The Art of Stage Dancing

November 24, 2010

It started as an all-too-common story: a young performer — an actor, dancer, musician, stage director — from the Midwest comes to New York to break into the big time on Broadway. His specialty act on the piano wowed ’em in his hometown, and he’s determined that it’ll wow ’em in New York.

But when he gets there to play his first gig, he finds that there’s no piano at the theater. Worse, he discovers that someone has stolen his act and has already performed it all over town. Now he has no job. He has no money. He trudges from agent to agent in a vain search for a break. He now understands why they call Broadway the “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.”

But the dream of Ned Wayburn (1874-1942) wasn’t broken yet. His ragtime piano playing eventually caught the attention of one of the great Broadway stars of the 1890s, May Irwin, who hired him to accompany her for the princely sum of $25 a week. And from that big break grew Wayburn’s outstanding career as the first important choreographer on Broadway.

Actually, Wayburn didn’t care for the title “choreographer.” He styled himself as a director, and from 1901 into the 1920s he was one of the kings of Broadway, his spectacular vaudeville shows drawing huge crowds. He perfected synchronized chorus-line dancing, using large numbers of attractive young female dancers in imaginative, precisely-timed production numbers. He hit the pinnacle of his career when he directed the Ziegfeld Follies several years in a row, from 1916 to 1923.

But in spite of his success, financial security frequently eluded Wayburn. He went bankrupt for the first of several times in 1908. He bought a theater in 1915 to showcase his own productions, only to have it shut down four months later. He became involved in a messy divorce and was nearly jailed for failing to pay alimony.

Fred and Adele Astaire

Fred and Adele Astaire, pupils of Ned Wayburn

To shore up his finances, Wayburn opened a dance school in Manhattan in 1905. Among his early students were a young Fred Astaire and his sister, Adele. By the 1920s, the school was a Broadway institution, training legions of dancers in Wayburn’s unique styles of tap dancing (which some claim he invented), acrobatic dancing, “modern Americanized ballet,” specialty dancing, and ballroom dancing. The Art of Stage Dancing, written in 1925, is essentially a book-length advertisement for the Ned Wayburn Studios of Stage Dancing — but a fascinating advertisement nonetheless.

Wayburn’s book is chock full of photographs of the Broadway stars of yesteryear whom Wayburn had taught, or with whom he had worked, in his long career: Fred and Adele Astaire, the Dolly Sisters, Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, W.C. Fields, Marion Davies, Gertrude Lawrence, Al Jolson, and a host of other greats who are now, alas, forgotten.

But the book is more than just a self-congratulatory plug for Wayburn and his school. It’s also a complete guide for the would-be dancing star (primarily female, of course), with detailed, richly illustrated chapters on dance styles, steps, and tempos (with music); makeup and costume; stage technique; exercise, diet (with daily menus to slim down or fatten up), and health; and much more. Wayburn even threw in a collection of sample contracts so that his students would know what to expect in the real world.

Wayburn believed fervently in the power of confidence as the key to stage success:

Be patient, you who would star and see your name go up in the bright lights on the Great White Way. Do not get discouraged. You will meet with obstacles on the route to fame undoubtedly, as others have done, and, like the others who have finally arrived, you must overcome them one at a time as they appear, by sheer force of willpower, determination, pluck or whatever you desire to call it. If you are a weakling and lack strength of character do not ever take up a stage career, for you will get many a bump; so be prepared to stand it. For only those who are determined to succeed will ever reach the top, where there is plenty of room always.

Unfortunately, no amount of confidence could stop the march of time for Wayburn. The Depression brought both vaudeville and the Ned Wayburn Studios to a slow and painful end. Wayburn went bankrupt for the last time in 1935; he died in 1942 at the age of 68. But his legacy lives on in every Broadway show with a chorus line.

The Art of Stage Dancing was the 14,000th title posted to Project Gutenberg by Distributed Proofreaders.

This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.

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A Week at Waterloo in 1815

November 17, 2010

One might think, from the title, that A Week at Waterloo in 1815 is an old soldier’s memoir of a glorious battle. But the lengthy subtitle, “Lady De Lancey’s Narrative: Being an Account of How She Nursed Her Husband, Colonel Sir William Howe De Lancey, Quartermaster-General of the Army, Mortally Wounded in the Great Battle,” is the first clue that this is no ordinary military tale. Lady De Lancey’s narrative is, instead, a heart-wrenching account of a young bride who tended to her husband in his last agonizing days.

Lady Magdalene De Lancey

Lady Magdalene De Lancey

Magdalene Hall De Lancey (1793-1822), daughter of the noted Scottish geologist Sir James Hall of Dunglass, married Sir William Howe De Lancey (1778-1815) in April 1815. De Lancey was a descendant of the prominent De Lancey (or Delancey) family of New York City (Delancey Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan was named after them). Sir William’s branch of the family were Loyalists during the American Revolution, and fled to England when the British lost the war in 1783. Sir William joined the British Army as a teenager in 1792, and, shortly after his marriage to Magdalene, began serving under the Duke of Wellington in the last Napoleonic War.

