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The Bals Publics at the Paris Opera in the Eighteenth Century.

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The Bals publics at the Paris Opera in the Eighteenth Century. By Richard Semmens. (Dance and Music no. 13.) Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2004. [viii, 216 p. ISBN 1576470342. $54.] Bibliography, index.

Initiated under the Regent, Philippe II d'Orleans, in 1716 and staged in the same theater where the Academie Royale de Musique held its performances, the bals de l'Opera occupied a central position in the cultural life of Paris until the Revolution. They also played an important part in the eighteenth-century shift in center of gravity from Versailles to Paris and from private princely pleasures to public performance for a paying audience of mixed social levels. In response to these various issues raised by the Opera balls, Richard Semmens has written a book that is equal parts institutional history, cultural history, and dance history. The book is a particularly welcome contribution to scholarship on early ballroom dance, which has been dominated by the period of Louis XIV, and Semmens's perspicacity in linking trends in music and dance repertories with the social and cultural context in which they were performed reveals them in a new light.

The book is organized by historical approach, including one chapter each for the balls' institutional, economic, social, and finally musical and dance histories. Semmens's first chapter, "Context, Genesis, and Overview" acts as an introduction to...

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