Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  All of this shaped August Bournonville, and when he returned to Copenhagen in 1830 to accept the post of ballet master at the Royal Theatre, he immediately joined the world of Danish Romanticism. Oehlenschläger and Ingemann were mentors, and he created several ballets based on their works. He read and found inspiration in Grundtvig, Thiele, and other collectors of Norse mythology. Moreover, he established himself as a model citizen and solid member of the city’s small but prosperous community of burghers: he married a Swede, had seven children (although two died in infancy), and in 1851 also adopted an impoverished child orphaned by cholera. Though Bournonville had a sharp temper, he proved a devoted husband and father: when he traveled he wrote home regularly—“my dearly beloved wife!”—and his letters show just how seriously he took his financial and familial obligations. He even secretly sent money and letters to a daughter he had illegitimately fathered in Paris before his marriage, posing as her benevolent godfather all of her life.8

  As ballet master at the Royal Theatre, Bournonville began boldly: in 1835 he staged Valdemar, an epic four-act ballet based on an event from the Danish medieval past, to music by the contemporary Danish composer Johannes Frederik Fr⊘lich (1806–1860). Drawing on historical accounts and with (as he put it) “tones” taken from Ingemann, the ballet tells the story of a twelfth-century Danish hero, King Valdemar. It begins with civil war: three rival pretenders, Valdemar, Knud, and Svend, are fighting for the Danish crown. Eventually they agree on a peaceful subdivision and meet at Roskilde to celebrate their compromise. But Svend is a traitor and rogue and uses the event to mount a surprise attack. Knud is murdered, but Valdemar makes a dramatic escape by cutting down the chandelier, which crashes to the ground, plunging the banquet hall into darkness. Valdemar then raises an army of outraged supporters, and in a scene striving for Shakespearean grandeur, Svend and Valdemar meet at Grathe Heath, their armies poised for battle. Svend is killed and Valdemar ascends to power, ushering in a golden age (from which the Romantics took their cue) of Danish prosperity and cultural achievement.9

  It was a patriotic ballet full of high melodrama and moralizing sentiment: Svend is strong, but Valdemar prevails because he is just and good, a king who wins his people’s loyalty not through mere force of arms but through principled action and heroic deeds. To heighten the emotion (and provide a female role), Bournonville added a love story, in which the daughter of Svend, seeing her father’s treachery, comes to Valdemar’s aid, yet in the end paternal loyalty prevails and she holds her father’s dying body in her arms. The ballet relied on pantomime and elaborate stage effects, interspersed with impressive military processions and battle scenes full of bravura jumps and turns for the hero (danced by Bournonville himself, à la Vestris). Audiences reared on more staid, old-style pantomimes were suitably impressed: Valdemar was an emotionally charged mix of old memories and new virtuosic forms, a national myth come to life with full theatrical bravado.

  Yet in spite of Valdemar’s enormous success, it was not Bournonville’s best ballet or even his most Danish one. The production and its steps have long since been lost, but we can get a feel for the texture of the work from Bournonville’s scenario, which is heavy and wooden, weighted down with complicated pantomime sequences. Its effortful earnestness may have added to its patriotic intensity, but it also suggests that Bournonville had not yet found his most fluid and natural voice: Valdemar reads like the work of an artist trying too hard to compress everything he knows and aspires to into a single work. Here it helps to recall that Bournonville was in fact quite a bit younger than the lions of Denmark’s golden age: he was beholden to them but belonged to a second generation of Danish Romantics, and in many ways the artist with whom he shared the most was not Oehlenschläger or even Ingemann, but his near contemporary the writer Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875).

