Remember the scene with the dinner party at Coco's where everyone is drunk and Igor tears himself away from the table, rushes to the piano, and plays a wild and magnificent piece of music? Can anyone tell me what the music is? I don't think it is on the movie score CD, though I'm not certain.
shareIt is from "Le Sacre du Printemps," the orchestral/ballet piece that was premiered at the beginning of the film. Of course, the filmmakers couldn't show the whole thing then, because it runs over half an hour, and obviously it sounds a bit different when being played just on piano.
shareThank you, zoerpit, for both comments. Wow! What a transcription! And what a pianist! I have often wondered - before the age of videotaping, what was the language of choreography? To the extent the work of the great choreographers of the past is preserved, how is it denoted?
shareChoreography is a pretty murky area to me, but I gather it often WASN'T preserved very well in those dayas and for some time thereafter--in fact, it's my understanding that most of the original choreography for "Le Sacre" was lost, and there've been various reconstructions of it based on available bits of information. In general, I know that over the years there've been various notation systems for choreography but I don't know that there was ever a single standard one. Nowadays, as you said, a lot of the companies also rely on film and video to record dances.
shareI'm coming late to the party, but various notation systems for dance have been in regular use since the 18th century. Many 19th century choreographies have been preserved that way, especially from the Russian Imperial Ballet (now Kirov/Mariinski).
Today (actually since the early 20th century), apart from video documantation, major ballet companies regularly employ "choreologists", whose task is it to take down the choreography for further generations.
It is, of course, quite possible that nobody bothered to notate the "Sacre" choreography, as it obviously didn't work with the music.
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Grammar:
The difference between knowing your sh**
and knowing you're sh**.
One of the ironic things is that while "Le Sacre" originated as a ballet--as shown in the film--it is rarely performed that way today; it's almost always given as a concert piece at orchestra concerts. I gather part of that may have to do with the fact that most if not all of the original choreography by Nijinsky got lost, though there've been various attempts to reconstruct it. Presumably what was seen in the film was based on one of these attempts. The costumes do resemble some photographs I've seen of the originals.
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Thanks for those perspectives.
As to Nijinsky's choreography for "Sacre" being considered a disaster, would you say that the fact that the music was controversial had anything to do with the choreography not being preserved? (Maybe at the time they couldn't believe that a ballet with such music would get very many more performances.) Along those lines, do you happen to know whether the choreography for "The Firebird" and "Petrouchka", Stravinsky's other ballets from that period, were preserved?(Yes, I know those were created by other choreographers than Nijinsky.) I could be wrong, but I don't think I've ever heard that the original choreography for either of those was particularly controversial.
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