My Theatre Life - Hardcover

BOURNONVILLE, August.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0819550353 ISBN 13: 9780819550354

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 1979

Here is one of the truly important source books in the history of the theatre and the dance: the great Danish dancer/ballet-master’s own account of his career and his works. Bournonville’s life spanned three-quarters of the nineteenth century (1805-1879), and fifty of those years he spent as artistic dictator, organizer, and guiding genius of the Royal Danish Ballet – with leaves of absence varying from six months to six years in Naples and Rome, Sweden and Norway, London, imperial Russia, and above all Paris.

There, as a young man in the first heady years of the Romantic movement, Bournonville lived the storied vie de Boh�me, knew the seriocomic pangs of unrequited first love, and made friends whose names would become world famous: Marie and Paul Taglioni, Rossini, Perrot, Meyerbeer, Nourrit, Vestris, to mention a few. There, more importantly, he laid the groundwork for his legacy to the Danish, indeed to international dance: a school, an individual balletic technique, a tradition, and the choreographies of some two-score ballets including La Sylphide, Napoli, Konservatoriet, and others which remain in the active repertoire of many ballet companies today.

This is the stuff to which My Theatre Life is made. By no means an everyday sort of career; nor is this an everyday sort of autobiography. It is, rather, a huge, colorful panorama of Danish and European artistic-social-cultural life over sixty years and more – a collection of memories and reflections on the author’s professional career and associations, set down at different times and published in three volumes over a thirty year period between 1848 and 1878.

Feeling himself called to be a kind of spiritual successor to the great eighteenth-century ballet reformer Jean-Georges Noverre, Bournonville commingles observations and thoughts on life, political-historical notes, personality sketches of friends and fellow-artists, travelogues, analyses of his own compositions and information about their provenances, aesthetic principles and judgments, data and practical ideas about theatrical management and finances – as one critic noted in 1865, “everything between Heaven and Earth.” In fact there is hardly a person of note on the Continental political-cultural scene – from Napoleon I to Nicholas II, from Hans Christian Andersen and Jenny Lind to Marius Petipa and Richard Wagner – who does not figure somewhere in these pages, and usually in a pithy, insightful sort of way.

The present edition is a faithful translation of the Danish edition, retaining insofar as possible the slightly archaic flavor of the original. But for the sake of today’s less polyglot readers, the numerous individual words and short passages that Bournonville printed only in French, German, or another of the half-dozen languages he spoke are here rendered into English. Further, all of the dozen ballet libretti contained in the original are omitted here, as are six of the eleven of his own poems which Bournonville included. On the other hand, the translator has added several hundred footnotes, clarifying for today’s English-language reader the author’s frequent references to matters familiar to his Danish contemporaries but not to the outside world.

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Language Notes:

Text: English, Danish (translation)

Review:

“Now for the first time in English we have one of the great dance biographies of all time. Our acquaintance with August Bournonville is long overdue, for he was one of the seminal figures in the history of theatrical dance. In Patricia McAndrew’s scholarly and sensitive translation, My Theatre Life opens to us a treasure house of information about nineteenth-century ballet personalities and practices. Here Bournonville candidly discusses dance and dancers, but also applies his considerable intelligence to all the arts of his day, and to social and political issues as well. His range is wide, his perceptions sharp, his opinions fascinating. To anyone interested in the history of European ballet, My Theatre Life will be indispensable. And readers will find its pages as delightful as they are instructive.” (Selma Jeanne Cohen)

“The appearance of Bournonville’s memoirs...is an event of capital importance for dance scholars...[These memoirs] not only tell us about his ballets and dancers of his time, but give many precious insights into European theatrical history and writers, artists, musicians whose paths crossed his. They reveal, in short, a complete man, wholly dedicated to his art but taking his place in a wider artistic world... “This excellent translation makes readily available to scholars and students of ballet one of the greatest classics of dance literature. For all who are interested in nineteenth-century ballet it will be an essential addition to their libraries and one that will be taken from the bookshelf time and time again to be consulted, pondered over, and – most important – enjoyed.” (Ivor Guest)

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