A Folk Tale (ballet)

A Folk Tale (Danish: Et Folkesagn) is a ballet in three acts, created in 1854 for the Royal Danish Ballet by the Danish ballet master and choreographer August Bournonville to the music of Johan Peter Emilius Hartmann and Niels W. Gade. The first performance took place on 20 March 1854. Set in the Middle Ages, the ballet tells the story of a changeling living among the trolls and elves. Bournonville declared the ballet "The most complete and best of all my choreographic works."

At the beginning of the 1850s, Svend Grundtvig initiated a systematic recording of Danish folklore - the stories were told and written down in every little village in Denmark – but Bournonville did not credit Grundtvig as his source of inspiration, even though today Grundtvig is probably considered to be the person who made the most effort to preserve the wealth of Danish national folk tradition. Bournonville found his inspiration in a collection of national Danish songs (Nationalmelodier) published by the philologist R. Nyerup and the composer A.P. Berggren in J.M. Thiele's collection of Danish folk legends (Danske Folkesagn) published in four volumes between 1818 and 1823. Bournonville also found inspiration in the tales collected by the Grimm brothers in Germany.

The Romantic artists had a passion for the national and the past. The early part of the 19th century was a difficult time both politically and economically for Denmark, and this naturally generated a glorification of times past. The emergent bourgeoisie needed to consolidate its cultural status and found motifs for this in national folklore. The economic growth in a rapidly expanding Copenhagen had to some extent overshadowed spiritual development. Artists interpreted their contemporary society in a purely materialistic light. Oehlenschläger's poem about The Golden Horns (Guldhornene) is probably the most famous example of this issue but Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale The Bell (Klokken) depicted the materialistic fixation of the period with humour, irony and gravity.

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