ABSTRACT
Ballet was the perfect medium for Lord Berners: it suited his musical style which favoured the colourful and characteristic cameo. Berners’ lifelong interest in ballet brought him in contact with some of the major names in contemporary choreography, literature and art: Serge Diaghilev, Frederick Ashton, Georges Balanchine, Gertrude Stein, Sacheverell Sitwell and Christopher Wood amongst others. The Ballets Russes’ need to produce a new English ballet proved fortuitous for Berners. Berners’ music was written with an eye to the audience likely to attend, and as such was more accessible than anything he had yet written. The truth behind the affair will remain a mystery, but the animosity, combined with tepid audience receptions, made this a sad ending to Berners’ career in writing for the musical stage. Michael Hurd accurately describes Berners’ musical style as mixing ‘irony, satire and a degree of submerged romanticism’.
