Ballet at Vienna’s Kärntnerthortheater After the Napoleonic War
(Mary and Robert Riggs)

The Congress of Vienna (1814-15) ushered in the Biedermeier era of peace and the reaffirmation of aristocratic autocracies with their support of the arts but also Metternich’s repressive censorship of them. Peace promoted a thriving international exchange of talents and styles at the Kärntnerthortheater, the court’s venue for opera and ballet. Austrian composers collaborated with prominent dancers/choreographers from France (Aumer, Henry) and Italy (F. Taglioni, Astolfi, Samengo, et al.).

Ballets were performed on average twelve times per month but always as the second, longer half of a double bill. The first was either a comic one-act French operetta or a one-act Singspiel. Multiple societal influences determined this acute juxtaposition of comedic vocal works with serious, often tragic ballets. The censored scenarios of the ballets were based on historical, biblical, or literary sources, and many incorporated national folk dances from the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire and beyond. PowerPoint excerpts illustrate this rarely studied preromantic pantomimisches ballet repertoire in which Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elßler launched their careers.

 

Mary Barres Riggs, Oxford, MS, USA

Mary Barres Riggs (B.A., art history, Harvard University; M.A., dance history, University of Utah, thesis: “John Neumeier and the Symphonic Ballet: Third Symphony of Gustav Mahler.” She has presented papers at national and international conferences, including: the Society for Dance History Scholars, the Congress on Research in Dance, the Sounding Habsburg Conference in NYC, and the EADH Conference in Edinburgh.

She studied ballet with Leon Danielian, Kathleen Crofton, and at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet. She learned four major roles from Bronislava Nijinska and made her professional debut dancing the “Rag Mazurka” in Nijinska’s Les Biches at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. On a six-week tour of Europe with the American Classical Ballet (with Rudolph Nureyev as guest artist), she performed principal and solo roles in Les Biches, Chopin Concerto, Graduation Ball, Carnaval, and La Sylphide. She also performed with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and for two years with the ballet of the Niedersächsische Staatsoper in Hannover.

Robert Riggs, Oxford, MS, USA

Robert Riggs (Ph.D., musicology, Harvard University) began his career as a violinist, spending five years performing with the Niedersächsisches Staatsorchester in Hannover. Most of his teaching career for musicology and violin was at the University of Mississippi, where he was Chair of the Department of Music, directed the University Artist Series, and performed with the Oxford Piano Trio. He has presented papers at numerous national and international conferences, and his publications include: articles on Mozart, performance practice, and aesthetics (in The Musical Quarterly, Mozart-Jahrbuch, Journal of Musicology, and College Music Society Symposium); two books, Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, and Teacher and The Violin (both with the University of Rochester Press); two chapters in The Creative Worlds of Joseph Joachim (Boydell and Brewer); and one chapter in Joseph Joachim: Identities | Identitäten (Olms Verlag).

Mary and Robert Riggs have made joint presentations at musicology conferences in London, Toronto, Vienna, and at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. In 2024 they published “Bach’s St. Matthew Passion: Ballet by John Neumeier” in BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute.