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Ludwig Minkus a.k.a. Léon Fyodorovich Minkus (1826–1917) was an Austrian composer of ballet music, a violin virtuoso and teacher.
Minkus is most noted for the music he composed while serving as Ballet Composer of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres in Russia, where he wrote for the original works and revivals of the renowned Ballet Masters Arthur Saint-Léon and Marius Petipa. Among the composer's most celebrated compositions for these Ballet Masters were La Source (1866; composed jointly with Léo Delibes), Don Quixote (1869); and La Bayadère (1877). During his career Minkus wrote a substantial amount of supplemental material for insertion into already existing ballets. Among these pieces, Minkus is most noted for the Grand Pas classique, Pas de trois and Mazurka des enfants written for Marius Petipa's 1881 revival of the ballet Paquita.
Today, Minkus's ballet music is some of the most popular and performed in all of ballet, and is a most integral part of the traditional classical ballet repertory.
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Ludwig Minkus was born Aloysius Bernhard Philipp Minkus on 23 March 1826, in the Innere Stadt district of Vienna, the capital of the Austrian Empire. His father, Theodor Johann Minkus, was born in 1795 in Groß-Meseritsch, Moravia (today known as Velké Meziříčí near Brno, Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic) and his mother, Maria Franziska Heimann was born in 1807 in Pest, Hungary. Minkus was of Jewish descent—his parents converted to Catholicism not long before their relocation to Vienna, and were married on the following day.
Minkus's father was a wholesale merchant of wine in Moravia, Austria and Hungary. He opened a restaurant in the Innere Stadt district of Vienna that featured its own small orchestra. This may have influenced the young Minkus—it is possible that he composed for his father's Tanzkapelle, one of many such orchestras in the imperial capital. By the age of four he began to receive private lessons in the violin, and from 1838 to 1842 he began his musical studies at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna.
Minkus made his public début at a recital in Vienna at the age of eight. On 18 October 1845 an announcement in the Viennese newspaper Der Humorist commented on the performances of the previous season, and noted that, " ... (Minkus's playing featured) a conservative style with a glittering performance." Soon the young Minkus was appearing in various concert halls as a soloist of note, having been declared a child prodigy by the public and critics.
Minkus began composing for his instrument while he was still a student. Five pieces for the violin were published in 1846. At this time Minkus began to try his hand at conducting. For a time he was the regular conductor of an orchestra that competed with another under the baton of the young Johann Strauss II (in later years Strauss was acquainted with Minkus's brother Eugen, a bank director in Vienna).
Minkus's life from 1842 to 1852 is poorly documented—travel applications survive which show requests to visit Germany, France and England. In 1852 Minkus accepted the position of principal violinist to the Vienna Court Opera, but because this meant that he also had to fulfill the usual duties this position demanded, he resigned that same year to take up an important musical assignment abroad that would change his life forever.
In 1853 Ludwig Minkus emigrated to St. Petersburg, Russia to serve as conductor of the Serf orchestra of Prince Nikolai Yusupov, a post which Minkus occupied until 1855. That same year, Minkus married Maria Antoinette Schwarz at the Catholic Church of St. Catherine in St. Petersburg. Schwarz was also a native of Austria, born in Vienna in 1838.
From 1856 until 1861 Minkus served as principal violinist in the orchestra of the Moscow Imperial Bolshoi Theatre, and soon he was given the dual position of both conductor and principal violinist to the Imperial Italian Opera of that theatre. In 1861 Minkus was appointed as Concertmaster to the Bolshoi Theatre, and by 1864 he was promoted to the prestigious position of Inspector of the Imperial Theatre Orchestras in Moscow. At this time Minkus was also working as professor of violin at the newly established Moscow Conservatory.
