A Folk Tale is a ballet

Ballet

Ballet is a type of performance dance, that originated in the Italian Renaissance courts of the 15th century, and which was further developed in France and Russia as a concert dance form. The early portions preceded the invention of the proscenium stage and were presented in large chambers with...

 in three acts created in 1854 for the Royal Danish Ballet

Royal Danish Ballet

The Royal Danish Ballet is one of the oldest ballet companies in the world. Based in Copenhagen, Denmark, it originates from 1748, when the Royal Danish Theatre was founded, and was finally organized in 1771 in response to the great popularity of French and Italian styles of dance...

 by the Danish

Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

 balletmaster and choreographer August Bournonville

August Bournonville

August Bournonville was a Danish ballet master and choreographer. August was the son of Antoine Bournonville, a dancer and choreographer trained under the French choreographer, Jean Georges Noverre, and the nephew of Julie Alix de la Fay, née Bournonville, of the Royal Swedish Ballet.August was...

. The music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

 was composed by Johan Peter Emilius Hartmann

Johan Peter Emilius Hartmann

Johan Peter Emilius Hartmann was a Danish composer.-Biography:Hartmann came from a musical family of German descent. Although he received his music lessons initially from his father, he taught himself as much as possible...

 and Niels W. Gade. Set in the Middle Ages

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

, the ballet tells the story of a changeling

Changeling

A changeling is a creature found in Western European folklore and folk religion. It is typically described as being the offspring of a fairy, troll, elf or other legendary creature that has been secretly left in the place of a human child. Sometimes the term is also used to refer to the child who...

 living among the trolls and elves

Elf

An elf is a being of Germanic mythology. The elves were originally thought of as a race of divine beings endowed with magical powers, which they use both for the benefit and the injury of mankind...

. Bournonville declared the ballet, "The most complete and best of all my choreographic works."

Summary

Act I. The wealthy but fickle Birthe enjoys a forest outing with friends. She flirts with Sir Mogens though her bethrothed, the handsome Junker Ove is present. When the party leaves for home, Ove remains behind. An elf-hill nearby opens. Hilda, an elf-girl, tries to lure Ove into the hill with a magic drink in a gold cup. Ove refuses the drink. Hilda returns to the elf-hill. The sorceress, Muri, conjures up a bevy of elf-girls who dance with Ove and leave him deranged.

Act II. In the elf-hill, troll brothers Diderik and Viderik both woo Hilda. Diderik, the elder, has the right of priority. Viderik protests, but his mother scolds him. In a dream, Hilda sees trolls take a human child from a cradle and steal a gold cup. Hilda recognizes the dream cup as the one she offered Ove. Hilda suspects she is the human child in the dream and becomes uneasy. The wedding of Hilda and Diderik is celebrated with a feast. The trolls become drunk and Hilda flees.

Act III. In scene 1, Hilda dances near a holy spring as harvesters pass by. Mogens is present; he notices Hilda. Junker Ove walks by - completely elf-struck after his nocturnal dances with the elf-girls. Hilda leads him to the healing spring where he regains his senses. When Ove tries to defend Hilda against Mogens, he is overpowered by the harvesters. Hilda flees. In scene 2, Birthe bullies her servants. She rages and admits that Hilda is the true heir to the estate while she is an elf. In the last scene of the ballet, Mogens marries Birthe after Muri offers him gold. Hilda is united with Junker Ove. Hilda and Ove celebrate their wedding with a waltz

Waltz

The waltz is a ballroom and folk dance in time, performed primarily in closed position.- History :There are several references to a sliding or gliding dance,- a waltz, from the 16th century including the representations of the printer H.S. Beheim...

.

Characters

• Birthe, a rich, young noblewoman
• Junker Ove, Birthe's bethrothed
• Sir Mogens, a flirtatious nobleman
• Hilda, a changeling
• Muri, a sorceress
• Diderik, an elf-boy
• Viderik, an elf-boy
• Nobles, peasants, gypsies, trolls, elves

Music

Niels W. Gade provided the music for the beech forest scenes of Acts I and III, while J.P.E. Hartman composed the music with an Old Norse tone for the burlesque

Burlesque

Burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects...

 trolls in Act II.

Act I presents the principal musical characteristics: the brisk music of the hunt, the ballad-like folksong melodies, the nobles' dignified minuet

Minuet

A minuet, also spelled menuet, is a social dance of French origin for two people, usually in 3/4 time. The word was adapted from Italian minuetto and French menuet, and may have been from French menu meaning slender, small, referring to the very small steps, or from the early 17th-century popular...

