1968 – Premiere of Frederick Ashton’s Enigma Variations by The Royal Ballet

Enigma Variations was choreographed by Frederick Ashton to Edward Elgar’s music in designs by Julia Trevelyan Oman. It was first performed by The Royal Ballet at Covent Garden in 1968. Elgar subtitled his Enigma Variations as ‘friends pictured within’, but it was Ashton, supported by a legendary cast of dancers, who captured visually, in dramatic movement, the friends that Elgar immortalised in music. In Ashton’s exquisite ‘picturing’, so much human depth is conveyed by a gentle gesture, by a hand reaching out or laid upon another, by a veiled signal missed, a shoulder turned, a tilted head, all speaking of feelings recognised or only half-recognised in a fleeting moment or missed, sadly, lost forever.

For Ashton, in contrast to the pyrotechnics we have become accustomed to in ballet today, less is so often so much more. Gently, mysteriously, throughout the ballet, layer upon layer of universal themes are woven together: success and failure, musical and other passions, the priceless nature of love and friendship of different types and intensity. Underlying everything is the loneliness of the artist.

The original cast included: Svetlana Berisova, Derek Rencher, Desmond Doyle, Deanne Bergsma, Vyvyan Lorrayne,  Robert Mead, Antoinette Sibley, Leslie Edwards and Wayne Sleep.