Study Notes: These notes are largely cribbed from other sources. Most sources are referenced at the bottom of the page.
Ballet traces its origins to the Italian Renaissance, where it developed as a court entertainment. The art was brought to France following the marriage of Catherine de Médicis to Henry II of France, and was later championed by Louis XIV.
The Académie Royale de Musique was established in 1669 by Louis XIV to present opera, which was then understood to include brief dance elements or divertissements. The success of these dance elements led to the creation of opéra-ballets, which combined singing, dancing, and orchestral music unified by a loose theme.
Ballet remained subservient to vocal music at the Paris Opéra until the 1770s, but elsewhere ballet was allied with mime to form a new type of theatrical work known as the ballet d’action. Ballet d’action developed in part as a reaction against the divertissement in opera, in which dance plays an incidental role, and the opera-ballet, where vocal music has an important role and plots are loosely constructed.
The zeitgeist of Romantic era led choreographers to compose ballets that appeared light and airy. These "unreal" ballets portrayed women as fragile unearthly beings who seemed to float in air. Filippo Taglioni’s ballet La Sylphide (1832; “The Sylph”) featured a spirit as the heroine and became the prototype for other romantic ballets.
As the 19th century drew to a close, the center of ballet activity moved to St. Petersburg, where the art was supported by the tsar.
Marius Petipa dominated the Russian ballet from 1870 to 1903. Petipa's work include three ballets set to scores by Tchaikovsky - The Sleeping Beauty (1890), The Nutcracker (1892), and Swan Lake (1895) - and La Bayadère (1877).
In 1909 Serge Diaghilev helped reinvigorate ballet in the west when brought the Ballets Russes to Paris. The dancers Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova were among the greatest sensations of the Ballets Russes.
In 1911 Diaghilev, set up a permanent base for the Ballets Russes in Monte Carlo. The company's principal choreographer was Michel Fokine, who staged a number of ballets that became classics, notably Les Sylphides (1909), The Firebird (1910), and Petrouchka (1911).
The ballet of the Paris Opéra began to reestablished itself under the leadership of Serge Lifar and later Rudolf Nureyev.
The most important ballet companies in the United States are New York City Ballet, which was led for many years by George Balanchine and American Ballet Theatre.
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