Theory and Practice in Eighteenth-Century Dance: The German-French Connection

By Tilden Russell

This book is about the intersection of two evolving dance-historical realms—theory and practice—during the first two decades of the eighteenth century. France was the source of works on notation, choreography, and repertoire that dominated European dance practice until the 1780s. While these French inventions were welcomed and used in Germany, German dance writers responded by producing an important body of work on dance theory. This book examines consequences in Germany of this asymmetrical confrontation of dance perspectives.

Between 1703 and 1717 in Germany, a coherent theory of dance was postulated that called itself dance theory, comprehended why it was a theory, and clearly, rationally distinguished itself from practice. This flowering of dance-theoretical writing was contemporaneous with the appearance of Beauchamps-Feuillet notation in the Chorégraphie of Raoul Auger Feuillet (Paris, 1700, 1701). Beauchamps-Feuillet notation was the ideal written representation of the dance style known as la belle danse and practiced in both the ballroom and the theater. Its publication enabled the spread of belle danse to the French provinces and internationally. This spread encouraged the publication of new practical works (manuals, choreographies, recueils) on how to make steps and how to dance current dances, as well as of new dance treatises, in different languages.

The Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister, by Gottfried Taubert (Leipzig, 1717), includes a translated edition of Feuillet’s Chorégraphie. Theory and Practice in Eighteenth-Century Dance addresses how Taubert and his contemporary German authors of dance treatises (Samuel Rudolph Behr, Johann Pasch, Louis Bonin) became familiar with Beauchamps-Feuillet notation and acknowledged the Chorégraphie in their own work, and how Taubert’s translation of the Chorégraphie spread its influence northward and eastward in Europe. This book also examines the personal and literary interrelationships between the German writers on dance between 1703 and 1717 and their invention of a theoria of dance as a counterbalance to dance praxis, comparing their dance-theoretical ideas with those of John Weaver in England, and assimilating them all in a cohesive and inclusive description of dance theory in Europe by 1721.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781644530238

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Theory and Practice in Eighteenth-Century Dance: The German-French Connection

Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture

Advisory Board to the University of Delaware Press Board of Editors

Sarah R. Cohen, General Editor

Wendy Bellion • Martha Hollander • Christopher M. S. Johns

William L. Pressly • Amelia Rauser

Michael Yonan

Art and Culture in the Eighteenth Century

edited by Elise Goodman

Dugdale and Hollar: History Illustrated

by Marion Roberts

Piety and Politics: Imaging Divine Kingship in Louis XIV’s Chapel at Versailles

by Martha Mel Stumberg Edmunds

Changing Minds: The Shifting Perception of Culture in Eighteenth-Century France

by John C. O’Neal

Utility and Beauty: Robert Wellford and Composition Ornament in America by Mark Reinberger

From Savage to Citizen: The Invention of the Peasant in the French Enlightenment

by Amy S. Wyngaard

Abstraction and the Classical Ideal, 1760–1920

by Charles A. Cramer

Jacques-Louis David: New Perspectives

edited by Dorothy Johnson

Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception

edited by Genevieve Warwick

Antoine Watteau: Perspectives on the Artist and the Culture of His Time

edited by Mary Sheriff

From Sacred to Secular: Visual Images in Early American Publications

by Barbara E. Lacey

Performing the Everyday: The Culture of Genre in the Eighteenth Century

edited by Alden Cavanaugh

The Artist as Original Genius: Shakespeare’s Fine Frenzy in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Art

by William L. Pressly

Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints

by Amelia Rauser

Decorative Games: Ornament, Rhetoric, and Noble Culture in the Work of Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672–1742)

by Jean-François Bédard

Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France

by Christine A. Jones

Pastiche, Fashion, and Galanterie in Chardin’s Genre Subjects

by Paula Radisich

Theory and Practice in Eighteenth-Century Dance: The German-French Connection

by Tilden Russell

Theory and Practice in Eighteenth-Century Dance: The German-French Connection

Tilden Russell

University of Delaware Press

Newark

University of Delaware Press

© 2017 by Tilden Russell

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Distributed by the University of Virginia Press

ISBN 978-1-64453-022-1 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-64453-023-8 (ebook)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Russell, Tilden A., author.

