Beschreibung:

THE BALLET COSTUMES Rudolf Nureyev was the most celebrated male dancer of his generation and perhaps the most active in the history of ballet. From the moment of his famous 'leap' to the West at Le Bourget airport on June 16, 1971 to the mid to late 1970s he had already danced over 100 different toles, performed with over 30 different companies throughout the world and choreographed major productions of La Bayadère, Raymonda, Swan Lake, Tancredi, Don Quixote, The Sleeping Beauty, Romeo and Juliet and The Nutcracker . In a six month period alone, from September 1975 to February 1976 he gave no less than 113 performances in 18 different cities. Against a background of such prolific and diverse performance the collection of costumes seems almost modest in its scope. To some extent it can be seen as a working wardrobe of convenience from which the peripatetic dancer was able to extract adn pack what was required as he travelled from one city to another, from one ballet compnay to another, and from one role to another. However, many costumes relate to olsolete and superseded productions and others, in purely physical terms, are so evidently past their performing life due to the noticeable wear and tear of repeated use, that they can only have been kept as mementos of performances and productions to which the greatest importance and indeed sentiment was attached. The full ballet costumes offered in the immediate following lots relate to many of Nureyev's key roles, performances and productions. They ahve been grouped by ballet in alphabetica order. Each group is headed with a description of the relevant ballet with details of the accepted 'original' production listed under the categores of Composer, Choreographer, Designer, Company and Première. It would be impossible to detail in similar fashion all subsequent productions and the attempt has only been made to describe those later 'new' productions which are significant in the history of the ballet, which seem clearly to relate to the costumes subsequently described and for which relate to Nureyev's debut in either the role or that specific production. The categories of Composer, Choreographer, etc. are not repeated in the descriptions of these 'new' productions where the information from earlier to later productions remains constant or when it has proved difficult if not impossible to obtain the requisite information from the available literature. The subsequent description of each individual costume is headed with details of Ballet, Act, Role and Production. When a specifically dated production is given then reference should be made to the initial description of the balet and its productions in order to obtain fulller detials. If no production date is given then this is because it has not been possible to pinpoint the costume to a specific production. It should be noted that the frequency with which Nureyev performed some roles in certain productions meant that costumes were regularly replaced as they becametoo worn and fragile for further use. The costumes offered in this sale may or may not be those used in the debut or première perormances just as they may or may not be the specific costumes illustrated in the cited literature. The identification of specific productions to which the costumes relate has proved extremely difficult not least because of the highly active nature of Nureyev's career. Information has been gleaned from the early literature on the dancer, from contemporary periodicals and other sources. While much of the literature is excellent in ints commentary and the quality of its illustrations it cannot be relied on for the accuracy and completeness of its captions. Research was complicated by the knowledge that Nureyev sometimes used the same costume for different productions of the same role, and by the fact that he often had the costumes of one ballet company either adapted or copied by the costume department of another. Against a background of such profou