  Andersen is best known for his children’s stories, but he also knew and understood ballet. Indeed, it was his first love. Born to an impoverished family in provincial Odense, he was raised in a world of depressing material squalor and uncertain emotional ties. His mother was overworked and his father—a widely read man and, like Antoine Bournonville, a keen admirer of Napoleon—died when Hans was only a child. Lanky and unkempt, Hans left for Copenhagen hoping to enter the theater or ballet, which seemed to offer “a magical picture of happiness and excellence.” He maneuvered his way into the Royal Theatre as a dance pupil and even presented himself at the home of Antoine Bournonville, who found him ungainly and gently suggested he concentrate on drama instead. Undeterred, Andersen took ballet classes and made his debut in 1829 as a dancing musician in the ballet Nina; he later appeared in Armida as a troll. He was an ardent student and performer known to mime and dance his way through whole productions for anyone willing to watch, playing every part with equal vigor.10

  Andersen did not become a dancer, of course, but he never lost interest in the art. He associated it with childish wonder and enchantment, but also, as he grew up, with a fantasy image of the ideal woman. Rather like Chateaubriand, although with less high drama and more charm, Andersen imagined women as sylph-like figures, unattainable and alluring. He usually fell in love desperately and from a distance—sometimes with dancers (he was infatuated with the ballerina Lucile Grahn and the Spanish dance diva Pepita de Oliva), but it was the singer Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” who really won his heart. He courted her (awkwardly) and was a regular visitor at the Bournonville household, where Lind stayed while performing in Copenhagen. But Andersen never married or settled down; he lived a restless bohemian life, with standing dinner invitations to the homes of loyal friends (one for each night of the week) and long bouts of travel. In his art he labored to make the “fairy world, the strange realm of the mind,” more vivid than the mundane and difficult realities of life. “My life,” he began his memoirs, “is a lovely fairy tale, so rich and happy.”11

  Andersen’s imagination flowed in many directions and in addition to his stories he also crafted delicate and childlike cutouts, many featuring ballerinas poised in fragile positions, carefully and symmetrically arranged—“ballet-dancers that pointed with one leg toward the seven stars.” These graceful images did not, however, spring from the occult worlds that had informed the French Romantic ballet. They came directly from Danish folklore, transposed and refined in Andersen’s mind: ghosts, fairies, trolls, elf girls, nymphs, water sprites, and other Nordic and natural creatures had been a constant presence in stories told around campfires during his childhood. (When the young boy of his semiautobiographical story “Lucky Peer” first went to the ballet, he was overwhelmed by the “whole force of the ballet dancers,” yet he also knew them: “they belonged in the fairy tales his grandmother had told him about.”) Moreover, Andersen felt a kinship to dancers who like himself generally came from poor families or outcast backgrounds but found respite in beauty and the imagination. He wrote admiringly of the way one Danish ballerina “danced, floated, flew, changing color like the honey-bird in the sunshine.”12

  Hans Christian Andersen is a key to August Bournonville. Consider Bournonville’s production of La Sylphide (1836). Here was a ballet widely recognized as the summit of the French Romantic tradition, yet Bournonville succeeded in translating it into a perfect expression of Danishness. He did this by turning the ballet away from Nodier, Nourrit, and the obsessive and tragic atmosphere that drenched the Parisian original and toward Andersen and a more fanciful bourgeois domesticity.* The circumstances surrounding Bournonville’s production of La Sylphide were not initially auspicious: he purchased Nourrit’s scenario but could not afford the Parisian score. Yet this turned out to be an advantage. Bournonville commissioned new music from the Norwegian composer Herman Severin L⊘venskiold and made a fresh start on the ballet.13

  Hans Christian Andersen loved ballet and made many beautiful cutouts of dancers who “pointed with one leg toward the seven stars.” (5.1)

  In the Parisian version of La Sylphide, as we have seen, the sylph
ide is everything: she is beauty and desire incarnate, an irresistible but unattainable vision, and the source of poetry and art. Her forested Scottish abode is the apotheosis of Romantic yearning, a realm of pure love and free imagination. Hearth and home, by contrast, are mere impediments, obstacles to James’s ardent aspirations. In the end, he is doomed and she dies, but the dream, the yearning, and the intense desire are worth the price.