It was for the private performances at the Yusupov palace that Minkus composed what appears to be his first score for ballet: the mythological L′Union de Thétis et Pélée (The Union of Thetis and Peleus), first performed in 1857. During his association with the Imperial Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, Minkus composed another score for ballet, the one-act Deux jours en Venise (Two Days In Venice), produced in 1862. Later that year Minkus was called upon to compose an additional entr'acte for Adolphe Adam's score for Jean Coralli's ballet Orfa, staged for the Bolshoi Theatre of Moscow by Arthur Saint-Léon. At that time Saint-Léon was one of the most celebrated Ballet Masters in Europe, and since 1860 he had served as Premier Maître de Ballet of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres, a position which also required him to stage the works for the Moscow ballet troupe.
In March 1863, Saint-Léon commissioned Minkus to compose his first full-length Grand Ballet, the fantastical three-act La Flamme d′amour, ou La Salamandre (The Flame of Love, or The Salamander), which the Ballet Master produced especially for the renowned Russian Prima ballerina Marfa Muravieva. The new ballet premiered on with success at the Bolshoi Theatre of Moscow. Saint-Léon then mounted the work in a new staging for the benefit performance of Muravieva under the title Fiametta, ou L′amour du Diable (Fiametta, or The Love of the Devil) in St. Petersburg for the Imperial Ballet, premiering at the Imperial Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre. Minkus later accompanied Saint-Léon to mount this work in a new staging for the Théâtre Impérial de l'Opéra in Paris, again for the ballerina Muravieva. Reduced to two-acts, the ballet premiered on 11 July 1864 and featured the ballerina Eugénie Fiocre in the role of Cupid (Fiocre is noted for creating the travestie role of Franz in Coppélia in 1870). For the Paris staging the ballet's title was changed yet again, this time as Néméa, ou L′Amour vengé (Néméa, or The Avenged Love), and was retained in the Parisian ballet's repertory until 1871, lasting fifty-three performances. Saint-Léon also mounted the work for the ballet of the Teatro Communale in Trieste, where it premiered on 15 March 1868 as Nascita della Fiamma d′Amoure (Birth of the Flame of Love). The change of titles of this work has caused much confusion among historians, many of whom have claimed that each of these productions were completely different works altogether.
In the fall of 1866 Saint-Léon was invited to stage a new work for the Théâtre Impérial de l'Opéra. This was La Source, which was written by Minkus in collaboration with the composer Léo Delibes. The division of labor was as follows: Minkus wrote the whole of Act I and the second tableau of Act III, while Delibes wrote the whole of Act II and the first tableau of Act III. Surviving documents and contemporary accounts do not offer an explanation as to why the score was shared between the two composers. La Source premiered on 12 November 1866, lasting seventy-three performance in the company's repertory until 1876.
Saint-Léon continued to work with Minkus throughout the 1860s. On Saint-Léon presented the one-act ballet Le Poisson doré (The Golden Fish), which was staged at Peterhof in honor of the wedding of the Tsarevich Alexander Alexandrovich to the Princess Dagmar of Denmark. For his subject, Saint-Léon chose a Russian theme based on Alexander Pushkin's 1835 poem Skazka o rybake i rybke (The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish). For the Imperial Ballet's 1867-1868 season, Saint-Léon expanded Le Poisson doré into a three-act Grand ballet that premiered on . The following season Minkus and Saint-Léon produced the ballet Le Lys (The Lily), based on a Chinese legend Three Arrows, and it featured a score by Minkus that was based on his music from La Source. The ballet premiered at the Imperial Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre on for the benefit performance of the ballerina Adèle Grantzow. In spite of his efforts, both Le Lys and the expanded Le Poisson doré proved to be catastrophic failures for Saint-Léon. In light of this the directorate of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres did not renew the Ballet Master's contract, and soon he re-located to Paris where he died in 1870.