Title: Theory and practice in eighteenth-century dance : the German-French connection / Tilden Russell.

Description: Newark : University of Delware Press, 2017. | Series: Studies in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017024238 (print) | LCCN 2017035243 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Dance—Philosophy—History—18th century. | Dance notation—History—18th century. | Choreography—History—18th century. | Dance—Germany—History—18th century. | Dance—France—History—18th century. | Taubert, Gottfried, active 1717.

Classification: LCC GV1588 (ebook) | LCC GV1588 .R87 2017 (print) | DDC

792.801/4809033—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024238

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Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1 Anatomy of a Dedication: Gottfried Taubert, His Dedicatee, and the Feuillet Analogy

2 Taubert in Danzig, and the German Reception of the Chorégraphie

3 In Defense of Behr: Taubert’s Contemporaries Revisited

4 Concordance of German Dance Treatises, 1703–1717

5 Feuillet, Taubert, Philipp Gumpenhueber, and the Spread of Beauchamps-Feuillet Notation

6 Dance Theory in Germany and England, 1703–1721

Postscript: Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater

Bibliography

About the Author

Acknowledgments

For extensive, generous sharing of insights, information, source material, and unpublished work, I am especially grateful to Bruce Alan Brown, Marie Glon, and Stephanie Schroedter.

I have admired and learned from Linda Tomko, a leader in eighteenth-century dance scholarship and performance, since meeting her at Aston Magna in 1989. It was my great good fortune that she read this entire book carefully and critically in its formative stage. Whether in the details or the broad development of ideas, she was a sensitive, wise, and supportive reader who refined the book and helped make it whole.

Next, I thank my readers at University of Delaware Press for their scrupulous, sympathetic, and authoritative contributions. Thanks also to Julia Oestreich at University of Delaware Press, and the fine production team at Rowman & Littlefield: Brooke Bures, Kathi Ha, and Zachary Nycum.

I thank Lynn Matluck Brooks (co-editor, Dance Chronicle) and Taylor and Francis LLC (http://www.tandfonline.com) for permission to reprint my article Anatomy of a Dedication: Gottfried Taubert and His Dedicatee, Dance Chronicle 35/2 (2012), pp. 208–23 (and Corrigendum in vol. 35/3, p. 420), with revisions, as the first chapter of this book. Abridged or condensed versions of other chapters were presented at scholarly meetings: Chapter 2 at the 2012 annual meeting of the Society of Dance History Scholars in Philadelphia; Chapter 5 at the 2014 joint meeting of the Society of Dance History Scholars and the Congress of Research in Dance in Iowa City, Iowa; and Chapter 6 at the Fifteenth Annual Oxford Dance Symposium in 2013.

Cordial thanks to Fran Barulich, Giles Bennett, Irene Brandenburg, Sarah R. Cohen, David Peter Coppen, Sybille Dahms, Susanne Dietel, Krystyna Gorniak-Kocikowska, Helen Hanowsky, Craig Hlavac, Claudia Jeschke, Alexandra Kajdanska, Helen Long, Marie-Thérèse Mourey, R. J. Phil, Ken Pierce, John Powell, Gabriele Ruiz, Andrea Sommer-Mathis, Sandra Stelts, Scott Stone, Elizabeth Svarstad, Jennifer Thorp, James Tuller, Hanna Walsdorf, and Channan Willner.

I also thank the Society of Dance History Scholars for awarding my previous book, The Compleat Dancing Master, the de la Torre Bueno Prize Special Citation (2012), which encouraged my continued study of Gottfried Taubert and his contemporaries that resulted in this book.

For any faults in this book, I am solely responsible.

Last and surpassingly utmost, yet still inadequate, my thanks to Dominique Bourassa: personal librarian, book hunter-gatherer and delivery service, chorégraphie explicator and demonstrator, technical support, travel agent, idea bouncer, critic, inspiration, muse.

