Hit & Myth

Despite the S.R.O. signs, it looked as if the Sadler's Wells Ballet Company had got off on the wrong toe. For more than two weeks, the company, on its third visit to Manhattan (TIME, Sept. 21), staged some familiar oldtimers, but its new numbers were largely disappointing--and at times, plainly dull. Then, last week, Sadler's brought on another new one, a bucolic, mythological tale entitled Sylvia. "Magnificent," cried Critic Walter Terry in the Herald Tribune. "The ducal birthright of the ballet is made manifest." "A sumptuous extravaganza," announced John Martin in the Times. "An exemplary performance."

Sylvia was indeed a hit. For one thing, it moved to a perfectly lyrical score by the father of modern ballet music, Leo Delibes (1836-91). Delibes, a musical whiz-kid who was accepted at the Paris Conservatory when he was twelve, became a church organist in his teens, wrote his first stage piece (Two Cents Worth of Coal) at 19. He was a pupil of famed Adolphe (Giselle) Adam, wrote with a symphonic fluidity that made much of the ballet compositions of his contemporaries sound like music for setting-up exercises. In all, he turned out about 20 operettas and operas (including Lakme) and several ballets (Coppelia and La Source). For Sylvia (written in 1876), Delibes used a 16th century story of a Greek shepherd who falls in love with one of Diana's huntresses. She repulses him until the god Eros steps in. In a scene reminiscent of The Perils of Pauline, a robber khan ab ducts Sylvia, but with the help of the gods, and oblations from peasants, shepherds and huntresses the lovers are united. Sadler's Wells Choreographer Frederick Ashton tied music and story together with some first-rate dance inventions. Every leap and step, gracefully tuned in the 19th century romantic mood, seemed to move the story forward. True. Sadler's ensemble work was a trifle ragged as usual, but with feather-footed Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes in the leading roles, most of the audience minded not at all. For one of the few times this season, ballet fans greeted with ovations what they long ago came to expect from Sadler's: more than their money's worth.

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