Musica Mia: Italian Ballet Music

Musica Mia, My Music is a little guide to Italian music available in the United States and imported from Italy. We have selected Italian music from Amazon.com featuring CDs from Italy like Festival of Sanremo and Greatest Hits by Italian singers and groups. You will also find a selection of websites that carry Italian MP3 songs and albums as well as iTunes of Italian artists. If you prefer to order directly from Italy, ibs.it will ship your Italian music, movies, books and video games anywhere in the world. We hope you'll enjoy Musica Mia and find it useful, we encourage you to suggest this site to your friends and to include it in your favorite websites. Grazie!

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Italian Ballet Music

Italian contributions to ballet are less known and appreciated than in other areas of classical music.
Italy, particularly Milan, was the European center of court choreography as early as the 1400s in the form of such things as ritual masked balls. Early choreographers and composers of ballet include Fabrizio Caroso and Cesare Negri.
The style of ballet known as the "spectacles all’italiana" imported to France from Italy caught on, and the first ballet performed in France (1581), Ballet comique de la Royn, was composed by an Italian, Baltazarini di Belgioioso, better known by the French version of his name, Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx.
Early ballet was accompanied by considerable instrumentation, with the playing of horns, trombones, kettle drums, dulcimers, bagpipes, etc. Although the music has not survived, there is speculation that dancers, themselves, may have played instruments onstage.
Then, in the wake of the French Revolution, Italy again became a center of ballet, largely through the efforts of Salvatore Viganò, a choreographer who worked with some of the most prominent composers of the day. He was made the balletmaster of La Scala in 1812.
The best-known example of Italian ballet from the 19th century is probably Excelsior, with music by Romualdo Marenco and choreography by Luigi Manzotti. It was composed in 1881 and is a lavish tribute to the scientific and industrial progress of the 19th century. It is still performed and was staged as recently as 2002.
Currently, major Italian opera theaters maintain ballet companies. They exist to provide incidental and ceremonial dancing in many operas, such as Aida or La Traviata. These dance companies usually maintain a separate ballet season and perform the standard repertoire of classical ballet, little of which is Italian.
The Italian equivalent of the Russian Bolshoi Ballet and similar companies that exist only to perform ballet, independent of a parent opera theater is La Scala Ballet, which is under the direction of Frèdèric Olivieri. Since 1979 there has existed in Italy a modern dance company, the Aterballetto, based in Reggio Emilia. The company performs worldwide under the leadership of choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti.