A Folk Tale
Bournonville found his inspiration in a collection of national Danish songs (Nationalmelodier) published by the philologist R. Nyerup and the composer A.P.
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The poetic past has been replaced by a 'hypercritical' present, as Bournonville himself writes, and it is the duty of the artist to restore the spiritual, the poetry.
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.
The men might be lured under a spell by elves and the women might be carried off by disguised nixes and it always happens in an outdoor, natural environment, which is both compelling and mysterious.
Both the elves and the nixes exert a demonic and erotic power over the victims and in most cases have a fateful impact on them - many end in the grave.
He lets the cock crow at dawn and the young man, who had slept by the hill, wakes from his spell (which turns out to have been a dream) and he counts himself lucky.
Despite this, Bournonville decided to compose his own version of the story about the young man who is danced into a spell by a group of elf maidens.
In an engraving from 1856, the painter Edvard Lehmann, who was also a close friend of the Bournonville family, portrayed the spellbound Junker Ove encircled by the hovering, luminous elves.
The changeling aspect means that the story never becomes as seriously dangerous for Ove as the Sylphide's enchantment is for James in Bournonville's Taglioni-inspired ballet from 1836.
Junker Ove gets his Hilda, and the promise of gold persuades Sir Mogens to be united with Birthe who, in a modern interpretation, represents the young woman with the unruly disposition unable to conform to society's norms.
The most recent version of this lively folklorist ballet was produced in 1991, staged by Frank Andersen and Anne Marie Vessel Schlüter, with settings and costumes designed by Queen Margrethe II.
Hilda, an elf-girl, tries to lure Ove into the hill with a magic drink in a gold cup but he refuses it and she returns to the elf-hill.
Hartmann's music for Act II is typified by a clear-cut character idiom in which rhythmic tension and dark resonance dominate.
In Act III, the final scene features a gypsy polonaise, followed by the Bridal Waltz, a famous composition Gade considered to be a trifle, but which nowadays accompanies practically every Danish wedding.
