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Requiem (MacMillan)


Requiem is a one-act ballet created by Kenneth MacMillan in 1976 for the Stuttgart Ballet. The music is Gabriel Fauré's Requiem (1890). The designer was Yolanda Sonnabend, who had first collaborated with him on 1963's Symphony.

In MacMillan's words, "This danced Requiem is dedicated to the memory of my friend and colleague John Cranko, Director of the Stuttgart Ballet 1961–1973." The first performance was given at Stuttgart on 28 November 1976. MacMillan recreated the piece for the Royal Ballet, London, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden on 3 March 1983.

MacMillan's decision to set a ballet to Fauré's Requiem met with opposition from the board of the Royal Ballet. Catholic members of the board felt that sacred music should not be used for ballet. MacMillan wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury to seek his opinion. Although the response was favourable to MacMillan the board remained unpersuaded. MacMillan then contacted the artistic director of the Stuttgart Ballet who had previously expressed an interest in commissioning a ballet from him. They reacted with enthusiasm. The piece was a portrait of the ballet company coming to terms with the death of Cranko, their much-loved artistic director.

Many of the choreographic images in Requiem were based on drawings and paintings by William Blake, including illustrations for Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost and the Old Testament Book of Job. The ballet begins with a group of mourners entering to the accompaniment of the Introitus. A central figure is raised aloft like an offering. She then dances two pas de deux with different men during the Offertorium and the Sanctus, returning to comfort a young woman during the Agnus Dei. In the final section, In Paradisum, the women appear from the wings before all the dancers leave the stage bathed in light and with their backs to the audience.


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