Limelight · Ballet

The Incredible Flutist

The Incredible Flutist is a 1938 ballet score by Walter Piston, his only work written for the stage, built on a libretto he wrote with Hans Wiener. The story is set in a marketplace where a travelling circus arrives; a flutist charms both a snake and the local women, a widow's flirtation with a merchant is exposed and resolved, and the circus departs. It belongs in the catalogue less because a specific choreography has survived to us through this article than because Piston structured the ballet, and later his own orchestral suite, as a sequence of discrete dance numbers.

What it contains

Minuet
  • Minuet — Minuet - Dance of the Widow and Merchant · The suite movement titled 'Minuet - Dance of the Widow and Merchant', corresponding to the widow-and-merchant flirtation scene in the libretto — A courtly duet form for the widow and merchant; the minuet is used here as a character number for a flirtation between two named figures rather than an abstract dance. Source: "Minuet – "Dance of the Widow and Merchant""

What is danced

The article does not name a choreographer or describe steps in performance terms, but the thirteen-movement suite Piston drew from the ballet is itself a map of danced numbers keyed to the marketplace plot: an entrance for vendors, a dance for vendors, an entrance of customers, a tango for the merchant's four daughters, a circus march, a solo for the flutist, a minuet for the widow and merchant, a Spanish waltz, a siciliano for the flutist and the merchant's daughter, and a polka before the finale. Two of these carry titles that match historic ballroom/theatrical dance forms directly on offer in this taxonomy - the Minuet ('Dance of the Widow and Merchant') and the Polka - and can be coded on that basis, understood as character numbers for named couples rather than abstract concert dances. The tango, Spanish waltz and siciliano are equally clearly intended as danced set pieces but have no exact match among the codes available here and are flagged below as taxonomy gaps rather than forced into a near neighbour.

Context

Piston wrote this as incidental/ballet music in the late 1930s for an American concert-hall ballet culture in which composers such as Piston, Copland and Thomson were being drawn into stage commissions from orchestras and dance companies rather than opera houses, producing scores built from legible dance-form movements (minuet, waltz, polka, tango) laid over a folkloric or generic 'anywhere' setting. Elliott Carter's remark, quoted in the article, that Piston deliberately avoided a geographically specific musical 'pastiche' so the marketplace could be 'any village,' points to a broader mid-century American tendency to use recognizable European social-dance forms as stylized character shorthand rather than as ethnographic quotation.

How to watch it

Watch for the way each social-dance form is assigned to a specific pair or group - the widow and merchant get a minuet, the merchant's daughters a tango, the flutist and the merchant's daughter a siciliano - so the vocabulary of each borrowed dance form is doing characterization work, not just decoration. The circus frame (arrival march, flutist's solo, departure) brackets these social dances with a more theatrical, presentational vocabulary suited to a snake-charmer/circus performer figure.

Structure

  1. Introduction
    Opening movement of the suite, no danced action specified.
  2. Siesta Hour in the Marketplace and Entrance of the Vendors
    The marketplace comes to life as vendors enter.
  3. Dance of the Vendors
    A dance number for the marketplace vendors.
  4. Entrance of the Customers
    Customers arrive in the marketplace.
  5. Tango of the Four Daughters
    The merchant's four daughters dance a tango.
  6. Arrival of Circus and Circus March
    The travelling circus arrives with a march.
  7. Solo of the Flutist
    The flutist, acting as snake charmer, performs a solo.
  8. Minuet - Dance of the Widow and Merchant
    The widow flirts with the merchant in a minuet.
  9. Spanish Waltz
    A Spanish waltz number within the marketplace scene.
  10. Eight O'Clock Strikes
    A time-marking transitional movement.
  11. Siciliano - Dance of the Flutist and the Merchant's Daughter
    The flutist dances with the merchant's daughter.
  12. Polka
    A polka number late in the ballet.
  13. Finale
    The circus leaves the square; closing movement.

Structure read from an encyclopaedia article, not from a libretto or score we hold. Confirm against a programme before treating the numbering as authoritative.

Credits

  • composer: Walter Piston

Questions

Who choreographed The Incredible Flutist?
The article does not name a choreographer, and our record does not have one recorded either. Hans Wiener, credited as co-author of the libretto with Piston, is the only staging-related collaborator named in the source.
Is this ballet still performed, or mainly known through its orchestral suite?
The article only documents the 1938 stage premiere by the Boston Pops under Arthur Fiedler and the 1940 concert premiere of Piston's own extracted suite under Fritz Reiner; it gives no revival or staging history for the ballet itself, so on this evidence the suite is the more documented afterlife.
What dances actually appear in the ballet?
Based on the movement titles of Piston's suite, the score supports a minuet for the widow and merchant, a tango for the merchant's four daughters, a Spanish waltz, a siciliano for the flutist and merchant's daughter, and a polka, framed by vendor and circus numbers.
This entry was written from “The Incredible Flutist” on English Wikipedia (revision 1360196619), used under CC BY-SA 4.0. The link points at the exact revision this text was written from, so it shows the words we actually used rather than whatever the article says today. Credits and premiere data come from Wikidata (CC0), cited per field.
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