Les sources musicales des ballets de Noverre dans les archives de la famille Schwarzenberg de Český Krumlov

2011

Jean-Georges Noverre (1727-1810), un artiste européen au siècle des Lumières

Bruce Alan Brown

University of Southern California

While the music for some of Noverre’s Stuttgart ballets was published nearly a century ago, the music by Aspelmayr and Starzer for the ballets that the choreographer created during his Viennese engagements (1767-74, 1776) has remained unpublished, and relatively little studied. In the present paper I offer an overview of one of the most important groups of sources for these works, the orchestral partbooks in the former Schwarzenberg archive at Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic, describing their place in the larger repertoire of Viennese ballets, and indicating some of the avenues of research that they suggest. In particular, I discuss the partbooks’ acquisition from Viennese court copy workshops, their chronology, their possible uses, and problems of attribution of both choreography and music. Additionally, I compare these materials to musical sources elsewhere for Noverre’s Viennese ballets, in terms of provenance, versions, format, and function.