As was the custom in those days, Magdalene accompanied her new husband when he was posted to Brussels for the Belgian campaign, in June 1815. Their first days there were surprisingly peaceful and happy. It soon became clear, however, that the French would attack Brussels, so Magdalene moved to Antwerp while Sir William went off to battle. He wrote her on June 16, assuring her that he was safe.

It was the last letter she would receive from him. On June 18, 1815, in the first hours of the Battle of Waterloo, a cannonball struck Sir William in the back, sending him flying off his horse. Wellington himself saw Sir William fall, and rushed to his side. Believing that the wound was fatal, Sir William begged to be left to die on the field of battle, and asked Wellington to give his wife a last message. He was moved to a cottage, where, believed to be dead, he was left untended for a day and a half.

Meanwhile, the day after the battle, Magdalene was told that her husband had “died like a soldier.” Overcome by grief, she locked herself in her room:

I locked the outer door, and shut the inner one, so that no one could again intrude. They sent Emma [her maid] to entreat I would be bled; but I was not reasonable enough for that, and would not comply. I wandered about the room incessantly, beseeching for mercy, though I felt that now, even Heaven could not be merciful.

But Heaven was, for a time, merciful. The following day, Magdalene received the news that her husband was, in fact, alive, though badly wounded; a fellow officer had found him in the cottage and had gotten a surgeon to treat him. Magdalene made ready to go to her husband immediately. She was in a state of terror as she waited for her carriage:

I would not if I could, describe the state I was in for two hours more; then I lost all self-command. . . . My agitation and anxiety increased. I had the dreadful idea haunting me that I should arrive perhaps half an hour too late. This got the better of me, and I paced backward and forward in the parlour very fast, and my breathing was like screaming.

The horrors of the battle were brought home to her as her carriage approached Waterloo. “The horses screamed at the smell of corruption, which in many places was offensive,” she wrote. But she rejoiced to find her husband alive. His first stoic words to her were, “Come, Magdalene, this is a sad business, is it not?”

For the next six days, Magdalene nursed her husband in what was essentially a hovel with few supplies or conveniences. At first, he seemed to improve somewhat, but he was soon coughing up blood. His breathing became labored, and he developed severe chest pain and a fever. And no wonder: the cannonball had smashed eight of his ribs, and his lungs were punctured. The only medical treatment he received, typical of the day, was to be bled repeatedly — a fine treatment indeed for one who was bleeding internally!

On the night of the fifth day, Sir William, unable to sleep, asked Magdalene to lie down with him in his tiny sickbed against the wall:

He said if I could lie down beside him it would cut off five or six hours. I said it was impossible, for I was afraid to hurt him, there was so little room. His mind seemed quite bent upon it. Therefore I stood upon a chair and stepped over him, for he could not move an inch, and he lay at the outer edge. He was delighted; and it shortened the night indeed, for we both fell asleep.

The next day his lungs filled with water, and Magdalene knew the end was near:

I sat down by my husband and took his hand; he said he wished I would not look so unhappy. I wept; and he spoke to me with so much affection. He repeated every endearing expression. He bade me kiss him. He called me his dear wife. . . . [H]e looked up at me and said, “Magdalene, my love, the spirits.” I stooped down close to him and held the bottle of lavender to him: I also sprinkled some near him. He looked pleased. He gave a little gulp, as if something was in his throat. The doctor said, “Ah, poor De Lancey! He is gone.” I pressed my lips to his, and left the room.

Sir William was buried two days later near Brussels. Magdalene made a final visit to his grave on July 4. Her narrative concludes: “At eleven o’clock that same day, I set out for England. That day, three months before, I was married.”

After her return to England, Magdalene wrote A Week at Waterloo in 1815 at her brother’s request. It was privately circulated among family and friends. Magdalene remarried, but died in 1822, at the age of 29, giving birth to her third child. A Week at Waterloo in 1815 was published for the first time in 1906, and became a part of the Project Gutenberg library in 2010.

Magdalene De Lancey’s simple, unaffected style has an impact that no florid emotional verbiage could match. An introduction and notes in the published edition give historical context to the narrative, but her story transcends mere historical fact. It is a story of love and loss, ineffably human, and unforgettable.

This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.

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Bibliomania; or Book-Madness

October 23, 2010

What wild desires, what restless torments seize
The hapless man. who feels the book-disease….
—John Ferriar, The Bibliomania

bibliomania, n. A rage for collecting and possessing books.
—Oxford English Dictionary

I’ve always been crazy about books — what DPer isn’t? — but I am decidedly not a bibliomaniac. A bibliomaniac isn’t a voracious reader; a bibliomaniac is a voracious collector, an obsessive-compulsive accumulator of books as objects, often without regard to content. The term “bibliomania” was popularized in 1809 by Dr. John Ferriar, a Manchester physician whose satiric poem, The Bibliomania, poked fun at book-hoarders who lived only to haunt book-auctions and spend their entire fortunes expanding their libraries beyond all reason. The poem was dedicated to English collector Richard Heber, who filled eight houses with his collection of over 150,000 books.