  Bournonville did not see things this way. He complained that in the Parisian original James was upstaged by the overblown “prima donna” figure of the ballerina, and that the true moral of the story was thus lost. As he reimagined it, the ballet had a much blunter message: a man must never neglect his domestic duties in pursuit of “imaginary happiness” and elusive sylphides. Thus Bournonville enhanced the role of James (which he performed), making him more robust and three-dimensional—a good and solid lad inadvertently led astray. The emotional center of the ballet was no longer the wild forest but the family hearth, and Bournonville took care to etch this domestic world in warm and vivid colors: he painted a picture of busy domesticity, with ordinary folk going about their daily lives. Their gestures were sincere and the dances flowed out like conversations, every movement a natural extension of a thought or feeling—a small leap for a skip of the heart, a gracious turn of the shoulders as the lovers meet, a bolder jump into the forest beyond. The scale was modest and intimate, and the tragedy, if there was one, lay not in the loss of the sylphide (or the ideal she represented) but in James’s regrettable lack of self-control.14

  As James gained newfound prominence, so the sylphide herself became more demure: Lucile Grahn (1819–1907), a Danish ballerina and one of Bournonville’s most prized students, danced the role with marked restraint, offering a calm and modest interpretation. She had the grace and ease of Andersen’s paper cutouts—Andersen himself called her the “Sylphide of the North.” Even today, dancers at the Royal Danish Ballet portray the sylphide and her sisters with direct and youthful simplicity and convey a naive amazement at their own elusiveness. With their small and precise steps and refreshing lack of pretense, they come across as joyful woodland creatures, winged elf maidens or fairies whose real home is not Scotland at all—much less Paris.15

  La Sylphide was a French original reimagined through Danish eyes, but it was only when Bournonville traveled to Italy in 1841 that he really discovered Denmark. He went because he had to: one evening when Bournonville was performing in Copenhagen he was insulted by a noisy claque. Impulsively he turned to the king’s box and asked if he should continue. The king nodded but was not pleased: addressing the king publicly was an unacceptable breach of etiquette, and the offending (and offended) ballet master was asked to leave the country for six months while the incident cooled. He went to Naples, where he found everything Denmark seemed to lack: warmth and a warmhearted people, spontaneity, sensuality, and a life lived on the streets with unrestrained exuberance and physicality. He was free from obligation and routine, from the strict etiquette and moral codes governing Danish society, from the closeness of Copenhagen—even his prose took on a more relaxed jauntiness. He was hardly the first to find Naples a liberation: Romantic artists from across Europe were drawn to the city’s colorful disarray, not least among them Andersen (“I am at heart a southerner condemned to this Nordic cloister where the walls are fog”).16

  When Bournonville returned to Copenhagen, he immediately staged Napoli: “just as it appeared to me; Napoli, and nothing else.” The plot was thin and told of Gennaro, a young and ardent fisherman (danced by Bournonville) who loves Teresina, a vivacious village girl. Through a series of contrived events—quarrels between Teresina and her mother (who naturally prefers wealthier suitors), a romantic midnight boating, and a storm that sweeps the girl overboard—Teresina is taken captive by a sorcerer in the Blue Grotto on the Isle of Capri. The sorcerer transforms her into a naiad, but Gennaro rescues his beloved and subdues the pagan forces of the sea with an amulet of the Madonna. The lovers return home and celebrate.17

  The real point of the ballet, however, had nothing to do with the travails of Gennaro and Teresina. It was to re-create the fantastic street life Bournonville had experienced in Naples: the busy marketplace and port with its hearty fishermen and hawkers, macaroni sellers and lemonade stands; the children and animals everywhere and impromptu dancing (the tarantella), impassioned disputes and vigorously improvised gesticulations. The scenario begins with a simple stage direction: “Noise and bustle.” It was a genre painting, a romanticized picture of the lively happiness of Bournonville’s imagined Naples (which carefully avoided, of course, any hint of the city’s real poverty and filth). If anything, the formulaic scenario only got in the way: Bournonville dutifully devoted a whole act to the mystical Blue Grotto, “blue, blue like lamplight, crystal and sapphire,” but in spite of its otherworldly ethos audiences were bored and eventually took to using it as a coffee break, only returning to the theater for the lively street dances in the final act. What made Napoli such an enormous and enduring success was not its supernatural scenario but its joyous dancing. The ballet was a showcase for Bournonville’s increasingly distinctive style.18

