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Mixed Doubles: Debussy, Nijinsky, Jeux

Mixed Doubles: Debussy, Nijinsky, Jeux Pierre Boulez, in his characteristic oracular fashion, once declared the ballet Jeux to be “a sort of Afternoon of a Faune in sports clothes.” In this article, I contend that his pithy observation—characterizing the difference between Faune and Jeux in sartorial terms—has diverted historians ever since from asking the right questions about the later work. I examine belle epoque tennis culture to argue that the ballet's disjunct expressive registers—a diaphanous, cerebral score coexisting with sportive, avant-garde choreography—have their roots in belle époque social anxieties about what it meant to be appropriately masculine, but they also foreshadow the problematic place of danced works in current musicological scholarship. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png 19th-Century Music University of California Press

Mixed Doubles: Debussy, Nijinsky, Jeux

Vajjhala, Rachana
19th-Century Music , Volume 41 (1): 18 – Jul 1, 2017
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Publisher
University of California Press
Copyright
© 2017 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.
ISSN
0148-2076
eISSN
1533-8606
DOI
10.1525/ncm.2017.41.1.75
Publisher site
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Abstract

Pierre Boulez, in his characteristic oracular fashion, once declared the ballet Jeux to be “a sort of Afternoon of a Faune in sports clothes.” In this article, I contend that his pithy observation—characterizing the difference between Faune and Jeux in sartorial terms—has diverted historians ever since from asking the right questions about the later work. I examine belle epoque tennis culture to argue that the ballet's disjunct expressive registers—a diaphanous, cerebral score coexisting with sportive, avant-garde choreography—have their roots in belle époque social anxieties about what it meant to be appropriately masculine, but they also foreshadow the problematic place of danced works in current musicological scholarship.

Journal

19th-Century Music – University of California Press

Published: Jul 1, 2017

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