Atossa’s Dream Yoking Music and Dance, Antiquity and Modernity in Maurice Emmanuel’s Salamine (1929)

This essay explores the conflicting trends of tradition and modernism, unity and independence in Parisian musical and dance culture in the late 1920s through an analysis of Maurice Emmanuel’s (1863-1938) aesthetics of contemporary and ancient Greek music and dance. It begins by outlining and critiquing Emmanuel’s relevant scholarly contributions to ancient Greek dance history and music history before demonstrating how these tensions manifested in the 1929 production of Emmanuel’s opera Salamine based on Aeschylus’s The Persians. Exploring Emmanuel’s aesthetics of music and dance (ancient and modern) affords a unique opportunity to see how these creative media were theorized and practiced in the tumultuous years after the Ballets russes, while illustrating some of the conflicts between what Léandre Vaillat termed “the academic and the eurhythmic” in dance and music

Ballets Suédois (1920–25)

Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois was active from 1920 to 1925. It was the chief artistic rival to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and de Maré was often referred to as the Swedish Serge Diaghilev. With Jean Börlin as chief choreographer, the company created twenty-four ballets in collaboration with prominent modern artists and composers, including Fernand Léger, Giorgio de Chirico, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Erik Satie, Darius Milhaud, and Cole Porter. When first launched, the troupe performed ballets in a style similar to the Ballets Russes, but de Maré’s interest in the visual arts and the vibrancy of modern, contemporary life resulted in a greater emphasis on abstraction and popular idioms in both the design and choreography of Ballets Suédois productions