Ludwig Minkus

Origins and early life

Ludwig Minkus was born in Vienna on 23 March 1826 to Theodor Johann Minkus, from Groß-Meseritsch in Moravia, and Maria Franziska Heimann, from Pest; both parents were Jews who, according to the research of Robert Ignatius Letellier, converted to Catholicism shortly before their marriage — they were wed the day after the conversion — and before settling in Vienna, so that Ludwig was baptized at birth. This fiche states that plainly: his descent is Jewish on both sides, at the level of his parents, and he himself was raised a Catholic.

Work and career

He was a child prodigy on the violin, played in public at eight, and by twenty was conducting; in 1853 he went to Russia as conductor of Prince Yusupov's serf orchestra, and stayed for more than thirty years. He was first violin and then conductor at the Bolshoi in Moscow, taught violin at the Moscow Conservatory under Nikolai Rubinstein, and in 1872 was appointed official composer of ballet music to the Imperial Theatres of St Petersburg, a post created for him and abolished after him.

Working in daily collaboration with the choreographer Marius Petipa, he wrote the scores on which classical ballet was built: Don Quixote in 1869, La Bayadère in 1877 with its Kingdom of the Shades, Paquita's grand pas, La Camargo, Le Papillon and some sixteen full-length ballets in all. Critics of the day, and Tchaikovsky's admirers since, have called the music merely serviceable, and this fiche notes that judgment as plainly as it notes the answer: the dancers' repertoire could not exist without it, the rhythms were written to be danced rather than listened to, and Don Quixote and La Bayadère are performed somewhere in the world nearly every week.

His post was abolished in 1886; he returned to Vienna, where his Russian pension stopped with the revolution, and he died there on 7 December 1917.