ABSTRACT
A mortal man, consumed with passion for a supernatural creature, attempts to possess her. He loses her for ever. The subject enchanted Parisian audiences of 1832 and sparked a new trend in ballet. But although Filippo Taglioni’s La Sylphide1 seemed to strike like a flash of lightning, a number of practical inventions, decisions and developments facilitated the emergence of the aerial ballerina and her ardent partner in tales of gossamer and gloom. Less than a year after the July Revolution of 1830 installed Louis Philippe on the French throne, the Opéra ceased to be court property. Dr Louis Véron, as the new director of what was now a private enterprise with a government subsidy, wished quite naturally to make the Opéra’s productions reflect both its new independence and the power of the bourgeoisie that had triumphed the previous summer. He wanted that confident middle class in his audiences. They were already flocking to the boulevard theatres to see fairy spectacles and pantomimes, to see plays that laid on Gothic horror – their effects rendered more magical by improved stage lighting and machinery. The astute Dr Véron could see that the public craved mystery and exoticism, that they would be thrilled to see on the Opéra stage the haunted German valleys and misty Scottish fens that they had long been reading about in ballads by Goethe or Heinrich Heine and in novels by Sir Walter Scott, to see vaporous, beckoning women – firing a man’s imagination even as they chilled his flesh with long, pale fingers. The magical verismo of these other worlds offered escape during a period
of what must have seemed a dizzying succession of sweeping political changes, particularly in France. The present government’s careful middleof-the-road policies might as easily be swept away. Science was revealing more mysteries than it explained, and religion had lost much of its potency. On the one hand, instability and uncertainty as a condition of life; on the other, a complacent, plodding morality. No wonder that the Parisian public loved to see theatre that made enigma and restlessness thrilling, but at the same time tamed it and contained it through theatrical conventions. Up-to-date lighting equipment transformed the ballet stage into a fitting
habitation for sylphs and other ethereal creatures. According to ballet
historian Ivor Guest, one of Véron’s first innovations at the Opéra was the installation of oil lamps with large reflectors to soften and diffuse the light. For the moonlit cloister act of Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable, he ordered the house lights extinguished. In short, he did everything that could intensify the atmosphere of light and shadow and heighten the effects of trapdoors, wires, veils, explosive powder, smoke machines, waterfalls and other marvels of stage apparatus. Gradual developments in ballet technique made possible what was gen-
erally considered a new style of dancing, one well suited to bring fantasies to life. From Marie Taglioni and other dancers, as gifted if not as innovative, came the lightness and mobility that not only made fantasy flesh, and vice versa, but created a symbol of the unattainable far more profound than most of the ballet plots that made it possible. Several scholars have wondered whether what we call Romantic ballet
was perceived in its heyday as a vital part of the Romantic movement that flourished in painting, sculpture, music and literature. Were the flittings of these dancers truly ‘Romantic’ in the sense of challenging academic traditions? Was ballet not, they argue, a ‘juste milieu’ phenomenon that, like some of the middle-of-the-road painting of the day, simply applied a patina of Romantic imagery to traditional theatrics and to the same dance techniques that served neoclassicism? They have observed that even the most ardent of balletomanes, Théophile Gautier, thought that ‘dancing is little adapted to render metaphysical themes’ (Gautier 1973: 17). It is true that ballet choreographers that we consider Romantic exploited
and developed a traditional vocabulary, but an arch-Romantic like Byron did not deviate from traditional poetic forms either. And the German poet Friedrich Schlegel viewed Romantic poetry as something that would open up ‘a perspective upon an infinitely increasing classicism’ (Rosen and Zerner 1984: 17). In all fields of art, it was only pointless academicism that was to be resisted – like the approved genres of painting, and ballet’s traditional classifications of male dancers according to physique as danseur noble, demicaractère, or caractère. The choreographers’ choice of particular steps within the classical vocabulary and the freer way dancers performed them did indeed ‘increase’ the range of classicism. Certainly the general public did not attend the ballet for spiritual
enlightenment, and it naturally lapped up spectacle and technical prowess. The Petit Courrier des Dames correspondent must have alarmed his Parisian readers when he described a sumptuous production of the colourful ballet La Gitana in Saint Petersburg in 1838. There were, he exclaimed, 500 people in the last act’s masked ball, 5,000 candles, and 120 chandeliers: ‘Is Europe saying the Opéra is no longer the first theatre of the world for art and splendour?’ (PCD 1839: 31). When Giselle was first seen in London in 1841 in the form of a play – with dances, set to the original Adolphe Adam music, for those dangerous and alluring ghosts, the wilis – a poster
advertised in huge letters what was obviously a major attraction: FIRST NIGHT OF THE REAL WATER!2
