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Adventures of a Ballet Historian (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R581
Discovery Miles 5 810
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Adventures of a Ballet Historian (Hardcover)
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Loot Price R581
Discovery Miles 5 810
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A historian's task is a voyage of discovery, and in these personal
reminiscences Ivor Guest allows the reader to share the romance of
recreating times past. Since his first published article appeared
in the 1940s he has vastly expanded and enriched our knowledge of
ballet in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through more than
a score of books, many of them definitive works, that are a rare
blend of scrupulous scholarship and readability. The story of his
involvement in the world of ballet is a romance in itself. When he
was drawn to the study of ballet history, comparatively little
serious research had been done, and he found himself working in
virtually virgin soil - the fulfillment of an historian's dream.
The Paris Opera, with its library and archives, became his mecca,
where he returned year after year to unearth the material on which
were based his classic chronicles of the French ballet. In time his
pre-eminence was to be recognised when he - an Englishman - was
commissioned to write the official history of the Paris Opera
Ballet. For him all this was a labour of love - almost in a literal
sense, for as he reconstructed the lives of long-dead ballerinas
through his patient research and deductive sleuthing, he fell under
their spell like a man in love. His biographies are written with an
easy style that conceals the toil that went into them, but in this
book he tells of his quests for characters who were often
maddeningly elusive, such as his 'first love', Fanny Cerrito. The
account of his search for the date of her death is told with a
touch of fine comedy, and culminates in the discovery of her
descendants. These 'Adventures' are concerned mainly with Ivor
Guest's work as a writer, but this is by no means the whole story.
He played a crucial part in the creation of Frederick Ashton's 'La
Fille mal gardee', discovering the early scores from which the
music for this evergreen ballet was adapted, and his marriage to
Ann Hutchinson led him up new paths as they combined their talents,
hers as a specialist in dance notation, to recreate several
choreographic gems from the past, including Fanny Elssler's famous
Cachucha. And, to emphasise that his life is not all spent at his
desk or in dusty archives, he tells the story of his involvement
with the Royal Academy of Dance, as Chairman of its Executive
Committee from 1969, when it was on the verge of bankruptcy, to the
1980s when it was riding high as the largest and most vital
association of ballet teachers in the world. These reminiscences
illuminate an aspect of the dance world that seldom comes into the
limelight, yet is of great importance for its cultural
significance. Scholars and writers who lift the curtain on the past
work quietly in the background. This book tells the story of one of
them, who in the field of dance scholarship is internationally
recognised for his work.
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