Through his association with Saint-Léon and the St. Petersburg Imperial Ballet, Minkus came to the attention of the renowned choreographer Marius Petipa. Petipa arrived in the imperial capital in 1847, where he was engaged as Premier danseur to the Imperial Theatres, as well as assistant to the Ballet Master Jules Perrot, who served as Premier Maître de Ballet to the company from 1850-1859. Petipa was named Deuxieme Maître de Ballet after the success of his Grand ballet The Pharaoh's Daughter, set to the score of the Italian composer Cesare Pugni. Pugni had served as Ballet Composer of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres since 1850, a post which was created especially for him when he accompanied Perrot to Russia that same year. By the mid 1860s the composer was nearing the end of his life and prolific career. As the decade drew to a close he became increasingly unreliable due to his severe alcoholism, often putting off composing to the last minute and supplying music of an increasingly poor and banal quality. Saint-Léon and Petipa were becoming more and more frustrated with him, and began to turn more and more to Minkus.
For the Moscow Imperial Bolshoi Theatre's 1869-1870 season, Petipa staged a Grand ballet on the subject of Cervantes's Don Quixote. Although plans were made to have a score supplied by Pugni, Petipa instead turned to Minkus, who supplied a score filled with a great variety of Spanish-styled flare. Petipa's Don Quixote premiered to a resounding success on , and went on to become a celebrated work in the classical ballet repertory.
Not long before Saint-Léon's death, Petipa was named Premier Maître de Ballet of the St. Peterbsurg Imperial Theatres, and in January 1870 Petipa's chief collaborator, the composer Cesare Pugni, died. Petipa then staged a new version of his Don Quixote for the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg, and for this production Minkus completely reworked and expanded his score. This staging of Don Quixote premiered on , and instantly became a classic, earning Minkus great acclaim for his effective music. The success of the music earned for Minkus the post of Ballet Composer of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres, and marked the beginning of a productive collaboration between him and Petipa. Following the ballet's success, Minkus and Petipa produced La Camargo in 1872, an expanded four-act production of Jacques Offenbach's Le Papillon in 1874, Les Brigands (The Bandits) in 1875, Les Aventures de Pélée (The Adventures of Peleus) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (based on Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music) in 1876, and finally La Bayadère in 1877, which would prove to be Petipa and Minkus's most enduring and well preserved work.
During this time, Minkus continued playing violin in professional capacities. For example, he was the second violin in the ensemble that premiered Tchaikovsky's String Quartet No. 1 in D, Op. 11, in Moscow on 28 March 1871. Minkus's scores featured violin cadenzas written especially for the great Leopold Auer.
In May 1883 Minkus wrote the music for Petipa's Nuit et Jour, a sumptuous pièce d'occasion staged especially for the celebrations held at the Imperial Bolshoi Theatre of Moscow in honor of the coronation of Emperor Alexander III. The Emperor, a fanatic balletomane, bestowed upon Minkus the Order of Saint Stanislaus for his score. During the ceremony the newly crowned Emperor told Minkus " ... you have reached perfection as a ballet composer."
Petipa's Les Pilules magiques, which premiered was a grand work staged for the inauguration of the newly renovated Imperial Mariinsky Theatre, which was now the Imperial Ballet and Opera's principal venue. Les Pilules magiques was in the tradition of vaudeville, and aside from Petipa's danced episodes included comedy and singing. Minkus naturally supplied the music for Petipa's danced passages in three fantastical tableaux that caused a sensation among the St. Petersburg balletomanes and critics. The first took place in a subterranean cave inhabited by sorceresses, while the second included various card games brought to life through dance. The third and final tableau was known as The Kingdom of the Laces in which a Grand divertissement of national dances from Belgium, England, Spain and Russia was performed.
Minkus's next score was for Petipa's one-act ballet L'Offrandes à l'Amour, staged especially for the benefit performance of the ballerina Eugenia Sokolova on . Minkus's score was hailed as a masterwork of ballet music. Nevertheless Ivan Vsevolozhsky, director of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres, abolished Minkus's post in an effort to diversify the music supplied for the ballet. Minkus officially retired soon after, and on was given a farewell benefit performance.
