Ivor Guest
Passionate and meticulous ballet historian who revealed the cross-channel dance traffic of the 1830s
IVOR GUEST, who has died aged 97, was the most influential British dance scholar of the past half century, the official historian to the Paris Opera Ballet, and the author of dozens of books about early ballet and ballerinas.
Alongside a career as a solicitor, Guest developed an amateur’s passion for ballet into such fine scholarship that he was largely responsible for opening up 19th-century ballet history in Britain and France as a respected modern academic subject.
He described his researches as “a labour of love”, for as he reconstructed long-dead ballerinas’ lives and careers, he said he fell under their spell, as if a man in love. His 30 books, full of period detail, mapped out a century and a half of ballet that had had little literary attention, from 1750 to the 20th century, and unearthed a busy cross-channel traffic of ballets and star ballerinas between Paris and London in classical ballet’s formative days.
Guest’s interest was first sparked by discovering that the exiled French king Napoleon III had died in his own home village, Chislehurst, Kent. While writing a book about the episode, he became fascinated by the goings on in dance of the time.
Already a balletomane, he began to spend time off and holidays in Paris archives, becoming absorbed in producing a two-volume history, The Ballet of the Second Empire, in 1953-55, from which he evolved a special expertise in the Paris ballet over the 19th century that led to the French asking him to write the official history, The Paris Opéra Ballet (1976).
Guest became fascinated by the legendary but ill-recorded ballerinas of the 19th century, stars such as Marie Taglioni, Fanny Cerrito, Fanny Elssler and Virginia Zucchi, on whose brilliant skills and artistry the formative French choreographers had invented the new art form of ballet on pointe.
He wrote enjoyable biographies of the last three, working through archives in France, Italy, Russia and Britain to reconstruct long-lost lives and theatrical events. One tribute to his work held that “because of him lamps burn again on stages long dark, and the old ballerinas dance again.”
Ivor Forbes Guest was born on April 14 1920, the elder son of Cecil Marmaduke and Christian Forbes Guest (née Tweedie). His father was from Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, a newspaperman’s son who had been gassed while serving in the South African Scottish regiment in France and was invalided to Britain, where he met his wife, a solicitor’s daughter from Kent.
After Lancing College and Trinity College, Cambridge, Guest joined his maternal grandfather’s firm, AF & RW Tweedie (later Tweedie & Prideaux) of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, rising to senior partner. His brother, John, became a dress designer.
After his first book in 1952, Napoleon III in England, Guest’s writing proceeded at a phenomenal rate of a book a year, with The Ballet of the Second Empire and The Romantic Ballet in England (1954) quickly marking him out as a rare popular historian of a neglected era.
He became an active agent in dance and theatre research events, and brought large quantities of forgotten research materials to light, enabling the establishing of proper methodologies. He wrote several books about British developments in music-hall ballet, such as The Victorian Ballet Girl (1957) and Ballet in Leicester Square (1992), rich with detail from newspaper cuttings, illustrations, scenarios and invaluable notes about music scores and costumes.
It was as the result of Guest’s knowledge of old boxes in the Paris Opera that Frederick Ashton, the Royal Ballet choreographer, was able to climax his 1960 ballet La Fille mal gardée with a brilliant pas de deux inspired by one performed 123 years earlier by the Austrian star Fanny Elssler.
Aside from his writing, Guest was the linchpin of a growing network of outcrops of dance research and publication, including the Theatre Museum, the Early Dance Society, the scholarly Dance Research journal, the Radcliffe Trust, the Dancing Times magazine, to which he was editorial adviser, and above all the Royal Academy of Dancing, of which he was chairman for 24 years, a fellow and its vice-president from 1993.
A tall and charming man whose books were imbued with the spectator’s pleasure at the ingenuities and personalities of dance through the ages, he was awarded the RAD’S highest honour, the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award, in 1992. He also held an honorary doctorate from the University of Surrey.
In 1962 Ivor Guest married the American dance scholar Ann Hutchinson, and they became an invaluable partnership, nurturing dance history as an authentic academic research topic. His wife survives him; there were no children.
Ivor Guest, born April 14 1920, died March 30 2018