Adventures of a Ballet Historian (Unfinished Memoir)

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Description

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 on this planet of ballet is a romance in itself. When he used to be 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 that have been based his classic chronicles of the French ballet. In time his pre-eminence used to be to be recognised when he – an Englishman – used to be commissioned to write the official history of the Paris Opera Ballet. For him all this used to be 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 a very easy style that conceals the toil that went into them, but in this book he tells of his quests for characters who were steadily 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 author, but this is in no way the whole story. He played a a very powerful part in the creation of Frederick Ashton’s ‘La Fille mal gardée’, discovering the early scores from which the music for this evergreen ballet used to be 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 isn’t 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 used to be on the verge of bankruptcy, to the 1980s when it used to be riding high as the largest and most vital association of ballet teachers on this planet. 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 the world over recognised for his work.

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