List of Abbreviations

The Corpus (Chronological Order)

Other Titles

Introduction

Simply put, this book is about the intersection of two evolving dance-historical realms—theory and practice—during the first two decades of the eighteenth century. France was the source of works on notation, choreography, and repertoire that dominated European dance practice until the 1780s. While these French inventions were being welcomed and used in Germany, a group of German dance writers—Samuel Rudolph Behr, Johann Pasch, Louis Bonin, Meletaon (Johann Leonhard Rost), and Gottfried Taubert—responded by producing an important body of work on dance theory.¹ This book examines consequences in Germany of this asymmetrical confrontation of dance perspectives.²

By dance theory I mean the constituent elements and principles traditionally common to all manifestations of Western dance (analogous, for example, to melody, harmony, meter, and rhythm in Western music). If practice is the how of dance, theory is the no less basic what and why. Although dance theory did not develop as continuously and consistently as music theory, between 1703 and 1721 in Germany (and England) a coherent theory of dance was postulated that called itself dance theory, comprehended why it is a theory, and clearly, rationally, distinguished itself from practice. In view of the changing status and understanding of dance theory between then and now, the early eighteenth century may truly be called its golden age.

This flowering of dance-theoretical writing was contemporaneous with the appearance of Beauchamps-Feuillet notation in the Chorégraphie of Raoul Auger Feuillet (Paris, 1700, 1701). Beauchamps-Feuillet notation was the ideal written—literally choreo-graphic—representation of the dance style known as la belle danse and practiced in both the ballroom and the theater. Its publication enabled the spread of belle danse to the French provinces and internationally, and encouraged the publication, in different languages, of new dance treatises, as well as new practical works (manuals, choreographies, recueils) on how to make steps and dance current dances. In dance historiography, such practical works have cast a shadow of superfluousness on their theoretical underpinning and as a result have played a disproportionately large role in the construction of our modern sense of the ethos of dance in its historical dimension. An aim of this book is to reintegrate dance theory as a field of historical dance studies and sketch a coherent reading of the interaction of theory and practice during this pivotal moment in Western dance.

The Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister, by Gottfried Taubert (Leipzig, 1717), includes a translated edition of Feuillet’s Chorégraphie, indicating the centrality of French dance in Taubert’s world view.³ Chapters 1, 2, and 5 of this book have to do with how Taubert and his contemporary German authors of dance treatises became familiar with Beauchamps-Feuillet notation and acknowledged the Chorégraphie in their own work, and how Taubert’s translation of the Chorégraphie spread its influence northward and eastward in Europe. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the personal and literary interrelationships between the five German writers on dance between 1703 and 1717: Behr, Pasch, Bonin, Meletaon, and Taubert. Chapter 6 examines these writers’ invention of a theoria of dance as a counterbalance to dance praxis, compares their dance-theoretical ideas with those of John Weaver,⁴ and assimilates them all in a cohesive and inclusive description of dance theory in Europe by 1721.

The first chapter analyzes intersecting analogies between Gottfried Taubert; Prince-Elector Friedrich August II of Saxony, his dedicatee; King Louis XIV of France; Emperor Augustus of Rome; and Raoul Auger Feuillet, as presented in the dedication of Taubert’s Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister. These analogies yield a coherent view of Taubert’s sense of his own place in the artistic and political culture of early eighteenth-century Saxony and in the history of dance.

Chapter 2 focuses on Taubert’s twelve years in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland), during which he wrote most of the Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister. Here, he broadened his knowledge of world dance practices while experiencing the local (predominantly Polish) dance culture firsthand. Of central dance-historical importance, it was probably in Danzig that Taubert first encountered Feuillet’s Chorégraphie and made his crucial decision to translate it into German, thus making it available to the German-speaking world.

Chapter 3 explores the interrelationships between the five authors of German dance treatises between 1703 and 1717—Samuel Rudolph Behr, Johann Pasch, Louis Bonin, Meletaon, and Gottfried Taubert—who were acquainted with some if not all of their colleagues and read some or all of each other’s works. Hundreds of passages, long and short, are imported from one book to another throughout this repertoire, whether by direct or unacknowledged quotation or recognizably close paraphrase. Indifference to citation was the norm; only Taubert explicitly quotes other authors. The most problematic author with relation to the others is Behr, who is never quoted or alluded to by name. Behr’s impressive learnedness, especially in anatomy and music, counters his generally negative reception by the other authors leading up to and including Taubert.

