Ballet Comes with Strings Attached: Music as a Scenographic Device

If scenography is understood to be the practice of creating stage environments or atmospheres, then sounds and music are an integral part. Ballet is obviously heavily dependent upon music, even if the discourses about their relationship have changed over time. The discussion seems to have intensified in the eighteenth century, when both ballet and music theorists such as Cahusac and Noverre, Batteux, and Schubart published aesthetic reflections on the interplay between music, ballet, and pantomime, especially with regard tot he expression of emotion(s) on stage. With this eighteenth-century discourse at its centre, the paper will focus on whether the relevant treatises also contain statements, implicit or not, on the interaction between music and stage sets and lighting design - starting with Ménestrier (1682) and ending with Appia (1899). 

Hanna Walsdorf received her PhD in Musicology and Dance Studies in 2009 from the University of Salzburg (Austria). From 2009-2013, Hanna was a postdoctoral research fellow in Musicology at Heidelberg University (Germany). She was awarded the Tanzwissenschaftspreis NRW in 2011. From 2014 to 2020, she directed the Emmy Noether Research Group Ritual Design for the Ballet Stage: Constructions of Popular Culture in European Theatrical Dance (1650-1760), granted by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In 2022-2021, she was a guest lecturer at the University of Music and Theatre "Feliz Mendelssohn Bartholdy" Leipzig, and at the University of Salzburg. In autumn 2021 she was appointed Assistant Professor for Musicology at the University of Basel (Switzerland) where she is now based.