Pastoral Images in Debussy’s and Ravel’s Children’s Ballets
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Abstract
The French ballet theater of the first decades of the 20th century witnessed the unusual actualization of pastoral
subject matter. It was not uncommon for the pastoral ideal in musical theater to be revived in connection with the
image of childhood. The tangency of the subject matter of the pastoral with that of childhood in art is hardly a new
phenomenon in art. The cult of simplicity and naïveté forms comprises one of the foundations of the pastoral worldview.
A particular manifestation of pastoral images in the music of the early 20th century has been demonstrated by theater
compositions for a children’s auditorium – Claude Debussy’s ballet “La boite a joujoux” (1913) and Maurice Ravel’s
“L’Enfant et les sortileges” (1925), where the pastoral model is present on the level of the plots. The pastoral images of
Debussy’s and Ravel’s ballets acquire a polysemic, diversified meaning. Thus, the pastoral scene from Debussy’s “La
boite a joujoux” presents a witty play with tradition and theatrical clichés and, along with this, the reflection of a new
picture of the world in pre-war Europe projected by the artist onto the world of children’s consciousness. The pastoral
scene of lyrical fantasy in Ravel’s “L’enfant et les sortileges” presents a stylized image of the past (either than of an
individual person or that of all humanity), demonstrating itself as one of the motives of confession of the artist uttered
on behalf of a child. The “children’s” interpretations of the pastoral myth in the French ballet theater are connected with
the general cultural tendencies of the time – a perception of the pastoral as a Golden Age, to the archetype of which the
image of the child also appeals.
Keywords: the art of the early 20th century, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, the pastoral, children’s ballets, French
musical theater.
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