My Theatre Life

Here is one of the truly important source books in the history of theatre and dance: the great Danish dancer/balletmaster’s own account of his career and his works. August Bournonville’s life spanned three-quarters of the nineteenth century (1805-1879), and fifty of those years he spent as artistic director, organizer, and guiding genius of the Royal Danish Ballet, with frequent forays to Naples, Rome, London, Imperial Russia, and Paris. The book presents a huge, colorful panorama of Danish and European artistic-social-cultural life over sixty years—a collection of memories and reflections on the author’s professional career and associations, set down at different times and published in three volumes over a thirty-year period between 1848 and 1878. The present edition, first published in 1979, remains the only English translation of this masterful work.