The history of habitual, extensive borrowing among the five authors is documented in chapter 4 by a concordance of 342 instances of borrowing between two or more of their eight treatises. About 300 of these instances eventually find their way into Taubert’s massive text (1,176 numbered pages), but only ninety-three of them (i.e., 27 percent of 342) appear there as direct quotations with the author named. The concordance documents these connections according to two organizational systems: (Concordance I) chronologically by publication date and (Concordance II) by page number in the Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister, which constitutes, by virtue of its alignment with Taubert’s logically organized table of contents, a de facto subject index. The concordance shows who borrowed from whom, and how much, and which topics were the most useful or influential.

In 1752, Philipp Gumpenhueber, a dancing master at the Habsburg court in Vienna, produced a manuscript copy of Taubert’s translation of the Chorégraphie. This fascinating document prompts several questions that are addressed in chapter 5: How might Gumpenhueber’s copy of Taubert have reached Vienna? How does the manuscript compare with both Feuillet and Taubert in terms of its physical description, text, and figures? What might have been Gumpenhueber’s motivations for producing the manuscript, and what uses might it have served in the context of theatrical dance in Maria Theresia’s Vienna, during the gestational period of ballet d’action?

Chapter 6 begins with a description of the dance theory developed by Johann Pasch and Gottfried Taubert. It shows how the essential ideas in John Weaver’s Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures Upon Dancing (London, 1721)—Pythagorian proportions, the Vitruvian man, the place of dance in the arts and sciences, human anatomy, the physics of motion—had already been introduced and debated by the German writers introduced in chapter 3. The Lectures, taken together with the German sources, present in effect a collaborative theory of the dancing human body in the early eighteenth century.

A brief postscript to this chapter and to the book as a whole jumps ahead 100 years to Heinrich von Kleist’s famous essay Über das Marionettentheater (1810), with its uncanny echos of Behr’s, Taubert’s, and Weaver’s ideas on the physics and metaphysics of dance.

This book can be seen as a continuation or companion of the introductory first volume of The Compleat Dancing Master, my translation of Taubert’s great work, the Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister. Daunting in length and readability, the Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister—like the work of other German theorists contemporaneous with Taubert—remained largely unread or unappreciated until fairly recently. Whereas my introductory volume was concerned with various aspects of Taubert’s book as a whole, this book focuses more narrowly on dance theory and choreography. At the same time, its purview is broadened both synchronically, to include Taubert’s contemporaries, and diachronically, to consider the reception of their work, later repercussions of their ideas, and the essential role they played in the development of dance-theoretical thinking.

Translating Gottfried Taubert’s Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister was a fascinating, domineering, obsessive twelve-year project that allowed for no other pursuit—apart from full-time teaching during all but the final year. The present book was begun while The Compleat Dancing Master was in press and I had recently, with providential good timing, retired. With Taubert’s vast text still fresh in my mind, I was as alert as anyone could be to parallel passages, quotations, paraphrases, key words, and idiosyncratic turns of phrase. Therefore, the time was ripe to delve into the treatises of Behr, Pasch, Bonin, and Meletaon. The chapters in this book flowed directly and inevitably from these investigations.

A note on quotations from primary sources: Variant orthography follows that of the source text. German sources are originally printed in Fraktur but switch to roman type for French or Latin words, and German words containing a French or Latin component are split typographically between roman and Fraktur, thus: hiesig-florirenden, symmetrisch, coupiren, which in modern English typography would have to be represented thus: "hiesig-florirenden, symmetrisch, coupiren." As this procedure would cause confusion with other, conventional uses of italics (particularly when a title is cited), German texts are transcribed in roman type only.

