The Toy Box Ballet

"The toy is the child's earliest initiation into art, or rather for him it is the first concrete example of art, and when mature age comes, the perfected examples will not give his mind the same feelings of warmth, or the same enthusiasms, or the same sense of conviction."
{Charles Baudelaire in his essay, 'A Philosophy of Toys'}

"[Toy-boxes are] really just like towns in which toys live like people - or
maybe towns are really just toy-boxes in which people live like toys."
{André Hellé, illustrator of 'La Boîte à Joujoux'}

At first blush, one might suppose that the 1913 ballet music Claude Debussy's composed for his daughter Emma - 'La Boîte à Joujoux' (The Toy Box) - would be a fairly benign conceptual piece. But the last great masterpiece from the French composer is said to resonate beyond evoking the imagination of a child in a simple four act story of character conflict where toys come to life.

"..the music and the ballet that emerged from it is a revelation. The Toy-Box offers a corrective to the grinding dissonance and ideological heaviness that characterized artistic trends outside of France. It was, in short, a riposte to German Expressionism and Soviet avant-gardism, an effort to define modernism in a positive rather than a negative way.

"For one thing, the characters in the original conception derived from the Italian tradition of commedia dell'arte; for another, there were various visual and narrative allusions to silent film, circus, and vaudeville."

The score was charmingly sketched in watercolours by the French children's book author and illustrator, André Hellé, who shared Debussy's fascination for toys and his desire that the ballet be performed by children. Alas, the war intervened and the first production of the ballet (by adults) did not occur until the year after Debussy's death in 1918.

• The Debussy/Hellé 'La Boîte à Joujoux: Ballet pour Enfants' libretto is online among Princeton University Library Digital Collections. {link updated April 2012}
• The Mendel Music Blog provides an overview of the ballet's concepts as a prelude to its performance at Princeton earlier this year.
• Further production commentary from Princeton News including some photographs of the April 2010 performance.
• Claude Debussy at Wikipedia.
• A small selection of Hellé illustrations from Will's photostream plus more from an image search et en Français.
• Fulltable has selected Hellé images from both a book of fables and this Toy Box work.