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Mar 29, 2024 · An expert ranking of the best Broadway songs in the history of musical theater, from Show Boat to Hamilton and beyond.
Musical theatre is a form of theatrical performance that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance. The story and emotional content of a musical – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an integrated whole.
- Overview
- Music for ballet
theatre music, any music designed to form part of a dramatic performance, as, for example, a ballet, stage play, motion picture, or television program. Included are the European operetta and its American form, the musical.
Music as an art of the theatre has its roots in primitive ritual and ceremony and its branches in every modern means of theatrical presentation. Its functions are as varied as the forms require and range from being the primary reason for performance, as in opera, to mere noise, filling a vacuum in imagination for some screen and stage presentations.
Theatre music is all music composed to govern, enhance, or support a theatrical conception. Music composed for theatrical purposes obeys different laws than does the music for concert performance or conventional opera. Whereas in opera the music dictates the form in which the dramatic visual imagery is presented and governs its development, in other kinds of theatre the music is, at best, an equal partner among its principal elements. In concert, of course, the music is the sole factor that determines the experience.
In the West, the concept of music as an intellectual experience for its own sake emerged only in the second half of the 18th century. Theatrical music is variously related to something other than itself, whether as an enrichment of words (as in operetta), a factor in structure and mood (ballet), or an intensification of situation and feeling (as in incidental music for plays and films).
In some instances music is dominant, in some it is subservient, and in operetta or stage musical the emphasis alternates between speech, song, and dance. In opera and spoken drama, in which words are wholly sung or spoken, a convention once set is consistently sustained and thereby creates its own kind of reality. The constant change of focus in operetta and musical, from music to speech and back again, emphasizes the artificiality of the illusion they seek to create.
The classical mainstream of theatre music in the West extends from the mid-17th century to the 1930s, and the instances of drama and music meeting on an equal level of imagination are relatively few. More frequently great music was lavished on weak or corrupt theatre, or great drama was embellished with indifferent music. From the early 20th century new dramatic developments were seldom directly matched in music. A German-Italian composer, Ferruccio Busoni, wrote in 1906:
During the 20th century the element of music in all forms of ballet has changed and developed its significance to an unprecedented extent. It has acquired the status of an equal partner with the choreography, where once it was entirely the servant of the ballet master. In the 19th century he asked little more than that the music should decorate his ballets prettily and give rhythmic support to the movements of the dancers. His modern successors have been made aware that the highest level of balletic achievement now requires the music and choreography to become extensions of each other, to be heard and seen on equal levels of perception.
The finest modern choreographers are not content simply to ride the surface of their chosen music, whether it is specially written, borrowed, or adapted. They seek to exploit the relationship of eye and ear, recognizing that the effect of any danced step can be changed by the stress of the musical rhythm, the degree of loud or soft in its dynamics, the nature of its harmonic character, and the expressive quality of its instrumental timbre. All these factors can make a positive contribution to the balletic image, and they give coherence to the sequence of movement as they merge into its continuous momentum.
Until the end of the 19th century, each new ballet customarily had music specially composed for it, but it was rare for any composer of distinction to write ballet music, unless it was part of an opera. There were exceptions—such as Beethoven’s score for Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (1801; The Creatures of Prometheus), originally a ballet by an Italian choreographer, Salvatore Viganò—but the great era of Romantic ballet from about 1830 was seldom enhanced by music of intrinsic worth. When ballet gained a musical interest, the difference was soon apparent; it has been well said that Léo Delibes gave ballet music a heart, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky gave it a soul, and Igor Stravinsky made an honest woman of it.
Stravinsky was the dominating figure for nearly half a century (beginning in 1910) in composing music for ballet. He gained international acclaim with the first products of his collaboration with the Ballets Russes of the Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). The first two continue to be performed in their original choreography by Michel Fokine, also a Russian, each with a narrative basis illustrated in music notable for its expressive colour and harmonic innovations. The Rite of Spring provoked one of the most notorious scandals in theatre history when Vaslav Nijinsky’s original ballet reduced its first Paris audience to verbal insult and physical assault; its rhythmic audacity has since remained a recurring challenge to other choreographers.
Largely as a result of the standard set by Diaghilev’s flair and artistic success, most leading composers in the 20th century have contributed something to the art of dance. Diaghilev directly commissioned two outstanding examples in the French composer Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (1912), which the composer defined as a “poème choréographique,” and The Three-cornered Hat (1919) by the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla. Distinctive original scores for ballet continued usually to be the outcome of specific commissions. Composers do not yet normally think in terms of dance (as they do in terms of song), although in Great Britain the composer Peter Maxwell Davies incorporated an integral role for solo dancer in his otherwise instrumental work, Vesalii icones (1969).
Contrary to what is still sometimes thought by musicians and a section of the public, music for ballet is not necessarily written to be “interpreted” in dance. Stravinsky has emphasized:
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Today’s musical theater combines acting, dancing, and singing to tell a story. The history of musical theater spans thousands of years and reflects changing values, cultures, and technology, as well as critical historical events that always influence art. The Music of Ancient Greek Theater.
