Gautier first came upon the idea for Giselle while reading Hugo’s poem “Fantômes,” about a beautiful Spanish girl who dances herself to death. To this, he added the image evoked by Heine of the Slavic wili or “night dancer,” a young woman who dies before her wedding day and rises (like the disaffected nuns of Saint Rosalie) from her grave at night to seduce unwitting male victims, whom she compels to dance to their deaths. Heine called wilis “dead bacchantes” and imagined them “dressed in their wedding gowns … with glittering rings on their fingers”; they reminded him of the intoxicating “longing for sweet sensuous oblivion” he had observed in Parisian women as they threw themselves with “fury” and “madness” into dancing at a ball.39
Gautier took these images and, working with the librettist Vernoy de Saint-Georges, came up with a script. The ballet was set to a sweetly melodic, programmatic score by the composer Adolphe Adam, and the production was once more designed by Cicéri. For the choreography, the Opera turned to its resident artist, Jean Coralli, an Italian by birth who had spent much of his career on the Austro-Italian circuit and in the Parisian boulevard theaters but who had been handpicked by Véron in 1831 to revitalize choreography at the Opera. Coralli, however, did not accomplish the dances for Giselle on his own: he had considerable help from the dancer and ballet master Jules Perrot.
Perrot was another boulevard dancer. The son of Lyon silk workers, he began his career as a clown and gymnast. He was ugly, awkward, and athletic—a “gnome-like” creature, a “zephyr with the wings of a bat.” He was a natural virtuoso and had studied ballet with Auguste Vestris, who warned him to keep moving—fast—to hide his physical defects. He made his debut at the Opera in 1830 to impressive acclaim, especially considering the sour response of audiences to male dancers at the time, but like Taglioni and Elssler he soon left to embark on an international career. In Italy he met the young La Scala–trained dancer Carlotta Grisi. Grisi, a simple girl from a small Istrian village, was a significant talent. She had some of Taglioni’s natural physical luminosity, and Perrot immediately took her on and began to work with her. His own transparently athletic style made its mark on her technique: her dancing, as one critic put it, was “less Grecian” than Taglioni’s and had a more “muscular grace.” Perrot was Grisi’s teacher but also her dance partner and lover, and the two lived, traveled, and performed together. When they arrived in Paris she became the star of Gautier’s Giselle.40
The central axis of Giselle lay in three related Romantic obsessions—madness, the waltz, and an idealized Christian and medieval past. The first act takes place in a “peasant valley” in a medieval German town where Giselle, a young village girl, has fallen in love with Albrecht, an old-world duke who poses as a villager in order to woo her. Giselle’s mother, however, senses trouble: her daughter’s gay and impulsive waltzing reminds her of the legendary ill-fated wilis. Hilarion, a real villager who also loves Giselle, plots to reveal Albrecht’s true identity, and in due course the ruse is exposed: Giselle learns that Albrecht is actually betrothed to Bathilde, a glamorous woman of his own social rank. Devastated at his callous betrayal of their amorous vows, Giselle slowly, painfully, step by step, and in full view of the entire village, loses her mind. At the height of her frenzy, she grabs Albrecht’s sword and kills herself.41
Up to this point everything is very real, if romantically expressed: Giselle’s love, betrayal, anger, and suicidal grief are painted in clear, clean strokes. But in the second act, all clarity disappears and we are plunged into a strange and ghostly fantasy, a misty world of intense memories and unbearable regrets. The action takes place at night in a chilly and humid moonlit forest, covered with “rushes, reeds, clumps of wild flowers and aquatic plants.” In the undergrowth, there is a white marble cross and tombstone inscribed with Giselle’s name. Myrtha, “a pale and transparent shade” and the queen of the wilis, appears and touches the flowers with her magic rosemary branch: they open and wilis rise out of them and flit, sylphide-like, from tree to branch. The wilis gather around their queen, and each performs a dance as if she were once again a young bride at a ball: there are Oriental and Indian dances, “bizarre” French minuets, and trance-inducing German waltzes. Finally Myrtha halts the fantastical ball and prepares for Giselle’s arrival.42
Giselle emerges from her tomb wrapped in a shroud. When Myrtha touches her with her branch, the shroud falls away and wings sprout on her back as she rises, skimming the ground with newfound freedom. Albrecht, disheveled and nearly crazed with grief, arrives in search of her grave and sees his beloved. He attempts to catch her, but she melts away and glides between his fingers, all ephemera and chimera. Grisi’s dance combined classical Sylphide-like steps with special effects: rigged to machines with pulleys and wheels, she whizzed through the air and across the floor with amazing speed. (A stunt dancer initially performed these tricks to test the equipment.) Exhausted and frustrated with his senseless pursuit of this specter, Albrecht sinks down behind Giselle’s tomb.
