A Brief History of Ballet
A Ballet originated in the Italian Renaissance of the 15th century. The nobility were treated to extravagant events, especially wedding celebrations, where dancing and music created a detailed and fascinating spectacle. Dancing masters taught the dance steps to the nobility, who participated in the performances. In the 16th century Catherine de Medici, an Italian noblewoman, wife of the king of France and a great patron of the arts, began to fund ballet in the French court. Her elaborate festivals encouraged the growth of ballet de cour, a programme that included dance, costume, song, music and poetry. A century later, King Louis XIV helped to popularise and standardise the ballet. A passionate dancer, he performed many roles himself, including that of the Sun King in Ballet de la Nuit. His love of ballet raised it from a hobby for amateurs to a skill requiring professional training.
B By 1661, a dance academy had opened in Paris, and in 1681 ballet moved to the stage. The French opera Le Triomphe de l'Amour incorporated ballet elements in its performance, creating a long-standing opera-ballet tradition in France. In the mid-18th century, however, French ballet master Jean Georges Noverre rebelled against the artifice of opera-ballet, believing that ballet could stand on its own as an art form. His idea that ballet should contain expressive dramatic movement, and this should reveal relationships between characters, introduced the ballet d'action, a dramatic style of ballet that features a narrative. Noverre's work is considered the forerunner to the narrative ballets of the 19th century.
C Early classical ballets such as Giselle evoked the world of spirits and magic, and often showed women as passive and fragile. These themes are reflected in the ballets of the time which are called romantic ballets. This is the period in which dancing on tiptoe, known as pointe work, became the normal style for the ballerina. The romantic tutu, a calf-length, full skirt, was also introduced at this time.
D The late 19th century saw the rise of classical ballet in Russia, where composers such as Tchaikovsky collaborated with choreographers like Marius Petipa. Their partnership produced timeless masterpieces including Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker. These ballets featured precise technique, elaborate sets, and complex storytelling. Russian ballet placed greater emphasis on virtuosity, with both male and female dancers showcasing extraordinary athleticism.
E In the early 20th century, Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes revolutionised ballet by bringing together avant-garde composers, artists, and choreographers. Collaborators included Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Vaslav Nijinsky. Their works, such as The Rite of Spring, shocked audiences with bold movements and modern themes. This period broke many traditional rules and expanded ballet's artistic boundaries.
F Throughout the 20th century, ballet continued to evolve. In America, George Balanchine co-founded the New York City Ballet and developed neoclassical ballet, which stripped away elaborate narratives and costumes to focus on pure movement and musicality. Meanwhile, contemporary ballet emerged, incorporating elements of modern dance and jazz. Today, ballet remains a vibrant and diverse art form, performed by companies around the world and enjoyed by audiences of all ages.
The History of the Celtic Language
A In November 1897, in a field near the village of Coligny in eastern France, a local inhabitant unearthed two strange objects. One was an imposing statue of Mars, the Roman god of war. The other was an ancient bronze tablet, 1.5 metres wide and 1 metre high. It bore numerals in Roman but the words were in Gaulish, a version of the Celtic language spoken by the inhabitants of France before the Roman conquest in the first century BC. The tablet turned out to be one of the most important sources of words from this extinct language.
B Two researchers, geneticist Dr Peter Forster and linguist Dr Alfred Toth, have now used the calendar and other Celtic inscriptions to reconstruct the history of Celtic and its position in the Indo-European family of languages. They say that Celtic became a language in its own right and entered the British Isles much earlier than supposed. Then in the first century BC, the Romans defeated the Celts, both in France and in Britain, so decisively that their language, Latin, and its successor languages displaced Celtic over much of its former territory. In the British Isles, Celtic speakers survived in two main groups: the Goidelic branch of Celtic, which includes Irish and Scots Gaelic, and the Brythonic branch, formed mainly from Welsh and Breton, a Celtic tongue carried to Brittany in France by emigrants from Cornwall.
C Because languages change so fast, historical linguists have little faith in language trees that go back more than a few thousand years. Dr Forster has developed a new dating method for relating a group of languages, basing it on the tree-drawing techniques used to trace the evolutionary relationships among genes. The method will work on just a handful of words, a fortunate circumstance since only some 30 Gaulish words have known counterparts in all the other languages under study. Dr Forster and Dr Toth have used the method to draw up a tree relating the different branches of Celtic to one another and to other Indo-European languages like English, French, Spanish, Latin and Greek. In a published article, they say that soon after the ancestral Indo-European language arrived in Europe over 5,000 years ago, it split into different branches leading to Celtic, Latin, Greek and English. Within Celtic, their tree shows that Gaulish, the mainland European version of the language, separated from its Goidelic and Brythonic cousins, much as might be expected from the facts of geography.
D The researchers' method even dates the points at which their language tree divides, although the dates have a wide range of possibility. They calculate that the Indo-European language initially fragmented in Europe around 8100 BC, plus or minus 1,900 years, and the divergence between the mainland European and British versions of Gaelic took place in 3200 BC, plus or minus 1,500 years. These dates are much earlier than previously estimated. "The traditional date of the Indo-European fragmentation has been 4000 BC for some time," said linguist Dr Merritt Ruhlen. He said the new method "seems pretty reasonable" and should be useful in tracing back the earlier history of the Indo-European language.
E Specialists have long debated which country was the homeland of the Indo-Europeans and whether their language was spread by conquest or because its speakers were the first agriculturists whose methods and tongue were adopted by other populations. The second theory, that it was spread by agriculture, has been advocated by archaeologist Dr Colin Renfrew. Dr Forster, who works with Dr Renfrew, said in an interview that the suggested date 8100 BC for the arrival of Indo-European in Europe does seem to vindicate Renfrew's archaeological idea that the Indo-European languages were spread by farmers. Agriculture started to arrive in Europe from the Near East around 6000 BC, which is earlier than the traditional date proposed by linguists for the spread of Indo-European. This finding would fit with the lower end of Dr Forster's range of dates.
