Following the conventions of the Paris Opéra, Giuseppe Verdi was also obliged to compose ballet music for the French premieres or first performances of his stage works. Between 1847 and 1894, he wrote a total of seven so-called divertissements, some extensive, for Jérusalem, Les Vêpres siciliennes, Le Trouvère, Macbeth, Don Carlos, Aida and Otello. With catchy melodies, lively, accentuated rhythms, descriptive sound effects and vivid gestures, but above all with incredibly colourful instrumentation, he succeeded in giving new impetus to the ballet music of his day. While the ballet music was generally omitted from productions of Verdi's operas for a long time – with the exception of Aida – it has recently been performed increasingly often and linked to the dramaturgy of the respective work. These beautiful, well-crafted pieces of music should no longer be withheld from the public. On the new double CD from BR-KLASSIK, the Munich Radio Orchestra and its chief conductor Ivan Repušić present Verdi's complete ballet music.

In 19th-century Italian operas, a ballet was not part of the composition but was performed either between the acts or after the opera performance – and was usually a work created by a ballet composer who had little or no connection to the operatic work in question. The strict convention at the Paris Opéra, however, was that an extensive dance interlude had to be included as a divertissement in the third act of a grand opéra. So if an Italian opera composer wanted to have his works performed in Paris (and who would not, given the international importance of that great opera house in Europe’s leading musical metropolis), ballet music had to be provided as well. In the case of works originally written for the Paris Opéra, the ballet was included in the French-language libretto from the outset, and ballet music also had to be newly added to all existing works as well. Italian opera composers such as Rossini, Donizetti and Verdi were hardly ever enthusiastic about this French preference for extensive dance interludes in the third act, but they had to bow to convention.