Nobilissima Visione
Nobilissima visione is a 50-minute stage work in six scenes, scored by Paul Hindemith, on a libretto he wrote with choreographer Léonide Massine depicting episodes from the life of Saint Francis of Assisi. The article describes it as a "dance legend" rather than a conventional ballet, made for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, with designs by the Surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchew and premiered under the composer's own baton.
What is danced
The source article does not describe the choreography, step vocabulary, or staging of any scene in movement terms. It gives the commissioning circumstances, the designer and conductor, the premiere venues, and a detailed account of how Hindemith later extracted a three-movement concert suite from five of the original eleven movements — but nothing about what the dancers actually did on stage, whether the vocabulary was classical, character, or modern in idiom, or which scenes carried set pieces such as solos or ensembles.
Because of this gap, no dance-vocabulary codes can responsibly be assigned from the article alone. A reader wanting technical detail on Massine's choreography — his known preference for symphonic ensemble structures and demi-caractère invention in this period is my own outside knowledge, not sourced here — would need to consult a source that actually describes the staging, such as period reviews or Massine's own writings, neither of which the article cites.
Context
The work was made in 1938 for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, one of the touring companies carrying forward the Diaghilev-era model of ballet built on newly commissioned scores and modern visual artists rather than inherited repertory. The pairing of Hindemith's score, a religious subject drawn from the life of Saint Francis, and Tchelitchew's designs situates the piece within the late-1930s trend of prestige one-off ballets built around a strong compositional and pictorial identity, though the article does not describe how this translated into movement.
Staging history
The article records a London premiere at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on 21 July 1938 and a single New York performance at the Metropolitan Opera House on 14 October 1938, for which the title was temporarily changed to Saint Francis, both conducted by Hindemith himself. It gives no further stage history after 1938, and no information on later revivals, companies, or choreographic revisions to the ballet itself — its subsequent life in the record is entirely as an orchestral suite, first performed at Teatro La Fenice in Venice on 13 September 1938 and later recorded by Hindemith with the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1956.
How to watch it
Because the article gives no choreographic detail, a viewer or researcher approaching a revival should watch for how the six-scene structure handles the Franciscan narrative and how the choreography answers Hindemith's episodic, non-narrative concert extraction — the suite was deliberately assembled without following the ballet's action, so the staged and concert versions of the same music tell different stories. Attention to Tchelitchew's designs, described elsewhere as important to the production's identity, is also warranted.
Credits
- composer: Paul Hindemith