Kickery has been all-Regency-all-the-time lately due to my current research projects, but I'm going to take a little break from that era and move forward to the 1840s.
While digging around in sheet music archives for something else entirely, I came across a new piece of music for the version of the five-step waltz taught by Pietro Saracco in New York in the mid-19th century. New five-step music is hard to find, but that alone wouldn't make this worthy of note. What's exciting about it is the cover page, shown at left (click to enlarge).
"The Angelina" was composed by Arnold Müller and was published in New York with a copyright date of 1846, which makes it earlier than most other sheet music for the dance. The earliest previous evidence I had for this five-step waltz was sheet music by Christian Nolff dated 1848 and 1849, though I did have one earlier (1844) piece of music. So it's nice to have a new piece by a different composer, and to bring the origin of the dance back a couple of years, almost as far back as the polka. It hadn't yet even acquired its more compact title of "five-step waltz", which suggests to me that the dance was very, very new at this point.
Even more interesting is that the dance is credited as a "New Waltz in Five Steps invented by Monsieur Saracco, choreographist, and Mademoiselle Angelina, first teacher of the Parisian dancing academy of M(onsieu)r Cellarius". Mademoiselle Angelina is the namesake of the music.
This is sensational to me on two levels.
As a dance historian, I had hypothesized (on no particular evidence) that the five-step waltz taught by Saracco was developed after (and perhaps inspired by) the Cellarius valse à cinq temps, which Cellarius claimed was composed in London by his friend Perrot and intended for the theatre rather than the ballroom. The Saracco version is definitely social rather than theatrical. The earliest publication of the Perrot valse à cinq temps is in Cellarius' La Danse des Salons (Paris, 1847; link is to the 1849 edition). But the 1846 date on this music calls its seniority into question. It is now impossible to definitively state that either version is the earlier one. And the credit to a teacher at the Cellarius academy means the two versions may well have co-existed on the same dance floor at the same time.
Even more excitingly: as a female dance teacher, I am thrilled to find a named female dance teacher in the nineteenth century who was not merely an adjunct of her husband, and doubly thrilled to find her credited not merely as a teacher but as a co-inventor of a couple dance.
I can't think of any other example of a woman receiving any credit for an entire couple dance. Even the noted Mrs. Nicholas Henderson (active in the 1840s-1860s) claims only to have "introduced" certain couple dances to London (from Paris) and to have choreographed a quadrille and possibly a country dance. In the early twentieth century, Joan Sawyer created variations but not an entire dance, while Irene Castle worked as a team with her husband Vernon, but again more by polishing dances for ballrom use and creating variations than in actually inventing new dance forms.
Mademoiselle Angelina may be unique in dance history.
The full sheet music for "The Angelina" may be found at Baylor University's Francis G. Spencer Collection of American Sheet Music, where is hidden, uncatalogued, under the piece it was published with, "The American Republic". "The Angelina" starts on page five. For instructions for the dance, see my original discussion of the Five-Step Waltz and the follow-up post with later variations. I'll have to stop calling it the Saracco five-step waltz and starting calling it the Saracco-Angelina five-step waltz!
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