Hilarion appears and becomes the wilis’ first victim. Albrecht watches as these “ogresses of the waltz” (Gautier) force the terrified boy into a frenetic and dizzying dance, whirling him from one wili to the next until he reaches the edge of the lake and finally, still spinning, plunges into the watery abyss. Albrecht is next, but Giselle remains loyal and tries to save him by guiding him to the cross on her tombstone, which will protect him from the wilis’ devilish powers. Myrtha, however, has no compassion, and she forces Giselle to seduce Albrecht away from the cross with a voluptuous dance. He succumbs, and they join in a “rapid, airborne, frenetic” dance of exaltation and exhaustion, pausing only to fall half conscious into each other’s arms. In the end, however, Albrecht (unlike Robert le Diable) is not saved by religion, supernatural forces, or his own (weak) will: it is the breaking dawn that sends the wilis “staggering” back into the trees and flowers whence they came. As Giselle sinks back into her flower-bed grave, however, she makes the final sacrifice: she points to Bathilde, who has approached with her retinue, and begs Albrecht to marry her. Devastated, Albrecht watches Giselle disappear into the earth and gathers to his heart the flowers that have engulfed her. He then turns and reaches out to the regal but forgiving Bathilde.43
The story was hardly new to the stage. It recalled Robert le Diable and La Sylphide, of course, but also the wilis in the ballet La Fille de l’air (1837), which played at a popular Parisian boulevard theater. Just a few years earlier, Taglioni herself had danced La Fille du Danube, also drawn from a Germanic legend, about a young girl who throws herself into the Danube rather than marry a man she doesn’t love. The man she does love dances with her ghost, and commits suicide himself to join her, submerged, for a watery pas de deux. Then there were the contemporary madwomen: Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) (after a novel by Sir Walter Scott); Nina, ou la folle par amour, first performed in the 1820s and revived in 1840; the haunted sleepwalkers in Bellini’s La Sonnambula (1831); and others.
Madness and waltzing were widely associated with women. Insanity in women—men were apparently afflicted for different reasons—was often thought to be a quasi-sexual disease owed to menstruation and hormonal irregularities that weakened women and made them dangerously receptive to overpowering feelings. Women were thought to waltz and commit suicide for the same reasons that they read novels and were more adept than men at spinning lies (and acting). To Gautier and many French Romantics, however, this surfeit of emotion, whatever its cause, was no shortcoming. On the contrary, women had special access to poetry, beauty, and the much-coveted mysteries of the imagination.
Like Chateaubriand, Gautier had his own phantom or sylphide: he fell in love with his first Giselle, Carlotta Grisi. And although Grisi, who had broken with Perrot, rebuffed Gautier and married a Polish nobleman instead, she never entirely left Gautier’s mind. He wrote her sentimental and nostalgic letters and made pilgrimages to visit her for the rest of his life. She was, he confided, “the true, the only love of
my heart.” After Giselle, he wrote another ballet for her, La Péri, in which she appeared as an oriental fairy in an opium dream; she was also the inspiration for several poems and for the fantastical story Spirite (1866), about a young man haunted by the spirit and ghost of a girl who dies of unrequited love. In the story, her phantom spirit follows him everywhere; he tries to capture her but she eludes him. When he dies she lifts his spirit up to hers and flies away with it; together they form the image of an angel. In real life, however, Gautier adopted a more pragmatic stance: he married Carlotta’s sister, the temperamental but solidly bourgeois Ernesta Grisi, with whom he had two children.44
La Sylphide and Giselle were the first modern ballets: we feel we know them because they are still performed, although in much-changed versions, but there is more to it than that. The French Romantics invented ballet as we know it today: they broke the hold on dance of words, pantomime, and the story ballet and completely shifted the axis of the art—it was no longer about men, power, and aristocratic manners; classical gods and heroic deeds; or even quaint village events and adventures. Instead, it was an art of women devoted to charting the misty inner worlds of dreams and the imagination.