Notes

1. Samuel Rudolph Behr, dancing master, musician, and author of dance treatises (b. 1670, Leipzig, d. date unknown); Johann Pasch, dancing master and treatise author (b. 1653, Dresden [?], d. 1710, Leipzig); Louis Bonin, dancing master and treatise author (b. Paris, date unknown, d. 1716, Jena); Meletaon (Johann Leonhard Rost), novelist and author of works on astronomy, mathematics, and dance (b. 1688, Nuremberg, d. 1727, Nuremberg); Gottfried Taubert, dancing master and author of dance treatises (b. 1670, Ronneburg, d. 1746, Zerbst). Their works, on which this book is principally based, are collectively referred to as The Corpus (for full bibliographical information, see the List of Abbreviations).

2. Strictly speaking, for the period covered in this book, the name Germany should be taken to mean German-speaking lands because the modern nation of Germany did not yet exist. Pasch, Behr, and Taubert lived and worked in the Electorate of Saxony; Bonin (though of French birth) worked in neighboring Thuringia at the court of Eisenach, a branch of the Saxon electoral line. In their writing, however, they did not identify themselves as Saxons or Thuringians or subjects of the Holy Roman Empire, but rather as Germans writing in German and for Germans. Meletaon, in fact, goes out of his way to praise Bonin on this very point: In a word, he is a good German, as his conduct proclaims just as well as his speech, which is so fully mastered that no one would take him for a Frenchman (Meletaon, foreword to Bonin, n.p.: Mit einem Worte: er ist ein guter Teutscher/welches so wol seine Aufführung/als die Sprache selbsten bezeiget/deren er dergestalt mächtig/daß man ihn nimmermehr vor einen Frantzosen halten würde). Therefore, it is entirely appropriate to refer to these writers not as Saxons or Leipzigers, etc., but as Germans.

3. Mary Ann O’Brian Malkin, Dancing by the Book: A Catalogue of Books 1531–1804 (New York: author, 2003), p. 219. Taubert’s translation of Feuillet is based on the second edition of the Chorégraphie (1701) and on the Traité de la cadance (1704); see the List of Abbreviations.

4. John Weaver, English dancing master, dancer, and author of dance treatises (b. 1673, Shrewsbury, d. 1760, Shrewsbury).

Chapter One

Anatomy of a Dedication: Gottfried Taubert, His Dedicatee, and the Feuillet Analogy

At first glance, Gottfried Taubert’s dedication of his Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister looks as formulaically baroque, in more than one sense, as any other dedication to a nobleman of his era: ornamental in its incrustation of hoary modes of address to crowned heads; hyperbolic in its tribute and praise; servile in its protestations of humility and inferiority. These qualities are graphically displayed in the dedicatee’s name trumpeted in immense type across the first page, and the author’s name and title cowering in miniscule type in the bottom-most corner of the last page—even below the date (see plates 1.1 and 1.2). The dedication consists of a grandiloquent salutation, a body of three paragraphs, and a parting obeisance. It is dated den 27. Martii, Anno 1717, one day after the foreword, and represents Taubert’s final thoughts upon completing the treatise, as well as the first sentences the reader encounters after the title page. Close reading reveals it to be both as substantive and subtle as the body of this magnum opus would lead one to expect. (For the full text and translation, see appendix 1.1.)

The dedication’s narrative arc encapsulates a retrograde history of the royal patronage of dance, beginning in the first paragraph with Taubert’s rather tenuous but respectful and hopeful relationship to his chosen patron, Prince-Elector Friedrich August II (1696–1763). In the second paragraph, Taubert refers to Raoul Auger Feuillet and the monarch to whom Feuillet might well have dedicated his Chorégraphie, Louis XIV (1638–1715), had he not, in fact, dedicated it to the dancer and choreographer Louis-Guillaume Pécour. The purpose of this hypothetical dedication is to suggest parallels between Louis and Friedrich August II, and between Feuillet and Taubert, who is presenting his German translation of Feuillet to the scion and heir apparent of his own monarch in the Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister. He then makes a more obscure reference to the Roman emperor Augustus (63 BCE–14 CE)—whose name is printed entirely in capital letters—ostensibly because his name is shared by Friedrich August and he was slow to anger and swift to show mercy; his real significance as a patron of dance is revealed later, in the treatise itself.

The third paragraph jumps from the ancient world back to contemporary Saxony, wishing the