The Gift of the Magi was featured as The Short Story of the Day on Thu, Dec 23, 2021 The Gift of the Magi is featured in our collections: Christmas Stories and Short Stories for Middle School. If you enjoyed it, try Giovanni Boccaccio's Federigo's Falcon, and The Necklace, both employing ironic twists, and great examples for comparative analysis.
Teachers and students may benefit from our The Gift of the Magi Study Guide to more fully enjoy the story.
A Folk Tale From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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For other uses, see Folktale (disambiguation).
Vignet from the piano music
A Folk Tale (Danish: Et Folkesagn) is a ballet in three acts, created in 1854 for the Royal Danish Ballet by the Danish ballet master and choreographer August Bournonville to the music of Johan Peter Emilius Hartmann and Niels W. Gade. The first performance took place on 20 March 1854. Set in the Middle Ages, the ballet tells the story of a changeling living among the trolls and elves. Bournonville declared the ballet "The most complete and best of all my choreographic works."[1]
Background[edit]
At the beginning of the 1850s, Svend Grundtvig initiated a systematic recording of Danish folklore - the stories were told and written down in every little village in Denmark – but Bournonville did not credit Grundtvig as his source of inspiration, even though today Grundtvig is probably considered to be the person who made the most effort to preserve the wealth of Danish national folk tradition. Bournonville found his inspiration in a collection of national Danish songs (Nationalmelodier) published by the philologist R. Nyerup and the composer A.P. Berggren in J.M. Thiele's collection of Danish folk legends (Danske Folkesagn) published in four volumes between 1818 and 1823. Bournonville also found inspiration in the tales collected by the Grimm brothers in Germany.
The Romantic artists had a passion for the national and the past. The early part of the 19th century was a difficult time both politically and economically for Denmark, and this naturally generated a glorification of times past. The emergent bourgeoisie needed to consolidate its cultural status and found motifs for this in national folklore. The economic growth in a rapidly expanding Copenhagen had to some extent overshadowed spiritual development. Artists interpreted their contemporary society in a purely materialistic light. Oehlenschläger's poem about The Golden Horns (Guldhornene) is probably the most famous example of this issue but Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale The Bell (Klokken) depicted the materialistic fixation of the period with humour, irony and gravity.
In the chapter about A Folk Tale in My Theatre Life (Mit Teaterliv), Bournonville makes his attitude to the present and the past clear: he indicates that our practical and rather unpoetic times (which seem about to precipitate a period of literary and artistic crop failure on the very lands that were once the richest soil of the imagination) art has fallen by the wayside. The poetic past has been replaced by a 'hypercritical' present, as Bournonville himself writes, and it is the duty of the artist to restore the spiritual, the poetry.
The artist saw himself as endowed by God with the ability to sense the true values and perspective in life. This insight was to be communicated to the ordinary citizen through art.
The function of art as a formative model was something about which Bournonville felt very strongly. In his choreographic credo he writes: It is the mission of art in general, and the theatre in particular, to intensify thought, to elevate the mind, and to refresh the senses. Music and dance elevate the mind and refresh the senses, but it is when the story comes into play that thought is intensified.