Pantomime was not gone. To the contrary, it continued to thrive, and both La Sylphide and Giselle told a story and featured substantial mime sequences (many of which have been cut or dropped today). But telling and pantomime were no longer the primary point—no one seemed to care that Taglioni was an undistinguished actress. Rather, the idea was to use movement, gesture, and music to capture an evanescent memory or fleeting thought—to give concrete physical and theatrical form to the “invisible nations” and immaterial stuff of the mind. Thus for the first time since the seventeenth century the steps, poses, and movements of ballet had acquired a new intrinsic meaning. As Gautier himself so aptly put it, “the real, unique and eternal theme for ballet is the dance itself.”45
This had nothing to do with expressing human motives or inner dilemmas, which is why La Sylphide and Giselle were never quite tragedies: their characters are cardboard and there is no moral dilemma at issue. Rather, these ballets turned away from classical literary models; they were visual poems or living dreams. La Sylphide in particular had achieved something quite extraordinary. Chateaubriand, Gautier, Janin, and the women who identified so strongly with Taglioni saw her dancing through the lens of their own discontentment. It was a window onto a “truer” feminine and emotional world, an art form imbued with a fragile idealism so poignant that it seemed to them to express the mal du siècle they identified with modern life. The connection to Taglioni felt personal and intimate, but it was also cultural and metaphorical. La Sylphide expressed a yearning to rise to an idealized, otherworldly state, but its existence was illusory and impermanent—the ballerina, like the sylphide, was mortal. There was a strain of utopianism in this: La Sylphide and Giselle held out the alluring “if only” promise of a balletic Elysian paradise of happiness and true love. But the point, of course, was the impossibility of ever getting there. What mattered for the French Romantics was the aestheticized sense of loss—the intense feeling of yearning.
With La Sylphide and Giselle the mold for modern ballet was thus set: the ballerina was the undisputed protagonist of the art and male dancers—disparaged and ignoble—were banned from the French stage or relegated to weak supporting roles. The pull between a central woman (supported by a large and sympathetic corps de ballet) and her lover, between the demands of the community and the secret desires of the individual, would structure ballet for over a century to come. None of this made the art any less classical or formal; if anything, Marie Taglioni deepened ballet’s attention to line and symmetry, striving for simplicity and perfection “in the ancient manner.” But she also expanded ballet’s expressive range, incorporating into her own elegant style the jumps, pointe work, and extreme positions pioneered by Vestris and the Italian dancers—steps and movements we recognize as fundamental to ballet today. Indeed, it was not the smoothness of her dancing—or the sweetness in those lithographs—that made Taglioni so effective. It was the tension beneath the surface, the unlikely redistribution of weight, line, proportion, which made her appear at once balanced and pulled in opposing directions. Ambiguity was implicit to her art: she was at once “the old misguided taste” (Victor Hugo) and its refutation.46
If Taglioni’s image still resonates now, her influence in her own time was more short-lived. By the time the 1848 Revolution erupted in Paris, the wispy and transcendent Romantic ballet was all but dead. It was tied to the experience of a generation and could not survive their passing. Marie Taglioni retired in 1847 and taught and coached intermittently; Elssler followed in 1851. Filippo Taglioni moved east to St. Petersburg and Warsaw; in 1849 Perrot left for a long sojourn in St. Petersburg, and Grisi followed shortly thereafter. Nodier died in 1844 and Chateaubriand in 1849, and the remainder of their generation of Romantic poets and writers faded into old age. Hugo went into exile. Gautier and Heine both continued to write ballets, but their later librettos tipped toward heavy literary plots (Faust) or silly oriental fantasies. Even La Péri, written for Grisi in 1843, ended with a ridiculous dance in which a bee flies into Grisi’s clothing, requiring Carlotta to perform a genteel striptease to avoid being stung.
