Divertissement

What it means

Divertissement refers above all to an inserted dance scene within an opera or ballet that suspends the main plot for a while in favor of pure dance and spectacle. The word comes from French and literally means diversion or entertainment; it is closely tied to French opera of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where such dance interludes were often combined lavishly with chorus, soloists, and ballet.

The term is also used more broadly for an entertaining, usually lightweight instrumental piece that makes no great formal claims and aims chiefly to please and divert. In this wider sense it overlaps with other names for cheerful eighteenth-century occasional music.

Musical use

Divertissement should be distinguished from the similarly sounding divertimento, even though both words share the same Latin root and both denote entertainment music. The divertimento is a fixed Classical-era genre: a multi-movement work, usually for a small solistic ensemble such as a wind group or string trio, built on a fairly clear formal scheme of several short movements, often including minuets.

The divertissement, by contrast, is either a dance scene within a larger stage work or, in its French instrumental variant, a freer sequence of dance movements without the formal fixity of the divertimento. It is therefore more closely tied to the stage and to dance, while the divertimento denotes a self-contained instrumental genre of the Classical period.

In French Baroque opera, as in the works of Lully and Rameau, the divertissement was a regular feature of many acts, offering an occasion for elaborate stage design, costumes, and dance choreography. Nineteenth-century Romantic ballet, particularly multi-act story ballets, also contains divertissement scenes in which the plot pauses to present a sequence of character dances.