Don Juan (ballet)

Don Juan ou Le Festin de Pierre (Don Juan, or the Stone Guest's Banquet) is a ballet with a libretto by Ranieri de' Calzabigi, music by Christoph Willibald von Gluck, and choreography by Gasparo Angiolini. The ballet's first performance was in Vienna, Austria on Saturday, 17 October 1761, at the Theater am Kärntnertor. Its innovation in the history of ballet, coming a year before Gluck's radical reform of opera seria with his Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), was its coherent narrative element, though the series of conventional divertissement dances in the second act lies within the well-established ballet tradition of an entr'acte effecting a pause in the story-telling. The ballet follows the legend of Don Juan and his descent into Hell after killing his inamorata's father in a duel.

The ballet Don Juan was based on Molière's Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre of 1665. Gluck's score is perhaps the most considerable written for eighteenth century ballet. The composer's understanding of dance as an autonomous art form completely independent of opera permitted him to compose a score free of conventional rhetoric or ornament, and utilized a structure that built toward an exciting and dramatically direct climax.

While choreographer Angiolini's rival Jean-Georges Noverre composed ballets in Stuttgart, London, and Paris based on heroic gesture inspired, in part, by the plastique of David Garrick in England, Angiolini's passi d'azione in Vienna (prompted by the concepts explored by Franz Hilverding and Gluck) accented dancing itself. Angiolini and Noverre never agreed on the place of music in ballet. Angiolini regarded music and dance as two separate components that the dancer was required to unite in his own body. Noverre disagreed and declared that a musical score would pre-set and manipulate the actions and movements of the performer. The protagonist would translate music into transparent gesture.

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