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HENZE, ASHTON, AND ONDINEGEORGE DORRISPublished online: 23 May 2006.

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Dance Chronicle, 28:155–159, 2005Copyright C© 2005 George DorrisISSN: 0147-2526 print / 1532-4257 onlineDOI: 10.1081/DNC-200048985

BOOK REVIEW

HENZE, ASHTON, AND ONDINE

GEORGE DORRIS

Ondine: Journey of a Ballet. By Hans Werner Henze, with an intro-duction by Alfred Andersch, translated by Daniel Pashley. 68 pp.Illustrated. Alton, Hampshire: Dance Books, 2003. $19.95. ISBN1-85273-095-1.

From the first time the twenty-two year old Hans Werner Henze sawthe Sadler’s Wells Ballet in Hamburg in 1948, and about the sametime began an intense relationship with a ballet dancer, the youngcomposer was entranced with ballet and for the next few yearsbecame one of the few important composers of his generation towork closely with dance. Between 1949 and 1952 he wrote at leastsix pieces for dance plus the opera-ballet Boulevard Solitaire. Thenin 1958 came Ondine, written for Frederick Ashton and MargotFonteyn.

In Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography he described that first ex-posure to Ashton’s work:

The curtain rose on the company’s opening night to the radiant brassand woodwind chords of Stravinsky’s Scenes de ballet, revealing AndreBeaurepaire’s painted backdrop and, in front of it, a group of dancers—ahandful of elegant youths and a young woman as delicate as a meadowsaffron. Her name was Margot Fonteyn. What followed was a rare exampleof interaction between the music in the orchestra and the dancers’ move-ments on stage, a veritable interplay between them, a true exchange ofideas. The music seemed to dance, the dancers seemed to make music. Isat there completely enchanted. At each reacquaintance with this ravishingstaging and with the other works in the company’s week-long programmeI was able to discover yet further surprising and fascinating aspects of therelationship between music, movement and space. For the most part, they

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156 Dance Chronicle

were the work of that great neo-classical choreographer, Frederick Ashton.I was introduced to a magical poetry of which I had previously had noinkling and began to understand the thaumaturgic, sensual links betweenmusical ideas and the gestures, positions and attempts to fly on the partof traditional ballet, with its cool and calculated, readily intelligible rules.(p. 79)

Ashton’s original choice for Ondine had apparently beenWilliam Walton, who recommended Henze, his neighbor onIschia. The ballet had a long incubation period, a frequent prob-lem when a score is commissioned for a ballet. After the composerand choreographer settled down on Ischia in the summer of 1956to plan the work, deciding on style, the characters, and the ac-tion, Ashton provided the subject, taken from La Motte Fouque’s1811 fairy tale, with the idea of the Shadow Dance borrowed fromJules Perrot’s 1843 Ondine, made for Fanny Cerrito. Eventually adetailed scenario was drawn up, with Ashton specifying the lengthof individual numbers, as stage time (especially in dance) is muchmore concentrated than concert time, and an extra minute caneasily seem an eternity. (A version of Ashton’s minutage is given inDavid Vaughan’s Frederick Ashton and His Ballets, pp. 438–41, and ahandwritten listing for Act III is in Henze’s little book on the bal-let.) Indeed, timing would later become a problem, when Henze’sAct III was some ten minutes longer than Ashton had specified.

Composition got well underway the following winter, whenHenze came to London, staying with Alexander Grant (who was todance Tirreneo) and writing the first act and part of the second.The score was finished in Naples, but when Robert Irving, thecompany’s music director, eventually taped a run-through with aGerman orchestra, Ashton discovered that the sound was so dif-ferent from what he expected from the piano reduction that hehad to start over. Completion of the ballet was also interruptedby a five-month American tour, but work resumed in 1958 foran October premiere, when the composer conducted the first sixperformances.

Although Ashton had problems with Henze’s modern idiom,the ballet was a success and remained in the repertoire until 1966,when Fonteyn gave up the role, which had also been danced bySvetlana Beriosova and Nadia Nerina. Fortunately it had beenfilmed (slightly cut), which made it easier to remount in 1988

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Henze, Ashton, and Ondine 157

and again in 1999. But Ondine was to be the last original scorecommissioned for Ashton, the rest of his ballets being either setto existing music or specially arranged for him, often by JohnLanchbery. It was also his last three-act ballet, although the two-act La Fille Mal Gardee and The Two Pigeons now ordinarily fill anevening.

