This essay explores the conflicting trends of tradition and
modernism, unity and independence in Parisian musical and
dance culture in the late 1920s through an analysis of Maurice
Emmanuel’s (1863-1938) aesthetics of contemporary and
ancient Greek music and dance. It begins by outlining and
critiquing Emmanuel’s relevant scholarly contributions to
ancient Greek dance history and music history before
demonstrating how these tensions manifested in the 1929
production of Emmanuel’s opera Salamine based on
Aeschylus’s The Persians. Exploring Emmanuel’s aesthetics of
music and dance (ancient and modern) affords a unique
opportunity to see how these creative media were theorized
and practiced in the tumultuous years after the Ballets russes,
while illustrating some of the conflicts between what Léandre
Vaillat termed “the academic and the eurhythmic” in dance
and music.