In the wake of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in December 1851 and the establishment a year later of the French Second Empire, dance lost its poetic aspect and took on a frivolous if enticingly erotic demimonde cast. Music hall and high-kicking, giddy virtuosity and taste for spectacle displaced the spiritual Romantic ballet: La Sylphide fell out of the Paris Opera repertory after 1858, and Giselle would have its last production ten years later. Le Corsaire (1856) might be said to have set the tone: it assembled part of the team that had worked on Giselle and featured music by Adam and a script by Vernoy de Saint-Georges, loosely inspired by Lord Byron’s poem. But the ballet turned out to be a kitschy mimed adventure story, heavy on shipwrecks and other special effects and of little choreographic interest.47 Six years later, Marie Taglioni’s last chosen successor, the French ballerina Emma Livry, was badly burned when the gas lamps supposed to bathe her in a dreamy light instead set her costume aflame; she died from her injuries, barely twenty years old.
If the Romantic ballet was fading, however, the demand for public and commercial theater was not. The Second Empire and the Third Republic that followed it saw a boom in popular fare, often spurred by officials who saw entertainment as a form of social control: the Folies Bergère and Moulin Rouge, outdoor concerts, novelty acts, pantomimes, magic shows, puppet plays, and costume balls.* There were even amateur theatrical events in which whole ballets were enacted by society ladies and gentlemen clad as nymphs and sylphs. An elderly Marie Taglioni was once spotted at one of these costume balls looking tense and out of place, with a “pursed up mouth and very prim appearance.” And although the Paris Opera continued to enjoy substantial state subsidies and a sustained tradition, it was no longer artistically exciting. Indeed, ballet belonged increasingly to the men of the Jockey Club and was widely known, as one observer noted, as a thinly disguised “market for girls.”48
Moreover, as a new generation of literary men and women turned away from Romanticism and toward realism, the once vital connection with ballet weakened. Drawn to the ideas of natural science and positivism, writers applied their art to clinically precise depictions of character and social life. Observation and social investigation replaced imagination as a subject and metaphor for art. “I cannot paint an angel,” wrote Gustave Courbet, “because I have never seen one.” “The real world which science reveals to us,” the writer Ernest Renan insisted, “is far superior to the fantastic world created by the imagination.” Ballet could not keep up: wedded to an idealized, otherworldly and feminine aesthetic, its appeal to writers diminished. Only the Goncourt brothers seemed to care deeply about the art, and their interest was focused more on older, eighteenth-century rococo-style forms (and ballerinas) turned thr
ough the lens of their own eccentric and erotic preoccupations.49
Yet Taglioni and the Romantic ballet did have an afterlife in Paris toward century’s end: not onstage but in the paintings, drawings, and sculptures of Edgar Degas. Degas’s intense preoccupation with ballet—almost half of his work focused on dancers—was evidence of the art form’s lasting ability to mirror its times. His paintings, with their soft but intense colors and Impressionistic brushstrokes, documented lost illusions and harsh realities, even while they also set forth ballet’s enduring formal ideals. Degas’s dancers were not the light and airy creatures of Taglioni fame; they were fleshy and substantial working-class girls, slumped and nonchalant, pursued at times by men lurking in the corners or foreground of a painting. Degas showed his performers backstage or in the studio and depicted them tying a shoe or indecorously stretching their limbs at the barre, never perfectly posed. Yet in spite (or because) of their rehearsal postures and midphrase movements, Degas’s dancers had an intrinsic nobility—the nobility of their work—and he was careful to convey the quiet physical concentration all dancers possess. He paid homage to dancers and the dance, and he did so in part by invoking the Romantic ballet.
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