Chopin in Ballet

Ballet music is, nevertheless, entirely absent from his oeuvre. Performance dance was not of interest to serious musicians in the first half of the 19th century. Chopin did attend ballet performances – after all, dance scenes were included in some operas, a genre he greatly enjoyed. His extant letters reveal that he watched nascent ballets in Vienna and Paris. No wonder: he tried to be an active participant in the life of the European high society.

The most famous choreography set to the Polish composer’s music is the neo-romantic Chopiniana devised by Mikhail Fokine. Written over a hundred years ago in 1907, it is the most poetic ballet in history.

Although in the early 20th century setting dance to Chopin music was almost considered as a sacrilege, Fokine’s finely tuned interpretation of Polonaise in A major, Nocturne in A-flat major, Prelude in A major, and Grand Valse Brillante in E-flat major won the most hardened hearts.

The score – apart from Chopin’s own pieces – includes works by his contemporaries: Hector Berlioz, Manuel de Falla, Sergei Lyapunov, Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, and Robert Schumann.

Scene after scene, the ballet takes you through important events in Chopin’s biography told in the expressive language of the human body: childhood play in his homeland, the Duchy of Warsaw, love for his mother, patriotic sentiments, travels, triumphs in the salons of Paris, love, tragic illness, and death.

The story draws on the novel by Alexandre Dumas (fils). The titular courtesan lived in Paris in Chopin’s times. Did he meet her? We do not know. The woman famously memorialised in opera (Verdi’s La traviata), theatre, and film excited the imagination of her contemporaries, so he must have known about her existence.

The score also features Waltzes in A-flat major and F major, a few Preludes, Ballade in G minor, and Chopin’s piano concertos. The last-mentioned have inspired a few other choreographers working on the Polish scene.

Two extraordinary yet very different choreographers – Liam Scarlett and Krzysztof Pastor – used the agency of Chopin music to look at Poland from the 21st-century perspective.

The costumes and sets come in: white – representing idealism, purity, and faith; red – the colour seen in the Polish flag as well as the symbol of communism or socialism; black – which has had various significations in Polish history, including nationalist ones; and finally – golden – which stands for carefreeness, consumerism, glitz, and lack of ideological content.

Chopin’s music has put down roots on the ballet stage for good. Over the last few years the composer’s pieces were employed by such choreographers as James Kudelka in Toronto, Marie Chouinard in Vienna, our own Krzysztof Pastor in Tel Aviv, Christopher Wheeldon in London, Benjamin Millepied in Saint Petersburg, Alexei Ratmansky in London, and Stanton Welch in Paris.