The Case of the Light Fantastic Toe
by Donald Sidney-Fryer
The Case of the Light Fantastic Toe:
The Romantic Ballet and Signor Maestro Cesare Pugni,
As well as their survival by means of Tsarist Russia.
A chronicle and source book
By Donald Sidney-Fryer.
“Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides.
Come, and trip it as you go
On the light fantastic toe.”
– John Milton, L’Allegro, 1645
“Donald Sidney-Fryer’s book, researched with a heroic thoroughness, is truly a boon to ballet history.”
– Joan Acocella, Dance Critic, The New Yorker
“Meticulously researched, Donald Sidney-Fryer’s study sheds light not only ballet and musical practices of the age, but also on the day-to-day struggles of a composer who lived outside the musical limelight.”
– Lynn Garafola, Professor Emerita of Dance, Barnard College, Columbia University
I. The Book
This book recounts the life and career of Italian composer Cesare Pugni (1802-1870), who worked primarily in Milan, Paris, London and St. Petersburg as a composer of ballet music. During the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s he created music for most of the new ballets at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London and at the Bolshoi Theatre in St. Petersburg and worked with the greatest ballet-masters of the century, including Jules Perrot, Paul Taglioni, Arthur Saint-Léon, and Marius Petipa. All told, he wrote music for over 300 ballets, of which the best-known are Ondine (1843), La Esmeralda (1844) and The Pharaoh's Daughter (1862).
The biography of Pugni becomes a history of ballet theatre in the 1800s, which remains the century of the dance drama – more often than not featuring a strong fantastic element. The first development took place in Western Europe from 1820-1850; then it spread to Russia, where it reached its florescence from 1850-1870 and continued to develop until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
The first half of the five-volume set covers Pugni’s life and career (1802-1870), inducing the Tsarist ballet theatre in detail (1848-1870) mainly at or around the Tsarist capital of St. Petersburg. The second half covers in detail the Aftermath of Pugni, first at St. Petersburg (1870-1904) and then intermittently there and at Moscow through the end of the Tsarist regime.
Supplemental materials aid both beginning and advanced readers with thorough Notes, Bibliography, Glossary of Russian names, and various Appendices – including a checklist of Pugni’s known compositions and strategic library holdings.
II. The Volumes
The Case of the Light Fantastic Toe, Vol. I
Volume one covers the years 1802-1850
Contains Introduction and entirety of Parts One and Two:
Part One: Early Life and Career: Genoa, Milan, and Paris
Part Two: London: Her Majesty's Theatre
Second Edition
ISBN: 9798690010546
The Case of the Light Fantastic Toe, Vol. III
Volume three covers the years 1861-1888
Completes Part Three: Sankt-Peterburg: Bolshoi Teatr – including Pugni’s death in 1870
Begins Part Four: Aftermath: In the Wake of Cesare Pugni
Second Edition
ISBN: 9798690012991
698 pp., $24.99, tpb.
III. The Author
Poet, performing artist, critic, literary historian – and now ballet historian – Donald Sidney-Fryer is the last in the great line of California Romantics that reaches from Ambrose Bierce to George Sterling, from Sterling to his protégé Clark Ashton Smith, and from Smith to his disciple Sidney-Fryer.
Carrying on the tradition of “pure poetry” begun in early modern English by Edmund Spenser and revivified by the Romantic poets long after the mainstream poetic establishment had abandoned it, the California Romantics created two monuments in verse: Sterling with A Wine of Wizardry and Smith with The Hashish-Eater.
During his long and inspired career, Sidney-Fryer has given dramatic readings from these poets as well as from Edmund Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queene, in locales across the U.S. and Great Britain. He has written and edited nearly three dozen books and booklets. He edited four books by Smith for Arkham House and three for Pocket Books, in addition to A Vision of Doom by Ambrose Bierce. His Emperor of Dreams: A Clark Ashton Smith Bibliography remains a cornerstone for Smith studies.
As a poet Sidney-Fryer first crafted Songs and Sonnets Atlantean (the first series), which was the final book to appear from Arkham House under the personal supervision of August Derleth. The Second Series was published by Wildside Press; the Third Series by Phosphor Lantern Press; and an omnibus edition is available from Hippocampus Press. Notably, Sidney-Fryer accomplished his chief prosodic innovation – the creation of the Spenserian stanza-sonnet – long before the emergence the New Formalists, who returned to a more traditional approach to poetics.
From 1980 to 2000 Sidney-Fryer assembled The Case of the Light Fantastic Toe (2018), which he considers his magnum opus.
Although he resided in California during 1955-2017, the self-styled Last of the Courtly Poets presently lives in East Sandwich, Massachusetts.
Praise for The Case of the Light Fantastic Toe
"They are called the specialist ballet composers – Cesare Pugni, Ludwig Minkus, Riccardo Drigo – and people seem to think that describing them as such settles the matter. But these are the men to whose music most of the great and good Russian ballets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were set. Surely we need to know more about those scores, and those composers: what influences they absorbed, what requirements they had to meet, how they plied their trade. Donald Sidney-Fryer’s book, researched with a heroic thoroughness, is truly a boon to ballet history."
– Joan Acocella, Dance Critic, The New Yorker
"Although virtually unknown today, Cesare Pugni created music for dozens of ballets performed in opera houses all over Europe in the nineteenth century. He began his career at La Scala, had a productive relationship in the 1840s with His Majesty's Theatre, London, where he composed the music for several of Jules Perrot's most important ballets, and spent the last twenty years of his life at St. Petersburg's Imperial Theaters, writing music for works by Perrot, Arthur Saint-Léon, and Marius Petipa, including the latter's first great success, Pharaoh's Daughter. Meticulously researched, Donald Sidney-Fryer's study sheds light not only ballet and musical practices of the age, but also on the day-to-day struggles of a composer who lived outside the musical limelight."
– Lynn Garafola, Professor Emerita of Dance, Barnard College, Columbia University
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