Mourey, Marie-Thérèse. "Zwischen Allegorie und Mimesis: Das frühe Ballet de cour."

Mourey, Marie-Thérèse. "Zwischen Allegorie und Mimesis: Das frühe Ballet de cour." Morgen-Glantz 29 (2019): 223-239.


Abstract:
This paper discusses the genre of „court ballet“ of the 17th century, which was mainly considered as a kind of early musical drama or opera. This led the experts and scholars to search after a dramatic plot that was not always extent, and therefore to belittle the works as pleasant entertainments without deeper meaning. This paper aims at showing that court ballets that were performed within the Holy Roman German Empire were primarily conceived not as (sung) dramas but as emblematic pictures of a great complexity, and that allegorical forms made up a main part of those „moving pictures“. As it appears clearly, the assumption of a mere decorative function of ballet is inaccurate to understand the aesthetic system of the balletic form.