5 - Dance: Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller

Summary

She has quickened the life in millions of people, and unknown thousands are today attaining to a fuller consciousness of their own lives through dancing lawlessly, as she dances.

—John Collier

The transformation of the imagined marche triomphale to the real Marche militaire, detailed in the previous chapter, took place during the era when the actual piece became Schubert's most familiar instrumental composition in its original duet version (chapter 1), in its bravura piano arrangement (chapter 2), and in its many ensemble transcriptions (chapter 3). The score's widespread fame during the fin de siècle is reflected in the fact that, nine years on either side of the turn of the century, the work began to be appropriated in both literature (1891) and dance (1909). We begin with the latter; unlike writers, choreographers utilized Schubert's entire score, and thus audiences for dance were more likely to identify their experience of the music with having heard it in concert or playing it themselves in recital.

During the period in which performances—professional and amateur, solo and ensemble, live and recorded, European and American—can be documented in the greatest numbers, several women from the United States created international careers by performing dances (individually or with young female acolytes and pupils) accompanied by well-known works of music from what by that time had coalesced into a standard repertory. Two of them—Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller—separately crafted pieces using the Marche militaire. Duncan's interpretations are especially noteworthy because they served as inspiration for a variety of artists, particularly John Sloan, a member of the Ashcan School of American painters.

Isadora Duncan Dances

At her final performances in Philadelphia and New York on December 1–2, 1909, Isadora Duncan danced to the Marche militaire accompanied by the New York Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Walter Damrosch. (The long shadow of the piano arrangement is evident in this orchestral version being advertised as “Schubert-Taussig [sic].”) Duncan's selection was not unusual; at the turn of the century, women on both sides of the Atlantic— including Genevieve Stebbins, Maud Allan, Loie Fuller, and the Wiesenthal sisters—popularized the practice of dancing to the accompaniment of a piano or an orchestra playing works of the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury masters, especially ones that were familiar to the public.