GLIÈRE’S LIGHT STYLE

Until the Romantic era, ballets scores were more often bric-a-brac assemblages than integrated wholes. Whereas Delibes excelled at composing for ballet, serving the dance, Tchaikovsky receives credit for transforming the art to make music and dance a more equal partnership. He also, however, composed music that pulled the audience’s focus away from the stage, and so affronted the middlebrow perspective on ballet music: it had to be good, but not too good, not too distracting. This chapter takes up the cause of a Soviet ballet The Red Poppy, which Reinhold Glière composed in a light style with borrowings from Tchaikovsky, the Mighty Five, a sailors’ dance, template chinoiserie, and ballroom genres. A dutiful student of ballet’s greatest musical hits, he also invested in a play of surfaces and rhapsodic, translucent possibilities. Ideal forms are tucked in ideal forms within the esthetic ideal of broad-based appeal.