  What exactly was this style? At first glance, it had all the attributes of the Vestris school and French ballet circa 1820: the jumps, pirouettes, and bravura male technique, the pointed feet and fully extended knees, the open and turned-out legs and épaulement through the torso and shoulders. Yet it was also different: more contained, less inclined to spectacular tricks and overextended movements. It prized decorum and propriety, clean lines and unfettered gestures. It was a demi-character style, except that its most boisterous, virtuoso sequences had a newfound (and very bourgeois) dignity and poise. Bournonville’s dancers were not noble or princely types: they tended to be stocky and muscular men with thick legs and heavy torsos. His best ballets did not feature gods or heroes but focused instead on fishermen, sailors, and other simple folk—even Valdemar had an up-from-the-people fighting spirit. Bournonville was strict if not severe in matters of style: he despised affect, coquetry, tics, and distortions. “Le plus,” he noted sharply, “c’est le mauvais goût”—too much is bad taste.19

  Bournonville’s dancers had impeccable manners. They kept their arms low (no overheated gestures or luxurious porte de bras) and their steps underneath them, never allowing their limbs to splay or extend beyond the natural circumference of the body. There were no static poses or hammy postures—the steps were simply too demanding and tightly crafted to allow for egotistical excesses. Phrasing was key: steps, even (especially) the most virtuosic ones, were never show-offy stunts performed to wow an audience but were integrated instead into a disciplined whole. The point of a jump, for example, was not necessarily to soar: to this day Bournonville dancers rarely jump up or announce their arrival midair with a flourish on a musical upbeat. Instead, they jump to and from other positions within the arc of a musical phrase. A jump will often even pull to the downbeat, resisting the I-got-there moment in favor of a modest suspension—a breath within an unbroken flow of movement. The thrust and ambition of a jump is thus sharply disciplined, its upward flying motion constrained by considerations of taste and musicality.

  Moreover, old photographs and early films show that Bournonville’s dancers jumped and moved largely from their metatarsals, with the heels barely touching the ground as they landed before pushing into the next step or phrase. This skimming, skipping quality may have been a consequence in part of Bournonville’s own physical limitations: he had a short, inelastic plié and was loath to pause between jumps lest he fail to get back off the ground. But it was also an indication of the importance of momentum and flow in his dances. No step was privileged at the expense of others, and Bournonville took great care to sand the edges between steps—to smooth the transition, for example, between a quick jump and an elegant promenade. Each step was constrained by its neighbor: a jump could only be as high as the next step allowed; too high and the transition would be missed
(or smudged) and the overall effect of the movement destroyed. Skillfully performed, these linkages are subtle and invisible, but they are also the moral fiber of the step—the reason it must be so and not thus. Bournonville’s preoccupation with polish and calm could make his dances appear too even and uniform, but this was a small price to pay for their supreme harmony and accord.

  Women were treated like men: as we have seen, Bournonville had little interest in the French cult of the ballerina. He thus expected a woman to perform a man’s steps, if occasionally in modified form. Indeed, Bournonville was less concerned with what his ballerinas danced than with how they were perceived: he wanted reputable, decent ladies, not demimonde flirts, and he railed against any hint of sexuality or seduction in a woman’s dancing. In this sense, Bournonville followed Marie Taglioni’s lead, except that Taglioni’s dancing had a complicated otherworldly quality that Bournonville’s ballerinas did not share. Even when they were fairies or naiads, Bournonville’s dancers were sweet and innocent, childlike and naive. Foreigners were quick to note their distinctive propriety, though this did not always work to a ballerina’s advantage: when Bournonville’s student Juliette Price performed Marie Taglioni’s role in Robert le Diable in Vienna in the 1850s, audiences found her Danish restraint quaintly prudish and a bit old-fashioned.20