The Swedish Dances, Part Nine: The Carnival of Venice

(Ninth in a series of posts discussing and analyzing the Swedish dances. The first post may be found here.)

This new and really entertaining dance, now so much in vogue in Paris, has only just been introduced in London, but has not, as yet, been very favorably received, owing most likely to the simple fact that it is new and not generally known.  It is, however, a pretty, simple, and pleasing medium between the Contra Dance and Quadrille, which we so frequently see at Balls and Assemblies, and only requires to be well known to be better appreciated.  The greatly increasing favor with which it is received in Paris is a sufficient guarantee that it will become ultimately an equally favorite dance in London Society as soon as it is better known.

I'm going to wind up my Swedish dance series with an odd little trio dance found in The Art of Dancing by Professor Bland (London, c1870).  It's not specifically listed as a Swedish dance, but the similarities are significant.  Interestingly, judging from the above, in the three-plus decades between Bland's book and the latest previous English sources, it seems that the Swedish dance genre may have fallen out of popularity and memory in England, even while enjoying a peculiar afterlife in America.  Bland certainly doesn't recognize it.

While it's possible that this dance, or part of it, was imported from Paris, I think it far more likely that this is merely a commercially expedient piece of puffery.

But first, the name.

"The Carnival of Venice" was a popular piece of nineteenth-century music that dates back at least to the 1810s.  It is said to have been introduced into England by Paganini.  There are numerous surviving pieces of sheet music for it, including some for the piano, harp, and guitar, and it has inspired a webpage dedicated to linking to different versions (see important note at end regarding this webpage).  And, of course, it is one of the tunes originally used by G.M.S. Chivers with his early Swedish dances, where it turns up as a three-part jig.  The same three-part tune is found in Elias Howe's Musician's Omnibus (Boston, 1864) with markings suggesting a rondo pattern (ABACA).  In the Traditional Tune Archive, it is found in a two-part version, matching the first two parts of the earlier tune.

Recognizing the tune name from Chivers and seeing that it was a dance for three immediately suggested to me a connection to the Swedish dances.  So let's look at the dance instructions.

This dance differs from (I may say all) our other dances, inasmuch as each gentleman has two ladies, one on each side, the three at the top face the second three from top to bottom of the room : the two gentlemen set and turn the lady on the right hand opposite, then set and turn the opposite lady on the left ; all set and turn opposite partners ; hands six round ; all advance and retire and chassez forward, meeting the next three.  The second part of the figure then commences, the music still continuing without stopping ; this part of the figure is danced the same as the figure “L’Eté;” in plain terms, each lady and opposite gentleman advance, retire, chassez right and left, recross and turn, advance and retire again, and pass forward meeting another “trio,” when the figure is repeated from the first.

This dance can either be danced in lines as in a Contra Dance or what is much better in a circle, as then all can commence at once until they meet again the three they commenced with, when the dance is considered finished ; but of course it can be continued at pleasure.

There are some real problems with this.  To take it simply as written would give us an odd pair of figures as follows:

Figure 1
8b    Gents set & turn right diagonal lady
8b    Gents set & turn left diagonal lady
8b    All set & turn “opposite partners”
8b    Hands six round
8b    All advance & retire, chassez forward/pass through

Figure 2
8b    “Each lady and opposite gentleman” advance & retire, chassez right and left
8b    Recross, turn
8b    Advance & retire, pass through

Leaving aside who actually performs the second figure, which I'll get to in a minute, this presents the very odd pattern of a 40-bar first figure and a 24-bar second figure.  The first figure also has the oddity of "opposite partners", a term which seems to have wandered in from some other dance entirely and presumably simply means one's opposite in the other trio. 

The second figure directs its instructions to "each lady and opposite gentleman", which could mean either three or six dancers performing the figure at once, and then, more problematically, leaves out eight measures of the L'Eté figure (the second figure of the first set of quadrilles) that it supposedly matches, which results in a "recross" when no one has done any crossing over.

All of this presents some reconstruction issues.

The second figure can be made to match L'Eté by adding in the missing eight bars of that quadrille figure, which also fixes the "recross" problem.  This makes the second figure 32 bars:

Figure 2
8b    “Each lady and opposite gentleman” advance & retire, chassez right and left
8b    Cross over, chassez right and left
8b    Recross, turn
8b    Advance & retire, pass through

But who dances it?  Taken literally, "each lady" suggests all four ladies and both the gentleman, though in that case it seems it would have been easier to simply say "all".  One could also read it as directed at the two ladies of the top trio within each minor set and the gentleman of the bottom trio, but that makes the activity unusually skewed for a trio dance (though very much in the pattern of the "Sixdrilles", a Scottish adaptation of the first set of quadrilles for a square of trios).  If the "turn" is read as being the active three turning (circling hands three round), then three of the dancers do nothing except advance/retire/pass through.  This might be plausible in a longways set, where at least the trios would switch roles when reaching the top, but Bland touts the superiority of a circle formation with all starting at once, which would mean three dancers are permanently stuck with little to do. 

