Salvador Dalí and the Unrealised Ballet Mysteria

The Ballet

Following his collaboration with Massine on Bacchanale (1939, music by Wagner) and Labyrinth (1941, music by Schubert), both staged at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, Dalí conceived a new ballet. Initially entitled Sacrifice, then El Sueño de Felipe II after El Greco’s celebrated painting, it finally became Mysteria.

The letters set out the choreography scene by scene: a minuet in which twelve girls each perform individual gestures, ‘one dramatic, another gentle, another languishing, another stiffened by catalepsy’; the Dance of the Innocent and his wife, with an umbrella transformed into a theatre-tent and a puppet play of the struggle between an Angel and a Demon; the woman turned into a ‘monstrous demon’; and, at the very end, the curtain of the ‘celestial apotheosis’.

The Documents

9 pages on 8 quarto leaves on Hotel Del Monte, California, headed stationery, with approximately fifteen original drawings and sketches:

• a large group composition in Indian ink, entirely heightened with watercolour, signed ‘Salvador Dalí’ and annotated by the artist, with a note from Gala to Massine;
• an autograph letter signed, in pencil (2 pages), with two large signatures in Indian ink, explaining in four points ‘la dance des geunes filles’, with six small sketches;
• a letter dictated to Gala over six numbered leaves, ‘Correographie pour le ballet Mysteria dance de l’Innocent’, describing the dance in seven numbered sections with ink drawings and autograph annotations.

Provenance

Sotheby’s, Paris, 15 May 2012, lot 148. The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Robert and Nicolas Descharnes.