It is unknown if Minkus ever worked again for the Imperial Theatres of St. Petersburg due to differing accounts of his involvement in two important productions between his retirement in 1886 and his final departure from Russia in 1891. The first was a revival by Marius Petipa of Saint-Léon's Fiametta which the Ballet Master staged especially for the visiting Italian ballerina Elena Cornalba, premiering . It is highly unlikely that Minkus participated in this revival due to the fact that Riccardo Drigo, the newly appointed Director of Music of the Imperial Ballet, supplied nearly all of the supplemental music for Cornalba's appearances in already-existing ballets. Petipa's Kalkabrino—a work that has been historically credited to Minkus—premiered on for the benefit performance of another visiting Italian, Carlotta Brianza, who in the previous year created the role of the Princess Aurora in the Petipa/Tchaikovsky The Sleeping Beauty. Although the score for Kalkabrino was credited exclusively to Minkus it is not certain if the composer took part in its creation, which Russian historians have claimed was a pastiche of airs taken from the many works he composed for the Imperial Ballet during his long career in St. Petersburg.
Minkus and his wife Maria left Russia forever in the summer of 1891, relocating to their native Vienna. The composer lived in semi-retirement on a modest pension from the Tsar's treasury. For a time he lived in the Karl Ludwig Strasse on the third floor of a rented apartment belonging to his friend, the revered pianist and teacher Theodor Leschetizky. These years saw Minkus's last known compositions: Die Maskenfest (The Masked Festival) was originally written by the composer as Tanz und Mythe (Dance and Myth) in 1897 for the ballet of the Kaiserliches und Königliches Hof-Operntheater (a.k.a. the Vienna Court Opera). The ballet was rejected outright by the Operntheater's directorate Gustav Mahler, who felt that the work's libretto was out of touch with contemporary tastes. Minkus then composed Die Dryaden (The Dryads) for the Viennese stage in 1899, a ballet in one act. The final work associated with Minkus's name before his death was Rübezhal, staged in 1907 at the Court Opera to a pastiche of airs taken from his and Delibes's La Source and the works of Johan Strauss II.
Minkus later relocated to an apartment in the Gentzgasse where he spent his final years alone and in utter poverty, his wife having died in 1895, and the events of World War I having cut off his pension from Russia. During the extremely cold winter of 1917, Minkus developed pneumonia and died on 7 December 1917 at the age of ninety-one. With no children of his own, Minkus was survived only by a niece, Clara von Minkus.
Ludwig Minkus was interred at the Döblinger Cemetery in Vienna. In 1939 Minkus's grave fell victim to the national socialist policies of the time when all cemeteries were systematically "cleansed". Any graves of persons who were considered ethnically "undesirable" (especially if one was of Jewish descent), or without any documented subscriber to the annual cemetery fees were exhumed and deposited into a mass anonymous grave.
The fact that Minkus the composer fell into obscurity has much to do with the way ballet music was created and handled during his time as Ballet Composer in tsarist Russia. There, as in other parts of Europe, the ballet master had full rein over the scores provided him by the composer. Ballets of the 19th century were a marriage of dance and mime. The music provided for ballets had to be above all "dansante", with light, rich, lively melody, and an uncomplicated, regularly phrased rhythmic and orchestral structure, capable of accenting the movements of classical ballet. The music provided for the mime scenes and scenes of action had to set the mood of the drama. Minkus was contracted to compose ballet music on demand. He was obliged to score a new ballet every season, along with the constant revision of the music of already existing works for Petipa's numerous revivals.
Like many of the specialist ballet composers before him, Minkus outlined the majority of his scores during rehearsals whilst the Ballet Master choreographed his dance fantasies, as well as putting to use the detailed instructions that the Ballet Master would provide, often known as composing music "to order" (even Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker were scored "to order", with detailed instructions from Petipa).
It was well-known that Minkus maintained a cache of already-composed music in his home, divided into categories such as waltzes, polkas, adages, etc. which he would then select for a new work and orchestrate accordingly. Often Minkus would write four to five melodic passages for a particular variation or pas to be chosen by the choreographer, as well as tailoring the music to fit any changes. Many of Minkus's original scores contain numerous optional repeats of various phrases, anticipating cuts in production. There were instances where Minkus would compose music for a large ensemble dance in sections—an introduction, four or five melodic passages, and an ending—to be assembled by the ballet master depending on how much music was needed. Even more interesting, there were times where the music had to be composed for a pas that had already been choreographed! Minkus was often required to interpolate the music from other composers' ballets into his own works, almost always at the behest of a ballerina wanting to dance her favorite pas or variation from another work. These interpolations often required Minkus to tailor the music of any surrounding numbers for smooth transitions.
