1826–1917 · Austria · Classical
Ludwig Minkus (1826–1917) was an Austrian composer, violinist and conductor. He was born and died in Vienna, yet spent many years living and working in Russia. Minkus wrote music for the ballets of the choreographer Marius Petipa, among them Don Quixote and La Bayadère. The site offers sheet music from La Bayadère for piano and for flute with piano.
Ludwig Minkus came into the world in Vienna on 23 March 1826; his full name was Aloysius Bernhard Philipp. His father, Theodor Johann, dealt in wine and kept a restaurant in Vienna with a small orchestra of its own, so the boy grew up surrounded by music.
Ludwig took up the violin at the age of four and from 1838 to 1842 studied at the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna. He gave his first public concert at eight, and critics soon recognised a child prodigy in him. Minkus began writing for the violin while still a student, and his first five pieces for the instrument were printed in 1846. He studied composition with Gottfried von Preyer and the violin with Joseph Böhm.
Around this time Minkus tried his hand at conducting: for a while he led an orchestra that rivalled the one directed by the young Johann Strauss the Younger. Little is known about his life between 1842 and 1852; only applications for journeys to Germany, France and England survive. In 1852 he won the post of first violinist at the Vienna Court Opera, but soon gave it up for an offer from abroad.
Minkus relocated to St Petersburg in 1853 and led the orchestra of serf musicians at Prince Yusupov's theatre until 1855. In 1855 he married Maria Antoinette Schwarz, a fellow Viennese. They were wed in St Petersburg's Catholic church dedicated to St Catherine.
From 1856 to 1861 he served as first violinist at the Imperial Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, and before long he combined playing with conducting. When the Moscow Conservatoire opened, he was invited to teach there as professor of violin. Minkus kept performing as a violinist in Russia as well.
Minkus made his debut as a ballet composer in 1857, writing the ballet The Union of Thetis and Peleus for a private performance at the Yusupov theatre. In 1862 his one-act ballet Two Days in Venice, written during his years at the Bolshoi, was staged. The same year the ballet master Arthur Saint-Léon, first ballet master of the St Petersburg Imperial Theatres since 1860, commissioned from him an entr'acte for solo violin to go into Adolphe Adam's Orfa, which was being revived at the Bolshoi.
Saint-Léon was pleased and ordered a full-length ballet. The result was The Flame of Love, or The Salamander: in 1863 it was staged in Moscow for the ballerina Marfa Muravieva, in 1864 it appeared in St Petersburg as Fiametta, and later in 1864 in Paris as Néméa. In 1868 the ballet was shown in Trieste under yet another title. Because of these changes of name, historians have sometimes taken a single ballet for several different works.
The Paris premiere of Néméa took place on 11 July 1864, with the Empress Eugénie in the audience. Parisian critics, Théophile Gautier among them, praised the score, and the ballet stayed in the Opéra's repertoire until 1871, with 53 performances.
In 1866 Minkus and Léo Delibes together wrote La Source for Saint-Léon's new Paris production: Minkus is responsible for the first act and part of the third, Delibes for the second act and the rest. The premiere took place on 12 November 1866.
Minkus carried on working with Saint-Léon. For Peterhof, where the wedding of the heir Alexander Alexandrovich and the Danish princess Dagmar was being celebrated, the one-act ballet The Golden Fish, after Pushkin's tale of the fisherman and the fish, was staged in December 1866. In 1867 Saint-Léon enlarged it to three acts, and in 1869 another ballet of theirs, The Lily, based on a Chinese legend, was shown. For Saint-Léon both The Lily and the enlarged Golden Fish turned out to be failures; the management of the Imperial Theatres in St Petersburg chose not to renew his contract, and soon he moved to Paris, where he died in 1870.
For the choreographer Marius Petipa, Minkus wrote the music to the ballet Don Quixote, after Cervantes, in 1869. A score by Cesare Pugni had been planned at first, but Petipa turned to Minkus instead. The Moscow premiere took place on 26 December 1869 and the work was a great success. When Petipa staged Don Quixote in St Petersburg, the composer reworked the whole score and enlarged it; that production opened on 21 November 1871.
