Who’s excited to celebrate Léon Minkus’ bicentennial? As I suspected, exactly no one.
Before you double-check to see if this post was written by Timothée Chalamet, I hasten to add that in his day, Minkus was a much sought-after, quite successful composer for the ballet. Among his most celebrated works are “La Source” (co-composed with Léo Delibes), “Don Quixote,” and “La Bayadère.” He also wrote insert numbers for older ballets by other composers.
Born in Austria (where he was known as Ludwig), Minkus briefly served as principal violinist at the Vienna State Opera before emigrating to Russia. There he became concertmaster and conductor of Italian opera at the Imperial Bolshoi Theatre. With a few years, he was promoted to the prestigious position of Inspector of Orchestras to the Moscow Imperial Theaters. He also taught violin at the newly-established Moscow Conservatory. In addition, he enjoyed a long association with St. Petersburg through his work with choreographers Arthur Saint-Léon and Marius Petipa.
At 65, Minkus returned with his wife to Vienna to live in semi-retirement on a modest pension from the Tsar’s treasury. One of his later works was rejected by Gustav Mahler, then director of the Vienna Court Opera, for being too old-fashioned. He came to a sad end, as his wife predeceased him and the events of World War I cut off support from Russia. He died, childless, in poverty, having developed pneumonia during the bitter winter of 1917, at the age of 91. O Fortuna!
While his music has not been embraced with the same level of affection as that of his colleagues Tchaikovsky and Delibes, whose ballets are frequently recorded and revived, in his day, Minkus enjoyed considerable success and will forever remain a notable figure in the history of Russian dance.
Remembering him on the 200th anniversary of his birth!
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To be fair, his ballets have never completely fallen out of the repertoire, and some balletomanes, I’m sure, love his stuff. Perhaps you will too. At the link is a Mariinsky production of “Don Quixote.”
Apparently, until the 1930s, there was a dream sequence in which Quixote fights a giant spider. Contemporaneously, a notorious spider pit sequence was dropped from the film “King Kong.” People must really have been creeped out by giant spiders during the Great Depression.
