During his lifetime the great Danish choreographer August Bournonville (1805 - 1879) created more than fifty ballets. As the rehearsal period for each ballet ended and the ballet reached its final form Bournonville published a short pamphlet giving the plot of the ballet in detail.

All those which survice are gathered here, translated into English by Patricia N. McAndrew. The libretti help us to piece together a comprehensive picture of the Danish ballet master as an artist of national and international calibre and enable us to assess more fully his place in the world of nineteenth-century European ballet. As his characters and ideas unfold before us, we can begin to compare them with those of other choreographers of his day and finally discover, in part, something sorely missed by many critics today: the setting in which August Bournonville's choreographic "gems" were once displayed.

Today, more than a century after his death, Bournonville's name is more widely known than it was during his lifetime: eight ballets and a number of assorted dances still grace the stage of Copenhagen's Royal Theatre, and those "skeletal" libretti-what Bournonville called his "ballet poems"-still exist to impress upon us what a treasure we possess in the Bournonville ballets, to remind us of what has been lost over the years, and-perhaps most important of all- -to reveal to us the workings of an ingenious, practical choreographer's mind.