Together with Petipa, Minkus created 16 ballets, and the best known of them became La Bayadère, staged in 1877. Their other joint works include La Camargo (1872) and The Adventures of Peleus (1876). In 1883 the celebrations at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow for the coronation of Alexander III included Petipa's ballet Nuit et Jour, set to Minkus's music. The emperor awarded the composer the Order of St Stanislaus.
In 1886, at the opening of the renovated Mariinsky Theatre, The Magic Pills was shown: Minkus wrote the music for the dance episodes of its three scenes, which included national dances of several countries. The same year he produced the one-act ballet L'Offrandes à l'Amour, the last score of his known to have been written for Petipa.
Having left Russia for good, Minkus settled with his wife in Vienna, where both had been born. They lived on a modest pension paid from the imperial treasury. For a time Minkus rented an apartment from his friend, the pianist and teacher Theodor Leschetizky, and later moved to the Gentzgasse. His wife died in 1895.
Minkus went on writing for the Viennese stage in these years. His ballet Das Maskenfest, composed in 1897, was turned down by the Court Opera: Gustav Mahler judged its libretto out of step with the tastes of the day. In 1899 Minkus wrote the one-act ballet Die Dryaden for Vienna, and in 1907 the Court Opera staged Rübezahl, built from tunes of La Source and works of Johann Strauss.
Minkus spent his last years alone and in dire poverty, since the First World War cut off his Russian pension. In the bitterly cold winter of 1917 he caught pneumonia and died in Vienna on 7 December 1917. He had no children, and only a niece, Clara von Minkus, outlived him. The composer was buried at the Döbling Cemetery.
Minkus was a composer of ballet music. Among the scores he composed entirely on his own, the works usually named are Don Quixote, The Golden Fish, Fiametta, La Bayadère, The Magic Pills, Camargo and Thetis and Peleus. His ballets, full of cheerful, melodic and rhythmic music, are still performed in leading theatres of Russia and the world.
Together with Petipa, Minkus created 16 ballets, and the best known of them is La Bayadère (1877). Don Quixote met with great success in Moscow, and for the St Petersburg staging Minkus reworked the whole score and enlarged it. The Magic Pills (1886) belonged to the vaudeville tradition: besides dancing, the show included comedy and singing.
Some of his music Minkus wrote for particular performers. Le Poisson doré features Russian folk melodies and virtuoso flute solos created for the Italian flautist Cesare Ciardi, while his scores contain violin cadenzas for Leopold Auer. The music of Don Quixote he filled with a wide range of Spanish colour.
Among the ballets Minkus and Petipa staged after La Bayadère are Roxana, the Beauty of Montenegro (1878), La Fille des Neiges (1879), Mlada (1879) and Zoraïa, or the Moorish Woman in Spain (1881).
Minkus also wrote interpolated numbers for the ballets of other composers. The best known are the Giselle variation, the one with the spinning tops, in Adam's Giselle, along with the children's polonaise and mazurka, the Grand pas and fragments of the Pas de trois in Deldevez's Paquita. His music is heard in Le Corsaire too: Medora's variation in the scene of the animated garden is taken from the ballet The Adventures of Peleus.
Several of his ballets are tied to major occasions: a private performance at the Yusupov theatre in 1857, the tsarevich's wedding at Peterhof in 1866, the coronation celebrations of 1883, the opening of the renovated Mariinsky Theatre in 1886. The numbers for Paquita were written at Petipa's request for the revival of that ballet in 1881.
The site holds sheet music from La Bayadère. Acte II is for solo piano, at upper-intermediate level. Allegretto delicato and Variation des Ombres are for flute and piano, also at upper-intermediate level. The hardest of them is Variation de Nikya for flute and piano, at advanced level. For a pianist playing alone, Acte II is the one to choose: it is the only piece for piano alone.