Music and Dance Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collection

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1

Open Access
The Birthday of the Infanta: An Early Twentieth-Century Chicago Ballet Contextualized
(University of Oregon, 2012) Lanctot, Heather; Lanctot, Heather; Smith, Marian
The Birthday of the Infanta, a ballet that was created by John Alden Carpenter, Adolph Bolm, and Robert Edmond Jones, was performed at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago on December 23, 1919 and the Lexington Theatre in New York on February 23, 1920. Despite the positive reviews from daily papers and music journals alike the ballet was only revived once and is not a part of a known ballet repertoire. Although musicologist Howard Pollack discusses The Birthday of the Infanta briefly in his biography of John Alden Carpenter my analysis serves, through its exploration of both primary and secondary sources, to create a more complete and thorough dialogue through the examination of the social, economic, political and artistic factors surrounding the ballet. This analysis also helps to create a better understanding of ballet’s place in America in the early twentieth century.