A ballet only works when the music and the dancing move as one. The composer sets the pace of every leap and lift, tells the audience who is good and who is wicked, and carries the story when nobody says a word. The best ballet scores are so strong that they fill concert halls without any dancers at all.
Here are 10 of the greatest ballet composers of all time, from the French Baroque to the American West, each with the piece to start with.
The short version
If you only explore three, start with Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet and The Firebird show how far ballet music traveled in a little over 30 years.
1. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
1840–1893 · Russian
Start with: “Swan Lake, Act 2 Scene”Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker
Tchaikovsky wrote only three ballets, but they are the most performed in the world. He trained as a lawyer and worked as a civil servant before entering the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1862. In 1866 he moved to Moscow to teach harmony at the new Moscow Conservatory, a post he held until 1878.
Swan Lake had a lukewarm premiere at the Bolshoi in 1877 and only became a classic after the Petipa and Ivanov staging of 1895. The Sleeping Beauty followed in 1890 and The Nutcracker in 1892. For the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy he used the celesta, a new instrument he had found in Paris, and gave it its tinkling, music-box sound.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: 10 interesting facts
2. Sergei Prokofiev
1891–1953 · Russian
Start with: “Romeo and Juliet, Dance of the Knights”
Prokofiev was born in what is now Ukraine and became one of the leading Soviet composers after returning from years abroad. Romeo and Juliet, written in 1935, had a rocky start. Soviet officials objected to his first idea of a happy ending, and the full ballet premiered in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1938 before the Kirov finally staged it in 1940.
The Dance of the Knights, with its heavy, swaggering march for the feuding Capulets, is now one of the best-known pieces of 20th-century music. His second great ballet, Cinderella, was written between 1940 and 1944, with a break for his opera War and Peace, and opened at the Bolshoi in 1945.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 13 of the greatest Russian composers
3. Ludwig Minkus
1826–1917 · Austrian
Start with: “Don Quixote, Pas de deux”
Minkus was a Viennese violinist who built his career in Russia. From 1871 to 1886 he held the official post of Composer of Ballet Music to the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg, writing to order for the choreographer Marius Petipa. His music is tuneful and rhythmically clear, written so the dancers always know exactly where they are.
Don Quixote, first staged by the Bolshoi in Moscow in 1869, and La Bayadère (1877) are still in the repertoire of major companies. The Kingdom of the Shades scene in La Bayadère, with its long line of dancers descending a ramp one arabesque at a time, is one of the most famous passages in classical ballet.
4. Adolphe Adam
1803–1856 · French
Start with: “Giselle, Act 1 Introduction”Wrote “O Holy Night”
Adam wrote over 40 operas and 14 ballets, and he taught at the Paris Conservatoire, where Léo Delibes was among his pupils. Outside the ballet world he is best known for the Christmas carol “Minuit, chrétiens”, sung in English as “O Holy Night”.
Giselle (1841) is the high point of Romantic ballet. Its first act is a village love story, and its second takes place in a moonlit forest haunted by the Wilis, the ghosts of jilted brides. Adam gave the main characters recurring musical themes, which was unusual for ballet at the time. His last work, Le Corsaire, premiered in 1856, the year he died.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 13 of the greatest French composers
5. Léo Delibes
1836–1891 · French
Start with: “Coppélia, Waltz”
Delibes studied with Adolphe Adam and went on to make ballet music far more symphonic than it had been. Coppélia (1870) tells the comic story of Franz, who falls for a girl he sees at a window, not realizing she is a mechanical doll made by the toymaker Dr. Coppélius. His fiancée Swanilda dresses up as the doll to teach him a lesson.
His second full-length ballet, Sylvia (1876), impressed Tchaikovsky so much that he called it the first ballet in which the music was not just the main interest but the only one. Delibes also wrote operas, and the Flower Duet from Lakmé is one of the most famous duets ever written.
