Ballet: Setting the wild moors in motion

IT'S A snowy day in Leeds, and the man responsible for the world's longest-running musical is giving advice to the dancers of Northern Ballet Theatre (NBT). They nod appreciatively before resuming their rehearsal, incorporating his comments into their movement.

• Tobias Batley as Heathcliff and Georgina May as Cathy. Picture: Merlin Hendy/Complimentary

Yet just a few years ago, Claude-Michel Schnberg was "not interested in ballet". He was far more at home in the world of blockbuster musicals such as Les Misrables, Miss Saigon and Martin Guerre – all three of which he composed. Two things catapulted Schnberg from a ballet virgin to a veritable expert: he was asked to write the score for a dance version of Wuthering Heights and married Charlotte Talbot, a former principal dancer with NBT.

Today, both husband and wife are helping the company restage the show that brought them together. Originally created in 2002, with Talbot in the lead role of Cathy, the ballet takes Emily Bront's 19th-century novel and transforms it into two hours of passionate dance. Although choreographed by NBT's artistic director David Nixon, it was Schnberg who came up with the initial structure for the piece.

"I was not a ballet expert before, but I thought that the best version would be the simplest one," he says. "So I read the book again and watched the films, and I thought the Laurence Olivier version was the most straightforward and clear in terms of storytelling, so I used that to write the script of the ballet."

It took Schnberg nine months to write the score, working eight hours a day in the south of France."This ballet was a completely new experience for me," he says. "But I looked at a lot of other ballets before I started writing, and I began to understand that it's not miming, it's using the body to express what's happening in the story and the spirituality of the characters."

Les Misrables has played to over 55 million people in more than 40 countries, so Schnberg clearly knows his craft. Yet without a libretto to work with, he was on his own. He also had to consider the physical demands a full-length narrative ballet places on the dancers performing it. "There are no lyrics so I had to try and express everything through the melody and orchestration. And ballet is very physical, so I had to take time for them to rest and start again – it was a whole new process for me. But once you start to learn and have that experience, it's fine – and I'm now just finishing my second ballet score."

Cathy and Heathcliff have been synonymous with undying love since Bront created them in 1847. As with most ballet or opera scores, Schnberg has given all the key characters a musical theme. Did he enjoy getting under the skin of Bront's fascinating characters?

"As a composer, of course you have feeling for a character, but you understand that it is still fiction. We all try to write good music but at the same time all composers are vampires, using these characters to feed ourselves and get the best from them. But you always have sympathy for certain characters, and generally speaking for me it's the worst ones, never the good guys. Heathcliff is very interesting because he's so physical and masculine, but gracious at the same time."

But once the rehearsals began, Cathy turned Schnberg's head – or, more specifically, the dancer playing her. One of NBT's most watchable dancers for many years, Charlotte Talbot has now retired from dancing and she and Schnberg have a four-year-old daughter, Lily. Her input to the creation of Cathy was so crucial that when NBT decided to restage Wuthering Heights in 2009, Talbot was asked back to coach the dancers stepping in to her role.

"Cathy has so much fire and passion," says Talbot. "And yet she's contradictory, because she wants the rough, raw Heathcliff, but she also wants to be rich and have the nice house and party frocks that Edgar can provide. That's just brilliant, because you get to show the different sides of her personality in one show."

NBT's approach to adapting a text is much like a theatre company's. "We treated it as you would a play to start with," says Talbot. "We didn't worry about the steps, just read through scenes from the book and workshopped them. Because we're based in Yorkshire, we all went on a trip to the Bront house in Haworth, where the emotion and history of it all really helped you realise what you were dealing with."

Talbot well remembers how draining a performance could be: "It's a very physical ballet and technically difficult. The dancer playing Heathcliff does an awful lot of partnering with both Cathy and his wife Isabella, so there are pas de deux all over the place – which is brilliant to watch but absolutely exhausting for the dancers."

It's interesting to watch her pass on that experience to another dancer. As the rehearsal progresses, and the new couple tackles one of the pas de deux, Talbot is utterly giving without a hint of ownership. "It helps that I've retired from dancing," she says. "But the main reason I've been able to do this is because I believe in the production – I believe in what we created. Yes, I do see Cathy as my part, but now I have to give it to other people so this show can have a life and improve."

When the curtain rises and Heathcliff sweeps Cathy up into his arms, what's going through Talbot's mind? "Dancing Cathy was absolutely the highlight of my career," she says. "And when I listen to Claude-Michel's music I still feel it in my body. But I don't wish it was me up there on the stage – I just remember the feeling I had back then and I'm happy with that."

• Edinburgh Festival Theatre, Thursday, 11 March to Saturday, 13 March.