The Book Fool

The Book Fool

Inspired by Dr. Ferriar’s witty verse, Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847), bibliographer of the second Earl Spencer’s magnificent library, made his own playful study of the subject, also dedicated to Heber. Bibliomania; or Book-Madness was first published in 1809 and considerably expanded in 1811. Many editions followed, even after Dibdin’s death. The Project Gutenberg edition was created from a modern reprint of an 1876 edition that was itself a republication of Dibdin’s 1842 revised edition.

The popularity of Bibliomania did not lie in its text, which takes the form of a dialogue among several personable characters, dominated by Lysander (the voice of Dibdin), who expounds on the history of book-collecting mania through the ages. The true value of Bibliomania is, instead, in its extensive footnotes — far longer than the main text — which are filled with fascinating anecdotes about real-life bibliomaniacs, along with comprehensive catalogues of their collections and the prices the books fetched at auction after their owners’ deaths. There are chatty accounts, too, of the lives of noteworthy (and often eccentric) librarians and bibliographers.

Here, for example, we find John Leland, Henry VIII’s “antiquary and library-keeper,” who collected such a large number of manuscripts from the dissolution of the monasteries that he became deranged trying to catalogue them. We find also Antonio Magliabechi, the illiterate Florentine street urchin who rose to become the librarian for the Medici. Here are Thomas Bodley’s letters to the chancellors of Oxford University, proposing to build and stock a new library for his alma mater. And here is a Shakespeare First Folio of 1623, in the collection of one Martin Folkes, Esq., sold in 1756 for just 3l. 3s. — a paltry sum even then for such a priceless volume. In a discussion of Archbishop Cranmer’s English Bible, one can even find an itemized account of how much it cost to burn Cranmer at the stake (a little over 11 shillings).

Bibliomania is a rich and entertaining pageant of books and book-collectors, famous and obscure. DPers will be especially interested to find, in the catalogues, many books that they have worked on. Just be careful: It may not take much to turn a bibliophile into a bibliomaniac.

This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.

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Principles of Orchestration, by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov

October 6, 2010

In 1905, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) was a prominent Russian composer and a professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. When the 1905 Russian Revolution brought student demonstrations to the Conservatory, Rimsky-Korsakov was assigned to a committee charged with quelling the unrest. Instead, he sided with the students, declaring that they had the right to demonstrate. As a result, he was fired, and performances of his works were banned. But such was his reputation as a composer that the ban received national press attention, and a national outcry ensued. The ban was soon lifted, and Rimsky-Korsakov got his professorship back. He retired the following year, and died in 1908, before he could complete his masterpiece of musicology, Principles of Orchestration.

Rimsky-Korsakov is probably best known today for his magical Scheherazade suite, but his output included 15 operas and numerous other orchestral works. Incredibly, Rimsky-Korsakov had relatively little formal training in music. While preparing for a career in the Imperial Russian Navy, he took piano lessons, which he disliked, but his teacher recognized Rimsky-Korsakov’s musical talent and urged him to learn composition. Rimsky-Korsakov was entranced. By the time he was 27, he was a professor of composition and orchestration at the Conservatory — a part-time job, as he was still on active duty with the navy.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s years of teaching and practicing orchestral composition — as well as his membership in “The Five” (with fellow composers Moussorgsky, Borodin, Balakirev, and Cui) — gave him a keen sense of the power of orchestration. He became a master of color, texture, and mood, even though he knew little about music theory. He continued to teach himself as he went along, and ultimately his experience as a teacher made him, as he put it, the Conservatory’s best pupil. His desire to share what he had learned led him to begin writing Principles of Orchestration in 1873.

At his death 35 years later, it was still incomplete. At times, his attention was focused on composition, health problems, and family tragedies, and he laid the draft aside. Other times, he had crises of confidence, believing that the subject was too massive for him to treat successfully. Luckily, he left copious drafts and notes, and his protégé and son-in-law, Maximilian Steinberg, was able to cobble them together into an invaluable treatise, first published in English in 1922, that remains an essential reference for composers and orchestrators.

The main text in Volume I is relatively brief — just 152 pages in the English translation, with demonstrative music snippets throughout — but Volume II contains over 300 orchestral examples drawn from a wide variety of Rimsky-Korsakov’s works. These beautifully demonstrate his fundamental belief that “good orchestration means proper handling of parts.” He advocated simplicity in scoring for individual instruments, which, when artfully combined, would result in “brilliance and imaginative quality in orchestral tone coloring.”

The version of Principles of Orchestration that we produced at DP tries to bring that quality to life with mp3 sound files linked to the orchestral examples. These were transcribed by hand with music notation software that employs actual instrument sounds. While no computer-produced sound can ever replace the warmth of actual human performance, it is hoped that these sound files will give the reader at least a glimpse into Rimsky-Korsakov’s own brilliance and imagination.

This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.

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