6. Aram Khachaturian
1903–1978 · Armenian (Soviet)
Start with: “Gayane, Sabre Dance”🏆 Lenin Prize
Khachaturian filled his music with the folk rhythms and melodies of his Armenian heritage. His ballet Gayane grew out of an earlier work, Happiness (1939), and premiered in Perm in 1942, performed by the Kirov Ballet while it was evacuated during the war. Its Sabre Dance became a worldwide hit, and its Adagio was later used by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Spartacus, about the slave revolt against Rome, won him the Lenin Prize and premiered at the Kirov in Leningrad in 1956. Yury Grigorovich’s 1968 Bolshoi production made it a signature work. The Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia reached a huge audience as the theme for the British TV series The Onedin Line.
7. Igor Stravinsky
1882–1971 · Russian, later French and American
Start with: “The Firebird, Finale”The Rite of Spring
Stravinsky made his name with three ballets for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). The Firebird is a Russian fairy tale in which Prince Ivan, helped by a magic feather from the Firebird, defeats the sorcerer Koschei. Petrushka follows a puppet who comes to life at a Shrovetide fair.
The Rite of Spring, with its pounding, irregular rhythms and a sacrificial maiden who dances herself to death, caused uproar at its Paris premiere on May 29, 1913. His later ballets with George Balanchine include Apollo (1928) and Agon (1957). Stravinsky moved to the United States in 1939, became an American citizen in 1945 and died in New York in 1971.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 10 interesting facts about Igor Stravinsky
8. Aaron Copland
1900–1990 · American
Start with: “Appalachian Spring”🏆 Pulitzer Prize
Born in Brooklyn, Copland is often called the Dean of American Composers. His three great ballets created the open, wide-spaced sound people now hear as American. Billy the Kid (1938), choreographed by Eugene Loring for Ballet Caravan, borrows cowboy songs, and Rodeo (1942) was made with Agnes de Mille, who danced the lead and gave the ballet its closing Hoe-Down.
Appalachian Spring, written for Martha Graham, premiered at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., on October 30, 1944. It shows a wedding celebration at a Pennsylvania farmhouse, and its variations on the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” are some of his most loved music. It won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1945.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 16 of the greatest American composers
9. Maurice Ravel
1875–1937 · French
Start with: “Daphnis et Chloé, Daybreak”
Ravel is often grouped with Debussy as an Impressionist, and he was one of the finest orchestrators who ever lived. 1912 was his year for ballet. Ma mère l’Oye opened in January, Adélaïde ou le langage des fleurs, set to his Valses nobles et sentimentales, in April, and Daphnis et Chloé in June.
Daphnis et Chloé was commissioned by Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes and tells an ancient Greek love story between a shepherd and a shepherdess. Its Daybreak scene, with murmuring woodwinds and a wordless choir, is one of the great sunrises in music. Boléro, now played far more in concert halls, was also written as a ballet, for the dancer Ida Rubinstein in 1928.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 13 of the greatest Impressionist composers
10. Jean-Philippe Rameau
1683–1764 · French
Start with: “Les Indes galantes, Forêts paisibles”
Rameau was famous first as a theorist. His Treatise on Harmony (1722) shaped how musicians think about chords to this day. He was about 50 when his first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, premiered in 1733, and from then on he dominated the French stage, where dance was part of every production.
His opéra-ballet Les Indes galantes (1735) is a set of separate love stories in faraway places: a Turkish pasha who frees his captive Émilie so she can sail away with her lover, the Incas of Peru, a Persian flower festival and a North American forest. Its final entrée, Les Sauvages, contains the dance tune Rameau first wrote for harpsichord.
Which is your favorite ballet composer?
Tap to vote and see what other readers picked.
Summing up
From Rameau’s court dances to Copland’s cowboys, these composers show how much range ballet music has. Tchaikovsky set the standard for the full-length story ballet, Stravinsky tore it up, and Prokofiev and Khachaturian brought it into the Soviet era on a huge scale.
Which ballet composer would you add to the list?
