Les petits riens is a one-act ballet in three tableaux made by Jean-Georges Noverre for the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris Opéra), first given on 11 June 1778. It survives today chiefly through its score — twenty numbers, seven of them (including the overture) by the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was in Paris at the time and went uncredited on the original bill.
What it contains
- Passepied · The score, numbered dance no. 11 — A named passepied number within the ballet's score; passepied is a period dance form in quick triple metre, and its inclusion as a distinct numbered movement in a 1778 ballet score follows the era's convention of structuring divertissement around identifiable historic dance types. Source: "The Passepied (nr. 11) in D major is reminiscent of the first movement of Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence"
What is danced
The article gives no choreographic notation, but it does describe the ballet's dramatic content tableau by tableau, drawn from a contemporary Journal de Paris account, and it names the leading Paris Opéra dancers of the day who carried each scene: Marie-Madeleine Guimard, Auguste Vestris, Jean Dauberval and Marie Allard. The first tableau, 'Love caught in a net and put in a cage', the second built around the game of Colin-Maillard (blind man's buff, with the flirtatious undertones familiar from Fragonard's painting of the same game), and the third a pastoral in which a woman disguised as a shepherd is courted by two shepherdesses before revealing herself — this is pantomime-ballet material, built for expressive gesture and comic/erotic business between named principals rather than for a corps de ballet showpiece.
The one piece of the score with a named dance form attached is no. 11, described in the article as 'The Passepied ... in D major', which places at least one number of the ballet inside the historic-baroque social-dance repertory that eighteenth-century ballet still drew on for its formal numbers. A related dance, a Gavotte in B-flat major (K. 300), was proposed by musicologist Ernst Fritz Schmid as originally intended for insertion into the ballet but 'was subsequently laid aside for unknown reasons' — so it is not established that it was actually danced as part of the piece.
Beyond the passepied, the article does not describe steps, positions, or technique for the tableaux themselves, so no further movement vocabulary can be verified from it.
Context
Noverre made the ballet originally in Vienna in 1767, at the height of his campaign for the ballet d'action — dramatic, pantomimic ballet built around continuous narrative and character rather than the interpolated formal dances of court spectacle. The Paris version, reworked with Mozart's new music, was first mounted as an interlude within Niccolò Piccinni's opera Le finte gemelle in 1771, a common eighteenth-century practice of pairing sung opera with a danced entr'acte; the opera failed, but the dance music was praised even though its young composer was not named on the bill.
Staging history
The score, catalogued as K. Anh. 10/299b, was believed lost until it turned up in the Paris Opera's own archives in the late nineteenth century; from there it moved into both the ballet and the orchestral concert repertory, independent of any particular staging of Noverre's choreography, which the article does not trace forward into revival history.
How to watch it
Because the article preserves only the dramatic outline and the music, not the steps, a viewer or reader should treat the three tableaux as pantomime-comedy set pieces — a caging of Cupid, a game of blind man's buff with erotic undertones, a cross-dressed pastoral seduction — rather than as abstract dance display. Listen for the passepied at no. 11 as the one number the source explicitly ties to a named historic dance form within the score.
Structure
- Act I · Scene 1 · L'Amour pris au filet et mis en cageLove is caught in a net and put in a cage, performed by Marie-Madeleine Guimard, Auguste Vestris and a young child.
- Act I · Scene 2 · Jeu de Colin-MaillardA blind man's buff game with flirtatious connotations, built around the legend of Colin-Maillard, with the main role danced by Jean Dauberval.
- Act I · Scene 3 · Espieglerie de l'AmourA pastoral in which a woman (Mlle Asselin) disguised as a male shepherd is courted by two shepherdesses (Guimard and Marie Allard), and reveals her true sex to disenchant them.
Structure read from an encyclopaedia article, not from a libretto or score we hold. Confirm against a programme before treating the numbering as authoritative.