Khamma (ballet)
ballet
Khamma ("légende dansée") is music by Claude Debussy originally intended for a ballet. It was composed in 1911–13, commissioned for the Canadian dancer Maud Allan, who was co-author of a scenario set in ancient Egypt. Debussy came to regret accepting the commission – he found Allan "a detestable woman" – and failed to complete the composition. The score was orchestrated and completed by Charles Koechlin in January 1913.
The work was not performed in Debussy's lifetime. It was first heard in a concert performance in 1924 at the Concerts Colonne in Paris, under the direction of Gabriel Pierné. The staged ballet, which was originally to be called Isis, was first seen in 1947 at the Opéra-Comique.
Khamma is set in Egypt, in the Temple of the Great God Amun-Ra in a town under siege. A young woman, Khamma, dances in front of the statue of the god to implore his aid for the town. After three dances she sees the statue move its head and arms, and ecstatically she dances wildly until a terrific flash of lightning and thunder at which Khamma dies.
“Khamma (ballet)” enters the record as ballet. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Khamma and ballet can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2160065. VIAF identifies the subject as 184436905. The Library of Congress control number is n2005051607. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1911, 1913, 1924 and 1947.
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This entry incorporates text from “Khamma (ballet)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.