F Dr Forster said that his estimated date of 3200 BC for the arrival of Celtic speakers in the British Isles is also much earlier than the usual date, 600 BC, posited on the basis of archaeological evidence. Dr Forster and Dr Toth said their method of evaluating groups of languages against each other was similar to historical linguists, many of whom restrict their research to how words in only one single language have changed over time. Asked what linguists thought of his approach he said: "To be honest, they don't understand it, most of them. They don't even know what I'm talking about." The method used by Dr Forster and Dr Toth has two parts. One is to draw a tree on the basis of carefully chosen words; the second is to date the splits in the tree by calibrating them with known historical events. This is similar to the way geneticists date their evolutionary trees by tying one or more branch points to known dates from the fossil record.
G Dr April McMahon, a linguist at the University of Sheffield in England, said that Dr Forster's method "seems to me to be a good start", and that it was reasonable to base a language family tree on just a handful of well-chosen words. She had less confidence in the dating method, she said, because language changes in an irregular way based on social factors like the size of the speaker's group and its degree of contact with others.
Lawrence Johnston and Hidcote Garden
Robin Lane Fox writes about the American genius behind a remarkable garden in the English Cotswolds.
Today, the National Trust in the UK administers hundreds of public gardens, but sixty-odd years ago there was only one: Hidcote Manor near the English village of Chipping Campden. In 1949, Hidcote attracted a mere 600 visitors and took only £30 during its first public season. Nowadays, Hidcote is famous worldwide as a masterpiece of design and planting, attracting 150,000 visitors and raising nearly £1 million annually from entrance tickets.
Hidcote Garden was the creation of an American in Britain, the shy Major Lawrence Johnston, who came to live on the site in 1907 with his widowed mother, Gertrude Winthrop. In some respects, Winthrop feared her son's talents for expensive landscape gardening and never allowed him full access to the family's funds. Nonetheless, with her inspiration and guidance, Johnston started his design in 1908 and brought it to a peak in the early 1930s when he was in his 60s. At that time, Johnston may rightly be ranked beside Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, creators of Sissinghurst, his garden's only surviving equal.
In the last years of his life, Johnston placed faith in his head gardener Nancy Lindsay. Lindsay was undoubtedly a skilled plantswoman, but she had many other talents as well, including one for taking offence. Johnston was ill-suited to dealing with her impassioned views. When the National Trust subsequently acquired the garden from Johnston, none of his crucial garden diaries could be found, and some speculated that Lindsay had burned them to hurt her employer. Whatever their actual fate, Trust gardener Graham Thomas was tasked with reviving Hidcote. Without these crucial documents, Thomas had to rely on his instincts. He knew that for the gardens to be a commercial success, he needed to extend areas of most interest to the general public, so he introduced new plants and a Mediterranean Bank where Johnston had planted nothing of the sort, while retaining the superb structure of avenues and evergreen rooms.
As a result, since 1949, the visiting public has innocently been admiring Thomas's flower plantings, not Johnston's own. When the important designer Russell Page visited Hidcote in 1934, he hailed the half-hardy plants in the summer house as one of the highlights. However, Thomas later removed these plants and pulled the house down, fearing that such relatively colourless exhibits would not capture the public's imagination.
Then, in 2002, Johnston's old diaries and notebooks resurfaced. The present head gardener had started giving lectures about Hidcote's lost early designs, during which he appealed for memories from his audience. A few months later, an envelope arrived. There was no letter inside, only Johnston's personal diaries from the 1920s and 30s. The sender remains unknown, but the importance of these documents to Hidcote is certain. They contain invaluable notes regarding the selection of plants and, even better still, detailed sketches by Johnston himself showing how the different parts of the garden are related and how those relationships evolve over the seasons.
These documents are a rarity in other ways too, for they never dwell on the issues typically addressed in diaries—relationships, loves, and longings. These are far more interesting, as they represent a classic social history of an English country house during the inter-war years.
On page after page, Johnston describes the layout of the plants and gardens, interspersed with notes about that day's guests. The famous novelist Edith Wharton is recorded as coming for lunch, beside a recipe for poison to kill garden weeds. It is this mix of glamour and the everyday that makes the diaries so fascinating. At their heart, though, these are useful documents containing, for example, lengthy lists of those who might one day be of service around the estate, including local stone masons and glaziers, or repairers of broken china from as far away as France.
The discovery of the diaries has offered Hidcote a new direction for the years ahead. Inspired by them, an anonymous American has donated £1.6 million to the gardens. This remarkable chance has been seized by the Trust to fund crucial repair work on paths and the famous pool, as well as the reconstruction of the old summer house. However, the real implications of the discoveries made from the diaries are more challenging, as the Trust now possesses information about the very plants that most appealed to Johnston during the garden's golden years. Today, these may not be easy to source or appealing to contemporary tastes.
'But isn't it all so long ago?' a non-gardening academic recently asked me. On the contrary, Hidcote is still with us, a living legacy. It includes the greatest central vista in British gardening, a design I regard as the greatest in British art in the past century. It was the work of an American genius building an un-American garden of his own. I do not believe the fashionable guess that Johnston was informed by books on contemporary design by Britain's Thomas Mawson, an altogether less innovative mind. This is because so much in the garden reminds us how Johnston had travelled widely in Europe, which Mawson had not. Johnston's own origins, the events of his life, and his individual design flair all contribute to making Hidcote so unique.
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