teacher), made the first steps to elevating ballet scores to a higher musical level. Hérold continued the practice of using familiar operatic tunes (partly to aid audiences' comprehension of mime scenes), but he borrowed carefully and with discrimination. La Belle au bois dormant is an early example, using music from, inter alia, Weber's Der Freischütz and showing, ("if in a crude form", in Nørlyng's phrase) the first steps towards more dramatically penetrating ballet music. Nørlyng adds that in addition, Hérold "had a never-failing elegance of orchestration, a melodic richness, and the ability to create dramatic effects". Nonetheless, Hérold did not treat the role of ballet composer with the attention he gave to his operas: he was known to compose his ballets at the dinner table while talking to friends. When they objected to his spending his talents on such trivial work he replied, "Plus j'écris, plus les idées me viennent" ("The more I write, the more ideas come to me"). Although Hérold's name is associated in the public mind with the music for La Fille mal gardée, the score he wrote for the Opéra in 1828 differs substantially from that played in modern productions of the ballet. His score is known to have incorporated some music from an earlier production of the ballet, as well as other contemporary sources, notably Rossini. Later productions have added music by Peter Ludwig Hertel, and the most famous number in the piece, the clog dance, is a modern invention, based on one of Hertel's tunes, by John Lanchbery, who revised the whole score in 1959 for Frederick Ashton's production. Lanchbery maintained that the orchestration of Hérold's score is inferior to that of his operas, probably because it was hurriedly composed. Eugène Scribe's libretto for La Somnambule (which inspired Bellini's opera La sonnambula) led Hérold to produce what Nørlyng describes as a graceful, pastoral score, in which, innovatively, Hérold sought to connect the music to the drama through the use of melodic motifs. Operas Betzwieser comments that despite of many deficiencies in the librettos of his early operas, Herold's talent for music drama was clear from the outset, and that he advanced the genre of opéra comique with his colourful and varied orchestration, and his gift for smooth transition between the spoken and sung sections of his works. In a 1904 survey of Hérold's work, Choquet praised La Clochette for its abundance of new and