4.3. When was the first ballet?
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This article is from the Ballet and Modern Dance FAQ, by Tom Parsons twp@panix.com with numerous contributions by others.
4.3. When was the first ballet?
That's open to debate, because there's no general agreement on how
balletic a performance has to be to qualify as a ballet. Two performances
are usually singled out by historians, however. One is a danced enter-
tainment that was put on at a banquet celebrating the marriage of Gian
Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, in 1489. Each course of the banquet was intro-
duced by a dance. But the dances told stories, and so this is occasionally
reckoned as "the first ballet." The other pioneering performance was the
"Balet Comique de la Royne" (in modern French, "Ballet Comique de la
Reine"), put on by Catherine de Medici in 1581 to celebrate yet another
marriage. The libretto and choreography for this ballet are generally
attributed to Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx, whose definition of ballet we
quoted above in Question 2.1. The dancers were members of the Court. The
performance, which included singing and recitation as well as dancing,
lasted more than five hours, and its expense was ruinous.
We know that other balletic entertainments were put on in between
these two events, and it seems pretty clear that dance was presented as
an artistic entertainment before 1489, but these are the events most
frequently cited.
Ballet is generally considered a French art, but it should be
clear that it has its roots in Italy. There was that performance in 1489;
Catherine de Medici was Italian and may have brought the ballet with her;
Beaujoyeulx was an Italian (originally named Belgiojoso); and the very word
"ballet" is derived from the Italian "balletto". But the first school
(Question 4.5) was in France, the terminology is nearly all French, the
most important early books on the subject were French, and it was the
French who turned it from an entertainment into an art.
One of the earliest landmarks in ballet appeared shortly after the
"Balet Comique". The book, "Orch'esographie", written by a priest, Jehan
Tabourot, under the pseudonym Thoinot Arbeau, appeared in 1588. In this
book, there is no clear distinction between ballet and social dancing.
Ballet evolved out of social dancing, and Arbeau's book gives us a snapshot
of the era when this evolutionary process was still going on.
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