Conference Agenda

In 2006, the scholar and dance critic Clement Crisp reviewed the ballet Leningrad Symphony, choreographed in 1961 to the first movement of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. “This brief dance outing for Shostakovich is, I feel, mistaken,” wrote Crisp. Leningrad Symphony featured choreography by Igor Belsky, designs by Mikhail Gordon, and a lead role created by Yuri Solovyev. Crisp’s assessment notwithstanding, the ballet had enjoyed huge acclaim when, at the height of the Cold War, the Kirov Ballet had performed the work on its New York and London tours (1961 and 1966, respectively). Balanchine praised its innovations and British critics hailed it as “a ballet unlike any other” as they commended Belsky’s choreography alongside that of Fokine, Petipa, and Ivanov.

To foreign critics, Belsky’s Leningrad Symphony fit into an unbroken lineage of Russian ballet in which celebrated Russian choreographers interpreted the music of prominent Russian composers. This narrative of Russia’s balletic legacies played well in Cold War cultural exchanges in which the “Russian” (rather than “Soviet”) identity of the Kirov and Bolshoi companies was regularly emphasized (Gonçalves 2016; Searcy 2020).

Belsky’s Leningrad Symphony, however, reflected not balletic continuity but the disruptive ballet of the Soviet 1920s and the problematic legacy of Shostakovich’s repressed ballets of the 1930s—complex and troubled topics of Soviet ballet history. Shostakovich had written three ballets, none of which survived on the Soviet stage (and the last was condemned), yet the idea that his music could find expression in ballet lived on. Belsky was the first Soviet choreographer to reengage with Shostakovich’s music in ballet, and he did so by exploring Shostakovich’s most famous concert music through avant-garde ideas drawn from the early Soviet period. Drawing on archival sources, my paper examines the reception of the ballet Leningrad Symphony in the 1960s and examines the return of Shostakovich’s music to the ballet stage. This return marked renewed interest in Shostakovich’s music as a resource for dance and emblematized the dramatic potential of the composer’s work—potential, which, in the face of artistic repression, had remained unrealized by the composer himself.

What does a dancer know about the harp? Russian ballet dancer Adolph Bolm was seemingly expert enough on the subject to pen an article titled “The Harp and its Relation to the Dance” for a 1922 issue of Eolian Review, the official organ of the National Association of Harpists. The essay, which traces the instrument’s ties with dance from ancient Egyptian iconography to contemporary ballet, was likely commissioned by the journal’s editor, the French harpist Carlos Salzedo, who partnered with Bolm’s ballet troupe on a tour of small-town America two years prior. Salzedo also found creative inspiration at the intersection of music and dance, and even more so from his friendship with Bolm, writing two compositions in the dancer’s honor: a multi-movement work for seven harps titled Bolmimerie (1921) and Prelude to Olaf Bolm (1920), a short piano piece dedicated to the dancer’s newborn son.

Following recent considerations of the role of friendship in modernist networks (Dohoney 2022), this paper explores Salzedo and Bolm’s partnership in the 1920s as a microcosm of the longstanding and mutually productive web of influence between music and dance. While Salzedo is already recognized for incorporating the esthetic gestures of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky in his harp methods (Owens 1992), his relationship with Bolm reveals an interest in dance that carried over to composition. Dedicated to its namesake, Bolmimerie was conceived as a film pantomime that invoked the magical and exotic atmospheres of Ballets Russes productions closely associated with Bolm. Prelude to Olaf Bolm, an Impressionist and oddly haunting homage to Bolm’s first child, further suggests an intimate and personal bond between the musician and dancer, a cherished connection that can be fortified by archival photographs of the pair. Meanwhile, Bolm, once called “a musician to his fingertips,” was a revered authority on music (evidenced by his harp essay). He used his influence in dance-crazed America to champion the work of his musician pals, like Salzedo, putting dance to work in service of contemporary music and good friends.

The ballet Parade premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 18 May 1917, performed by the Ballet Russes with a plot conceived by Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), music by Erik Satie (1866–1925), and set designs by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). It was characterized by Picasso’s Cubist set designs, a folkish plot, and a thinly textured, repetitive musical score juxtaposing light classicism and ragtime numbers, augmented by extra-musical noises including a typewriter and a wild-west revolver shot. Parade’s lightheartedness contrasted viscerally with the contemporary realities faced by Parisians in 1917. Just 125 miles from the front and already subject to air raids throughout the duration of the war, the sights, sounds, and dangers of war were familiar to the audience of the ballet’s premiere. Despite this seeming incongruity, I argue that Parade weaponized humor and banality in service of the war effort. Satie’s score centers popular music and, in the four-hands piano reduction of the score published in 1919, includes humorous performance directions, characteristic of the Montmartre cabarets in which Satie worked. These features were vital to Cocteau’s aesthetic ideals embodied by Parade. Having published an article in L’excelsior the morning of the ballet’s premiere describing laughter as a “Latin weapon” in contrast to the “heavy aestheticism” of German art, theatre, and music, Cocteau’s agenda for Parade was the definition of a distinctly French modernist style. A contextual analysis of Parade demonstrates how this ballet, through the cultural politics of wartime nationalism, oriented the artistic sensibilities of French modernism toward wit, laughter, and irreverence, in contrast to the perceived severity of German culture, epitomized by Richard Wagner. Moreover, the complicated reception of Parade serves as an artistic case study that illuminates the relationship between everyday Parisians on the Home front and the Great War.