In April and May of 1911, Dukas corresponded with Laura Albéniz about his latest project. Now that Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company was established in Paris, an opportunity beckoned to compose a modern choreographic work. Hot on the heels of Ariane’s European and transatlantic success, the production of La Péri in 1912 marked the second phase of a theatrical career. But as the above letter reveals, La Péri was envisaged less as a ballet than a as symphonic poem that included dance. Ultimately it was subtitled poème dansé (‘danced poem’), a neologism which positioned it theatrically without relinquishing its ‘symphonic poem’ backdrop. It is, therefore, a dual-purpose score that expanded Dukas’s portfolio in programme music and the theatre. The convergence of these worlds in the ballet may be understood as the materialisation of ideas he had theorised over a decade earlier (considered in Chapter 3). To recapitulate, he had argued that similar principles – fundamentally, ‘that the poetic idea is conceived musically’ – should apply to programmatic and dramatic music. Dance was not on his radar then as ‘dramatic music’, in the symphonic sense of that phrase. In a rare commentary on dance from that period, he simply shrugged his shoulders at the ‘mysterious exigencies’ choreography imposed on music. But by 1910 Diaghilev’s radical vision of dance had cleared the path for new, meaningful inter-artistic relationships. In Chapter 3 I classified L’Apprenti sorcier a ‘quasi-theatrical’ symphonic poem; here, there is no ambiguity. Via this ‘danced poem’, Dukas made the programmatic leap, so to speak, to the realm of the truly theatrical.

His letters portray La Péri as a partly danced work that remained under his conceptual control but the reality was more complex. Like any ballet, it and the subsequent unfinished Le Sang de Méduse, poème chorégraphique en un acte (1912–14) depended upon a team of artistic collaborators: the première danseuse Natalia (Natasha) Trouhanowa (1885–1956), her dance-partner Robert Quinault, the director Jacques Rouché and the painter René Piot. Not long after La Péri’s 1912 premiere, the professional and romantic relationship between Dukas and Trouhanowa deteriorated, leaving Méduse in limbo.