Addressing recent screen productions of Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice (dir. Langton, BBC1, 1995; dir. Wright, 2005), and 1815 novel Emma (dir. Lawrence, ITV, 1996; dir. McGrath, 1996), Maribeth Clark explores the function of music, dance, drama and visuals in specific danced divertissements. She focuses on choreographed versions of social dance scenes set to the late-seventeenth-century music of Henry Purcell and his contemporaries up to the late eighteenth century. Her chapter describes an impulse towards unity and congruence, towards the establishment of a stable repertoire, a conservative tradition – a canon that builds on the work of those involved in the twentieth-century English country dance revival.

David J. Code explores the reception of Vaslav Nijinsky’s L’Apres-midi d’un faune, a 1912 choreographic reworking of Claude Debussy’s orchestral Prélude (1894). He peels off layers of historical reference, looking backwards to Debussy and Stéphane Mallarmé from Faune’s 1912 Nijinskian embodiment. In the process, he questions the ballet’s accepted relationship to cubism in favour of a Matisse-inspired framework for understanding the underlying modernity of the Faun. With attention to scene and character types, structure and style, diegesis, eroticism and Freudian psychological interiority, Code highlights ways in which music and dance might both embody and subvert typically modernist modes of dramatic expression.

With reference to an impressive range of examples from across European genres and repertoires, Suzanne Aspden illustrates ways in which dance has been embodied within Western ‘art’ music. Exploding the myth of ‘the music itself’, Aspden notes a significant historical swing in both aesthetics and compositional practice during the nineteenth century, as musical representations of dance gradually morphed from being overtly ornamental and elaborate to more straightforwardly transparent in their dependence upon a long-established vocabulary of musical topics. While tracing this historical shift, Aspden offers a nuanced critical commentary on some of the shop-worn assumptions about dance that have marked traditional textbook histories of European music, especially negative associations between dance and the anti-intellectual, the ‘low’, the feminine and the ‘Other’.

This chapter by Thomas Grey presents a focused yet far-reaching account of the significance of dance to Richard Wagner. First, it explores how Wagner theorized the roles of dance, music and text in his ‘total artwork’; then it considers historical practice – examples of the actual dances (and also what the author calls the ‘sublimated choreography’) in several Wagnerian music dramas, especially Tannhäuser, with its infamous Venusberg ‘Bacchanal’. Wagner’s feelings towards dance were double-edged. On the one hand, the composer acknowledged the importance of movement and gesture in the creation of his ideal artwork. Indeed, as Grey suggests, Wagner sought to play up the two, emphasizing the role of the erotic, sexualized body onstage. On the other hand, Wagner liked to ridicule contemporary ballet. But, to Wagner, ballet’s problematic status did not relate to its explicitly bodily and human aspects. Instead, it was the genre’s association with an institutional context – ballet as produced and consumed at the Paris Opéra – that troubled the composer.