DIVERTIMENTO NO. 15

Choreography: George Balanchine
Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Premiere 31 May 1956 by New York City Ballet

Balanchine, arguably the most musical of choreographers, considered Mozart's Divertimento No 15 "probably the finest ever written" and to celebrate the 1956 bicentenary of the great composer's birth, revisited Caracole, a ballet he had created in 1952, which had been well received in New York and London, but then set aside. "We found we could remember very little of the original," he wrote. "So many ballets had intervened that I had to start work all over again. That was not altogether a misfortune, for this score is one I admire most in the world."

The plotless ballet expresses the 18th century's aristocratic parties and entertainments, for which musical works like this were composed as background music. Divertimenti were just that: diversions for the pleasure of the privileged. Balanchine fully understood this musical context and his own plotless dances were imagined in sympathy with the composer's intentions.

Mozart tended to compose these works for the available instrumentation in any given patron's circumstances. Oudoors, the brass and drums would predominate. Indoors, strings and woodwind would make a more intimate impact. Mozart, like all professional music-makers for the wealthy, understood and responded to this in his commissions. This particular Divertimento was composed for the 20th birthday of Antonia, Countess of Lodron, a leading figure at the court of the Prince-Archbishop's court at Salzburg, where Mozart was engaged to please his wealthy patrons.

Balanchine set his ballet for eight principal dancers (five women and three men) and an ensemble of eight female dancers. He omitted Mozart's second minuet and the sixth movement's andante, while a new cadenza for violin and viola by John Colman was added in the late 1960s revivals of the ballet.

Balanchine has created his own - and well-informed - musical take on Mozart, whose brilliantly-conceived musical entertainment provides the great choreographer with the necessary tools to devise his own divertissement.

©Tim Tubbs