, the peasant

Peasant

A peasant is an agricultural worker who generally tend to be poor and homeless-Etymology:The word is derived from 15th century French païsant meaning one from the pays, or countryside, ultimately from the Latin pagus, or outlying administrative district.- Position in society :Peasants typically...

s' reel

Reel

A reel is an object around which lengths of another material are wound for storage. Generally a reel has a cylindrical core and walls on the sides to retain the material wound around the core...

 and the elf maidens' dance. Gade's orchestration shows patent inspiration from Felix Mendelssohn

Felix Mendelssohn

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Barthóldy , use the form 'Mendelssohn' and not 'Mendelssohn Bartholdy'. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians gives ' Felix Mendelssohn' as the entry, with 'Mendelssohn' used in the body text...

 (1809-1957) and his A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Hartmann's music for Act II is typified by a clear-cut character idiom in which rhythmic tension and dark resonance dominate. For Hilda's solo he composed an elegant bolero

Bolero

Bolero is a form of slow-tempo Latin music and its associated dance and song. There are Spanish and Cuban forms which are both significant and which have separate origins.The term is also used for some art music...

 and a festive galop

Galop

In dance, the galop, named after the fastest running gait of a horse , a shortened version of the original term galoppade, is a lively country dance, introduced in the late 1820s to Parisian society by the Duchesse de Berry and popular in Vienna, Berlin and London...

 for the drunken trolls.

In Act III, the final scene features a gypsy polonaise

Polonaise

The polonaise is a slow dance of Polish origin, in 3/4 time. Its name is French for "Polish."The polonaise had a rhythm quite close to that of the Swedish semiquaver or sixteenth-note polska, and the two dances have a common origin....

, followed by the Bridal Waltz, a famous composition Gade considered the to be a trifle, but today accompanies practically every Danish wedding.

History

At the beginning of the 1850s, Svend Grundtvig

Svend Grundtvig

Svend Hersleb Grundtvig was a Danish literary historian and ethnographer. He was one of the first systematic collectors of Danish traditional music, and he was especially interested in Danish folk songs. He began the large project of editing Danish ballads. He also co-edited Icelandic ballads. He...

 initiated a systematic recording of Danish folklore

Danish folklore

Danish folklore consists of folk tales, legends, songs, music, dancing, popular beliefs and traditions comuminicated by the inhabitants of towns and villages across the country, often passed on from generation to generation by word of mouth. As in neighbouring countries, interest in folklore grew...

 - the stories were told and written down in every little village in Denmark. But Bournonville did not credit Grundtvig as his source of inspiration, even though today Grundtvig is probably considered to be the person who made the most effort to preserve the wealth of Danish national folk tradition. Bournonville found his inspiration in a collection of national Danish songs (Nationalmelodier) published by the philologist R. Nyerup and the composer A.P. Berggren, in J.M. Thiele's collection of Danish folk legends (Danske Folkesagn) published in four volumes between 1818 and 1823. Bournonville also found inspiration in the tales collected by the Grimm brothers in Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

.

The Romantic artists had a passion for the national and the past,. The early part of the 19th century was a difficult time both politically and economically for Denmark, and this naturally generated a glorification of times past. The emergent bourgeoisie needed to consolidate its cultural status and found motifs for this in national folklore. And economic growth in a rapidly expanding Copenhagen had to some extent overshadowed spiritual development. Artists interpreted their contemporary society in a purely materialistic light. Oehlenschläger's poem about The Golden Horns (Guldhornene) is probably the most famous example of this issue but Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale The Bell (Klokken) depicted the materialistic fixation of the period with humour, irony and gravity.

In the chapter about A Folk Tale in My Theatre Life (Mit Teaterliv), Bournonville makes his attitude to the present and the past clear: he indicates that our practical and rather unpoetic times (which seem about to precipitate a period of literary and artistic crop failure on the very lands that were once the richest soil of the imagination) Art has fallen by the wayside. The poetic past has been replaced by a 'hypercritical' present, as Bournonville himself writes, and it is the duty of the artist to restore the spiritual, the poetry.

The artist saw himself as endowed by God with the ability to sense the true values and perspective in life. And this insight was to be communicated to the ordinary citizen through art.

The function of art as a formative model was something about which Bournonville felt very strongly. In his choreographic credo he writes: ?It is the mission of art in general, and the theatre in particular, to intensify thought, to elevate the mind, and to refresh the senses.? Music and dance elevate the mind and refresh the senses, but it is when the story comes into play that thought is intensified.

