Ondine is a ballet in three acts created by the choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton and composer Hans Werner Henze.

The ballet was adapted from a novella titled Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué and it tells the tale of a water nymph who is the object of desire of a young prince named Palemon.

The resulting ballet was a collaboration between Ashton and the German composer Hans Werner Henze, who was commissioned to write the score.

They had worked together before on a ballet called The Quest for the Sadler's Wells company in 1943,[3] and agreed to collaborate again for the 1955–56 season; they decided on Macbeth as their subject.

Fonteyn, however, was firmly opposed to playing Lady Macbeth, and was not enthused by Ashton's next suggestion, Miranda in a ballet of The Tempest.

[4] Henze and Ashton met at the former's home on the island of Ischia, just across the bay from Naples, to decide their key approaches to this new ballet.

She was described by Henze as "an Italian bewitched by English landscape and culture", however her first intention was to make the sets in the style that might have been seen on the stage of La Scala a hundred years earlier.

Henze attended many ballet performances at Covent Garden, frequently accompanied by Ashton who told him clearly what he liked and what he did not like in music for dance.

Nothing else about the piece pleased everybody, though most reviewers liked Lila de Nobili's designs and praised the contribution of the supporting cast – Beaumont called Alexander Grant's Tirrenio "of Miltonic stature, magnificently danced and mimed.

[citation needed] The score is constructed with the certainty of technical accomplishment and inlaid with a lyricism that emanated from his experience of Italian life and Mediterranean colour.

This combination of the genres of early German Romanticism and the neoclassicism of Stravinsky gives the score a 'modern' sound "automatically made it anathema to the avant-garde of the 1950s".

The finale of Act 1 has an uneven rhythm with sudden accents darting about in Stravinskian fashion, the music being punctuated here and there by astringent wind chords.

This section also features many solos for various instruments, followed by a pas de trois above a gently undulating accompaniment where lyrical melody lines are heard, with the oboe able to penetrate the whole texture in expressive fashion.

The next movement, adagio, features a sweeter sound in the strings with a solo violin heard floating above the rest of the orchestral texture.

Brass fanfares then introduce the pas de seize and this adagio contrasts the horns with high woodwind, while the harp adds to this effect.

The tempo of the pas de seize varies and quiet lyrical moments may suddenly be interrupted by incisive brass and timpani.

During the next variation, oboe, harp, and pitched percussion provide another watery timbre before the ballet moves to the final pas de deux.

The final movement starts with gently pulsing chords that have a sweet but melancholy dissonance as Palemon is kissed by Ondine and dies.

What he was trying to suggest, says Ashton, was "the ebb and flow of the sea: I aimed at an unbroken continuity of dance, which would remove the distinction between aria and recitative."

As a result, Ondine offered few pyrotechnics, gained its effects instead through sinuous mass movements in which the undulation of arm and body suggested forests of sea plants stirring to unseen tides.

The sense of submarine fantasy was reinforced by Stage Designer Lila de Nobili's fine scenery: a castle of mist and fruitfulness, shadowy crags and waterfalls, aqueous skies streaked pink and green.

[11] Ondine is not a classical construction with great set pieces (except for the wedding divertissement in the third act) or grand formal pas de deux, but a continuous, flowing narrative.

[8] Henze's glittering music is the dominating force, although it is a difficult score to dance to, with the pulse well hidden within its general sheen, but it is atmospheric and often exciting, bringing the close of Act I to a climax.

[8] When Fonteyn danced the lead, the ballet was about her and her performance; however good today's interpreters may be, none has the mystique to reduce everyone else to the background, and so the supporting roles are now much more visible and need to be much more strongly depicted.

Following the original staging by The Royal Ballet, the Ashton/Henze production was later restaged in New York in 1960, and then again at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan on 21 April 2000, a performance conducted by Patrick Fournillier.

Other choreographers have used Henze's music, including Youri Vámos for the ballet of the Deutsche Oper Berlin (1987)[14] and Torsten Händler in Chemnitz[15] and the Semperoper Ballett in Dresden, Germany has staged it regularly from 1989 as part of its repertoire using modern design.