"Ballet is a lovely grove - its branches forever tossing on the winds of music."
I heard this on a television program years ago, and I'm sorry, but I can't remember the name of the show or the source of the quote - but I'll share it with you anyway. (If you can help with the missing information, please put it in a comment.) Some listeners feel that many composers write their greatest music for ballet (and/or other dance forms). It would be hard to argue that Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Stravinsky did otherwise, for example. Debussy's Prelude a l'apres-midi d'une faune, however, was written as a tone poem (a very free compositional form) and then later choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky for Les Ballets Russes. The piece came almost twenty years before the ballet, and it is my contention that it did a lot to shape the direction of modern dance and Les Ballets Russes.
Because it was written in a new harmonic language (see yesterday's post), and inspired by a Stephane Mallarme poem, it is a piece that suggests both freedom and cross-pollination between art forms. (It is like sonic Art Nouveau.) This became the essence of Les Ballets Russes, where the greatest choreographers, dancers, painters and composers of the early twentieth century were inspired and informed by each other. (Some have argued that the most influential figure in modernism was not an artist in any traditional sense, but rather an entrepreneur: Sergei Diaghilev, the director of the company.) The list of names involved is unparalleled in terms of achievement and influence, and it's startling to think that all of that work may have been (at least partially) inspired by a piece of music, ten minutes in duration.