Musical Form
Ballet Music
Orchestral music written to be danced.
Orchestral / Staged
Ballet music is orchestral music composed specifically to accompany a staged dance work, which means it has to serve the choreography and storytelling on stage as much as it works as concert music on its own. Composers write with tempo, phrase length, and mood tied closely to what dancers are physically doing at each moment.
How a ballet score is built
A traditional story ballet is made of a series of numbers, much like an opera: dramatic scenes that tell the story through mime, solo dances (variations) that show off individual dancers, a pas de deux for the lead couple, ensemble dances for the corps de ballet, and divertissements - showpiece dances that pause the plot, such as the national dances in The Nutcracker and Swan Lake. Composers work closely with the choreographer, often to precise instructions about the number of bars, the tempo, and the character each dance needs.
How ballet music developed
Ballet grew up at the French royal court in the 17th century - Louis XIV was himself an enthusiastic dancer, and his court composer Jean-Baptiste Lully wrote music for the court's lavish ballets. For a long time, though, ballet music was considered functional and second-rate. The Romantic era began to change that, with scores such as Adolphe Adam's Giselle (1841) and Léo Delibes's Coppélia (1870), which Tchaikovsky greatly admired.
Tchaikovsky's ballets - Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty - are the genre's best-known achievements, full of vivid, danceable melody. Working with the choreographer Marius Petipa in St Petersburg, he showed that a ballet score could have the depth and continuity of a symphony.
In the early 20th century, the impresario Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes turned ballet into the most adventurous art form in Paris, commissioning scores from Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy, and Prokofiev, with designs by painters including Picasso. A very different approach arrives with Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, whose violent, irregular rhythms were written for dance but shocked its 1913 premiere audience so badly it reportedly sparked a riot - proof that ballet music doesn't have to be gentle.
Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet sits between those extremes, using short, tightly characterized musical motifs to track individual characters and their fates across the story, much like a leitmotif in opera. In the Soviet Union, Aram Khachaturian's Gayane produced the famous "Sabre Dance," while in the United States Copland's Appalachian Spring and Rodeo and Leonard Bernstein's Fancy Free created a distinctly American ballet sound.
Ballet music in the concert hall
In the concert hall, audiences typically encounter ballet music as a concert suite - a condensed sequence of the score's best movements, stripped of the material written purely to cover choreography and scene changes. The Nutcracker suite and the Firebird suite are heard far more often in concerts than the complete scores, which are mostly reserved for ballet performances.
Famous ballet scores
- Tchaikovsky - Swan Lake (1877), The Sleeping Beauty (1890), The Nutcracker (1892).
- Stravinsky - The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), The Rite of Spring (1913).
- Ravel - Daphnis et Chloé (1912).
- Prokofiev - Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella.
- Copland - Appalachian Spring (1944).
Where to start listening: Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker suite is warm and immediately familiar; Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring shows the same genre pushed to its most confrontational extreme. In between, the "Dance of the Knights" from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet is pure drama.