Most of the numbers in Minkus's ballets are in either double or triple time (2/4, 4/4, 3/4, 3/8, 6/8, 12/8, etc. are the majority of the time signatures Minkus used, though occasionally he composed dances in 5/4, and even alternating from 4/4 and 3/4, as in the Danse des esclaves from his 1877 score of La Bayadère). 3/4 was the time signature that purveyed over the majority of his scores: Hindu temple maidens, under-water nymphs, Gypsies, Spanish bull-fighters, farm girls, magical fairies, gods and goddesses, princes and princesses, king and queens, whether they were alive or were ghosts, all danced to waltz rhythm.
One of Minkus's most revered strengths was his ability to create a vast variety of melodies (the principal element on which ballet music was judged in the 19th century). The ballet historian Konstantin Skalkovsky tells in his study In the Theatre World of how "Minkus's march from (his 1878 ballet), 'Roxana' was the favorite piece of Tsar Alexander II, who in general did not love music. Several units of the our troops stormed the Plevna to the music of this march." Minkus's other celebrated talent was in composing for solo violin and solo harp, of which most of his compositions have a great deal (Minkus's violin and harp solos were written with the talents of the famous violinist Leopold Auer and harpist Albert Zabel in mind, who both served as lead violinist and harpist in the orchestra of the Imperial Theatres throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries).
Minkus's orchestra was large. One of his scores from Imperial Russia calls for strings, flutes, piccolo, clarinets, cornet, oboes, bassoons, contrabassoon, trombones, bass trombone, English horns, French horns, trumpets, tuba, often 2 concert harps, drums (snare drum and bass drum), timpani, triangle, tambourine, and glockenspiel. Occasionally Minkus found uses for the gong, piano, and castanets. Even with such a large ensemble, passages for full orchestra are rare, with Minkus almost always using the same combination of instruments unless a special mood was required, while only exploiting the brass to thicken the music when needed. The majority of the main melody in all of his compositions is almost always given to the first violin and flute sections, often doubled up with second violins and violas, giving two-part writing (often 2 violinists sharing the same manuscript would take turns playing so that the other could turn the pages!). Minkus was also quite fond of the bass drum, as well as pizzicato for double bass, used mostly for marking time (his original orchestration for the scene The Kingdom of the Shades from his 1877 score for La Bayadère is filled with pizzicato for double bass and bass drum). Such writing is not at all a testament to any lack of imagination on the part of Minkus—he simply wrote this way because it was faster, as he often had very little time to orchestrate after what was needed musically was decided by the ballet master, not to mention that a more complex musical structure would have been rejected by both the ballet master and dancers alike.
In Russia Minkus remains much respected for his abilities with ballet music, though in the west this is mostly a recent occurrence, as many musicians have been known to have little respect for the genre of 19th century ballet music. Many western ballet companies have chosen to perform Minkus's music in various reorchestrations done by a number of musicians, most notably by the composer/conductor John Lanchbery. In recent times more and more ballet companies have been making considerable efforts to go as close to the original sources as possible when staging ballets, and in that process the music of the old specialist ballet composers is beginning to gain respect.
In 2001, the Kirov/Mariinsky Ballet (the former Imperial Ballet) mounted a reconstruction of the Petipa/Minkus La Bayadère, which was staged using the Stepanov Choreographic Notation of Petipa's last revival of the work in 1900, part of the Sergeyev Collection housed in the Harvard University Library. For this reconstruction the Mariinsky Ballet unearthed Minkus's original hand-written score, thought for many years to have been lost. This antiquated score was hailed as a masterpiece of its genre as well as a phenomenal example of a long-vanished era in the history of ballet music.
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