While working on Ondine, Henze kept a diary, that he soonafterward turned into a short book about the creation of a workof art. It has now been translated into English and published inan attractive format, illustrated with a dozen of Lila de Nobili’scostume designs for the original production and photographs ofthe creators, especially Fonteyn. It is not, however, presented asdiary entries but as a running account of a process that is seldomexplored: the making of a ballet as seen by the composer, from themoment discussions began until the curtain is about to go up onthe premiere. This is a more focused account than can be found inBohemian Fifths, which is clearer on dates and which cannot possiblystop on that opening night.

Henze makes a number of interesting comments on the prob-lems of writing a large-scale theatre work for comparatively lim-ited forces, “the larger type of chamber orchestra” (p. 16). Ashtonwas clearly concerned about how to get the conservative CoventGarden audience and the dancers to accept the composer’s ad-vanced idiom, asking “to what extent can I force him to renouncethe uncompromising hardness of his style,” while Henze was askinghow to proceed “without compromising the technical standards of‘new music,’” and “Is it even worthwhile to introduce complicatedelements into ballet music, which will neither be heard nor con-tribute to the clarity or comprehensibility of the music on stage”(pp. 23–4). Discussing the music of Tirreneo, the sea god, Henzerealized, “Pure madness, to treat difficult rhythmic sequences asdance music. They dominate the dancing and rob the choreogra-pher of the freedom to invent creative movement sequences. Asso often in this ballet, it turned out that a regular beat was ap-propriate, as the motions of the choreography form a much moreconvincing counterpoint to it; quick passages in the music are setoff by slow action on the stage, and vice versa” (p. 26). And talkingabout a more intimate moment, he explains the overlay of themesand rhythms used for the big first-act pas de deux for Ondine andPalemon.

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158 Dance Chronicle

The problems of Act III, in which Palemon marries Beatrice,thus breaking his oath to Ondine, are of a different sort. At forty-one minutes it is at least as long as Act I, while both are almost twiceas long as Act II. (I’m taking my timings from Oliver Knussen’srecording with the London Sinfonia on Deutsche Grammophon453 467-2.) Yet very little actually happens and much of the act istaken up by two sets of entertainments, with a pas de seize for thewedding guests and a Neapolitan divertissement for the followersof the wrathful Tirreneo. These are musically and choreographi-cally entertaining but nonetheless feel like padding in a way thatthe last-act divertissements of The Sleeping Beauty (a ballet originallycriticized for lacking sufficient plot to fill a full evening) neverhave for me. The final pas de deux, in which Palemon embracesOndine, even knowing that his betrayal makes her kiss fatal, is alovely one, gentle after all the preceding commotion, but it doesseem a long time coming, if worth the wait. The music itself is atouching passacaglia.

Henze has nothing but praise for his collaborators, especiallythe designer, Lila de Nobili, and Fonteyn, with the completenessof her absorption in her role, but above all for Ashton and hismusicality:

New ways of working with the music: in a break with the antiquated prac-tice seen in the nineteenth century, often still used today and mistakenlyheld to make musical sense, the dancers’ steps are not in time with themusic—except for a few isolated moments, for dramatic effect. What couldbe simpler than repeating a musical score in all its detail in dance, andwhat could be more obvious? Instead, Ashton lets the dance behave au-tonomously; he sets his own counterpoints and balances to the music. Atno point in the act I danse generale is a rhythmic element from the musicreproduced choreographically. Instead there is an independence of form,which allows both music and dance not to submit to one another but in-stead to fit, carry, complement each other. In order to achieve this, thechoreographer had to commit to an extraordinarily in-depth study of thescore, the first stage of which consisted of the usual transcription of musicalnotes to dance moves. But it didn’t stop there: here is where the real workbegan, where a relationship toward the music was developed, where thesymbols on the page began to be transfigured. (p. 47)

The book does have a few odd statements and a few slips. Ido not know what Henze means when he calls Fouque’s originallove story “an autobiographical one” (p. 7). Surely Ashton was not

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Henze, Ashton, and Ondine 159

“inspired by the first meetings with Ida Rubinstein and Massine”(p. 47), but with Nijinska (then the aging Rubinstein’s choreogra-pher) and Massine, while I have never understood the occasionalBritish use of Joos for Kurt Jooss (also p. 47). But these are of littleimportance compared with the insights into the mind of a com-poser working in tandem with a great choreographer, a discussionof process that is all too rare and that valuably supplements Henze’smuch later account of his life in music in an autobiography inwhich Ondine must take its place in a long line of compositionsover a lifetime.

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