Baldurs draumar (1938)
Baldurs draumar is a three-act ballet score by the Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt, adapting the Eddic poem Baldrs draumar (Baldr's Dreams) — the myth of Baldr's death — for narrator, vocal soloists and a huge orchestra including twelve percussionists on custom pentatonic 'Stone Age drums'. It sits in Limelight as a ballet in name and intention only: the article is explicit that it 'has never been staged as an actual ballet,' making it a catalogue entry for a work of theatrical dance that never received choreography.
What is danced
The article gives no choreography, dancer, or movement vocabulary to report, and says so twice: 'It has never been staged as an actual ballet' and, in the production history, that it 'has never been performed as an actual ballet, like Tveitt originally intended.' What exists is a concert/theatrical-music work — a piano version played in Leipzig and Berlin in 1935, then the full orchestral score premiered in Oslo in 1938 with a narrator (Einar Tveito) reciting the story alongside soprano, tenor and bass soloists. The synopsis describes a three-act structure telling Baldr's death 'recited by a narrator,' which is a narrated, sung and played dramatic scheme rather than a danced one as documented.
Because no choreographer is named anywhere in the source, and no set piece, pas, or divertissement is described, there is nothing here that can honestly be coded to a dance-technique taxonomy. A choreographer mounting Baldurs draumar today would be working from the score and Eddic narrative essentially from scratch, with no inherited stage tradition to draw on or depart from.
Context
Tveitt composed the work while developing what he called his own Nordic primitivism, in the orbit of Hans S. Jacobsen's neopagan circle — a group that was ideologically National Socialist but anti-Hitler. The article states Baldurs draumar 'most fully realizes the pagan ideas of this milieu,' making its intended stagecraft (narrator, ritual percussion, Eddic subject matter) a vehicle for a specific 1930s Norwegian nationalist-pagan aesthetic project rather than a conventional ballet commission from an established company.
Staging history
A piano version was heard in Leipzig (23 October 1935) and Berlin (16 November 1935) before the full ballet score premiered on 24 February 1938 at the University of Oslo's Aulaen hall, performed by an enlarged 100-piece Oslo Philharmonic under Tveitt's own baton. Excerpts were later given in Copenhagen and Paris, and Tveitt sent the score to London for a planned Covent Garden performance that never took place; it was then believed lost in the WWII bombing of London. Tveitt reworked surviving material into a shorter concert piece, Solgud-symfonien (Sun God Symphony), and further scores were destroyed in a 1970 fire at his Norheimsund home. In the late 1990s the Russian composer Aleksey Rybnov reconstructed the score from an NRK broadcast recording of the 1938 premiere, a fire-damaged original was found among Tveitt's remains in 2001 by Kaare Dyvik Husby and used to correct that reconstruction, and this restored version premiered — still only as a concert work — on 24 May 2002 at Grieg Hall, Bergen, with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, released on CD by BIS Records in 2003.
How to watch it
There is no staged version to watch; what survives to experience is the 1938-derived orchestral score (as reconstructed in 2002) with narrator and vocal soloists, plus the twelve-percussionist ensemble on specially built pentatonic 'Stone Age drums.' Listeners and researchers should attend to the narrated framing of the Baldr myth and the primitivist percussion writing, and to Sondre H. Bjørgum's 2008 NRK documentary, which uses the work as the throughline of Tveitt's biography.
Credits
- composer: Geirr Tveitt