The Incredible Flutist 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...

 composed by Walter Piston

Walter Piston

Walter Hamor Piston Jr., , was an American composer of classical music, music theorist and professor of music at Harvard University whose students included Leroy Anderson, Leonard Bernstein, and Elliott Carter....

 in 1938, his only composition for the stage. The ballet received its premiere by the Boston Pops, under Hans Wiener, on May 30 of that year. The text of the ballet was written by Piston and Wiener. It describes a marketplace teeming with activity and enlivened by a circus

Circus

A circus is commonly a travelling company of performers that may include clowns, acrobats, trained animals, trapeze acts, musicians, hoopers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, unicyclists and other stunt-oriented artists...

. A flutist acts as a snake charmer

Snake Charmer

Snake charmer can mean:*Snake charming, the practice of "hypnotizing" snakes*Snake Charmer, a 1983 album by guitarist The Edge, bassist Jah Wobble, multi-instrumentalist Holger Czukay, drummer Jaki Liebezeit, and DJ/remixer François Kevorkian...

, and also charms women. A rich widow

Widow

A widow is a woman whose spouse has died, while a widower is a man whose spouse has died. The state of having lost one's spouse to death is termed widowhood or occasionally viduity. The adjective form is widowed...

 flirts with a merchant, is discovered by her lover, faints, and is revived by the flutist's music. The circus then leaves the square.

Piston arranged music from the ballet into a suite for orchestra

Orchestra

An orchestra is a sizable instrumental ensemble that contains sections of string, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. The term orchestra derives from the Greek ορχήστρα, the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus...

; this was premiered on November 22, 1940, by the Pittsburgh Symphony under Fritz Reiner

Fritz Reiner

Frederick Martin “Fritz” Reiner was a prominent conductor of opera and symphonic music in the twentieth century.-Biography:...

. The suite is in thirteen movements:

• Introduction
• Siesta Hour in the Marketplace and Entrance of the Vendors
• Dance of the Vendors
• Entrance of the Customers
• Tango of the Four Daughters
• Arrival of Circus and Circus March
• Solo of the Flutist
• Minuet - Dance of the Widow and Merchant
• Spanish Waltz
• Eight O'Clock Strikes
• Siciliano - Dance of the Flutist and the Merchant's Daughter
• Polka
• Finale

Elliott Carter

Elliott Carter

Elliott Cook Carter, Jr. is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer born and living in New York City. He studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1930s, and then returned to the United States. After a neoclassical phase, he went on to write atonal, rhythmically complex music...

has commented on how Piston avoided the use of particular musical geographic "pastiche" style in the music, which could have made the setting specific to one geography, and noted that the village can be "any village" in this setting.

Sources

• David Ewen, Encyclopedia of Concert Music. New York; Hill and Wang, 1959.