 was promoted to soloist and remained with the Royal Danish Ballet until 1986.

Dinna Bjørn is a Danish ballet dancer and choreographer. She has specialized dancing and directing the ballets of August Bournonville. Bjørn has also created five Hans Christian Andersen ballets for the Pantomime Theatre in Copenhagen's Tivoli.

By combining personal memories of the stagings in the early 1930s, Bournonville's notations, and the writings of dancer Valborg Borchsenius regarding Harald Lander’s staging in the 1930s, the three directors made it possible to re-stage the complete Le Conservatoire.

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References

↑ Terry, Walter. The King's Ballet Master: A Biography of Denmark's August Bournonville. New York: Dodd, Mead, & Company, 1979. ISBN 0-396-07722-6.

Bournonville: Le Conservatoire

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[1] Terry, Walter. The King's Ballet Master: A Biography of Denmark's August Bournonville. New York: Dodd, Mead, & Company, 1979. ISBN 0-396-07722-6.