Having only three dance also presents the interesting spectacle of, after the crossing over, the dancers being stacked up rather oddly:

            G
            G
    L            L
    L            L

Let's remember that this book comes in at the end of the hoop skirt and beginning of the bustle  era, too, depending on exactly when it was published.  Those ladies would have taken up signficant space.  This works in a Sixdrilles square, but is going to be crowded in a long line or circle of trios.

One might almost suspect that Bland either misunderstood the figure as seen or reported to him, or simply made it up himself without thinking it through (turn L'Eté into a trio progressive dance; what a great idea!)

Keeping all of this in mind, my preferred solution for Figure 2 is (1) to have all six dancers dance at once, (2) keep the full L'Eté figure with the initial cross over and chassez right and left for a full 32 bars, and (3) have the final turn be a hands three round by each trio.

Figure 1, by comparison, is fairly simple.  The only real problem is the 40-bar length.  I find it unlikely that the music would alternate 40b and 32b repeat patterns.  40b and 24b would have made some sense, since it would have been equivalent to 32/32, but that would mean leaving Figure 2 incomplete relative to L'Eté and coming up with some very creative way to interpret "recross".

The other option is to subtract eight bars from Figure 1.  The most likely candidate is the third set and turn, with "opposite partners", which seems repetitive after the first sixteen bars, leaves same-sex opposites turning each other (unusual, though not unheard of), and can be awkwardly crowded to perform in a tight space (remember: bustles!)  That would leave Figure 1 looking rather like the Rustic Reel (a probable Swedish dance descendant), the 24-bar reconstruction of Hill's 1844 Swedish Dance, or the first figure of the American Swedish Dance. 

The only other candidate for elimination would be the hands six round, since the first two figures mirror each other and the progressive figure cannot be spared.  I am not convinced by the prospect of the entire figure consisting of 24 bars of repeated set-and-turn followed by progression.  Once again, I suspect Bland either misunderstood the dance, wrote it down incorrectly, or (if he actually composed it himself) wasn't paying much attention to the details.

Here's my final reconstruction of The Carnival of Venice:

Figure 1
8b    Gents set & turn right diagonal lady
8b    Gents set & turn left diagonal lady
8b    All hands six round
8b    All advance & retire, chassez forward/pass through

Figure 2
8b    All advance & retire, chassez right and left
8b    All cross over, chassez right and left
8b    All cross back to places, circle hands three round
8b    All advance & retire, pass through

Crossing over and passing through would be by right shoulders.  Setting in Figure 1 would more likely be right-and-left twice rather than forward and back, this being England.  For the hands three round in Figure 2, if the gentleman move a little further when recrossing the set, so that they end up slightly behind their ladies (all facing in), it will be easier to form a circle.

The music would simply be a 32-bar repeat of "The Carnival of Venice".  While any repeat pattern of that length will work, I think I would prefer an eight-bar "A" intro, giving time for bows between each gentleman and each of his partners, followed by dancing to BACA or ABBA (depending on whether using the three-part or two-part version of the music) repeated indefinitely.  Ending on the A strain would be typical of quadrille music.

So is this a Swedish dance?  Not exactly, but Figure 1 is so much like the earlier ones that I find it unlikely there is no connection.  If I had to guess, I would suspect it descended from the Swedish dances in Scotland and was there influenced by the Sixdrilles, with the Parisian origin being a market-friendly myth tacked on by Professor Bland.  Any more definite conclusion must await further sources.

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Edited 10/13/14 to add:
The webpage linking to different versions of the sheet music for "Carnival of Venice" has vanished from the web.  It is still accessible via the Wayback Machine, but some internal links then have to be manually edited to work.  Each link will look something like this: 

"https://web.archive.org/web/20080706131659/http://www.henseltlibrary.org/Melnotte_Carnival_de_Venice.pdf"

If clicking brings up a notice that that page was not archived, remove everything before the second "http" (highlighted in red above) and try again:

"http://www.henseltlibrary.org/Melnotte_Carnival_de_Venice.pdf"

Some of the linked pages may also have vanished, alas.

Comments

[Susan de Guardiola]

Quick update: I finally had the chance to call a trimmed-down version of this, Figure 2 alone, at the Eleventh Annual Remembrance Day Ball in Gettysburg on November 23rd. It worked beautifully with all six dancers moving at once, and was well-received by the dancers. Maybe next year I'll try both figures!