A Folk Tale takes as its starting point the archetypal dilemma of the folk ballad the transition from one home to another in the context of a wedding, where both men and women run the risk of getting into difficulties. The men might be lured under a spell by elves and the women might be carried off by disguised nixes and it always happens in an outdoor, natural environment, which is both compelling and mysterious. Both the elves and the nixes exert a demonic and erotic power over the victims and in most cases have a fateful impact on them - many end in the grave.

Bournonville must have had the folk songs Elverskud (The Elf-shot) and Elverhøj (The Elves' Hill) in mind when he has Junker Ove linger at the hill after lunch with Miss Birthe, his fiancée, only to dream of another - a beautiful and gentle Hilda, the counter-image of Birthe. It is always at this point - the moment of doubt before a wedding - that the elves appear. For the young man in the folksong Elverskud, the encounter proves fatal. He refuses to dance with the elf girl and her punishment is so harsh that he dies. He is laid in his grave on his wedding day, followed by his fiancée and his mother. In Elverhøj, which is of a later date than Elverskud, it is God who has human fate in his hands. He lets the cock crow at dawn and the young man, who had slept by the hill, wakes from his spell (which turns out to have been a dream) and he counts himself lucky. The manager of the Royal Theatre, J.L. Heiberg - who Bournonville fell out with on numerous occasions during this period, because he thought that Heiberg was trying to drive the ballet off the stage - had experienced great success with his Elverhøj, which in Biedermeier

Biedermeier

In Central Europe, the Biedermeier era refers to the middle-class sensibilities of the historical period between 1815, the year of the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and 1848, the year of the European revolutions...

 style, lets the elves' dance dissolve into dream and delusion.

Despite this, Bournonville decided to compose his own version of the story about the young man who is danced into a spell by a group of elf maidens. In an engraving from 1856, the painter Edvard Lehmann, who was also a close friend of the Bournonville family, portrayed the spellbound Junker Ove encircled by the hovering, luminous elves. Ove is briefly imprisoned in this state, but fortunately the beautiful Hilda comes to his rescue with water from a healing spring. Even though she has grown up among trolls inside the hill, we know that she is really a changeling, swapped as a baby with the temperamental Birthe, who is the real troll child. The changeling aspect means that the story never becomes as seriously dangerous for Ove as the Sylphide's enchantment is for James in Bournonville's Taglioni-inspired ballet from 1836. But then again the Danish Romantics did not cultivate fragmentation in the same way as the French. The Danes sought for the harmony and the idyll.

Even though both Junker Ove and Hilda suspect that they are in the wrong place in their lives as the story begins, they are not able to act on their own initiative. The dream gives Hilda an inkling of this other life, and the dream by the hill gives Junker Ove an idea about the ideal woman - but it is the crucifix and the golden goblet, two Christian symbols, which reveal the truth of the matter. Christianity is to be thanked for the restoration of harmony. Junker Ove gets his Hilda, and the promise of gold persuades Sir Mogens to be united with Birthe who, in a modern interpretation, represents the young woman with the unruly disposition unable to conform to society's norms. She is handed over - troll for gold - to Sir Mogens in order to continue her life somewhere else completely.

Following Bournonville's death, Hans Beck

Hans Beck

Hans Beck was the German inventor of the toy Playmobil. He is thus often called "The Father of Playmobil."...

 took over the stewardship of the ballets. In 1894, A Folk Tale was once again on stage, in Hans Beck's production. It has since been passed down from generation to generation, re-read and re-staged by successive Bournonville interpreters: Gustav Uhlendorff in 1922, Kaj Smith in 1931, Harald Lander

Harald Lander

Harald Lander is a Danish dancer, choreographer and artistic director of the Royal Danish Ballet.Lander started as a dancer, studying under ballet master Michel Fokine in 1926-27...

 and Valborg Borschsenius in 1941, Niels-Bjørn Larsen and Gerda Karstens in 1952, Hans Brenaa and Kirsten Ralov

Kirsten Ralov

Kirsten Ralov was a Danish ballerina.She was born to Kai and Kaja Gnatt, née Olsen, a family of dancers living in Baden, Austria. Kirsten's mother encouraged her, and her brother Poul, to train as dancers. She entered the school of the Royal Danish Ballet at the age of 22, and was associated with...

 in 1969, Kirsten Ralov in 1977 and 1979. The most recent version of this lively folklorist ballet was produced in 1991, staged by Frank Andersen

Frank Andersen

Frank Andersen is a former Danish ballet dancer who was twice artistic director of the Royal Danish Ballet. He has been an influential supporter of the Danish choreographer August Bournonville.-Biography:...

 and Anne Marie Vessel Schlüter, with settings and costumes designed by Queen Margrethe II.