Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  Against the backdrop of these events, Bournonville turned increasingly in on himself and on Denmark, devoting his energies to consolidating and preserving the ideals of Danish ballet, which he had done so much to define. It was a conservative impulse, a digging in and return to artistic first principles. But that did not make it uncreative; indeed, it was in the years between 1848 and his death in 1879 that Bournonville made some of his most lasting contributions to classical ballet. The first came in 1849 in a lighthearted two-act entertainment entitled Conservatoriet, or a Proposal of Marriage Through the Newspaper. It was a vaudeville-ballet of marginal interest except that it contained a moving tribute to Bournonville’s French past: a staged enactment of an Auguste Vestris ballet class called “The Dancing School.” Small children began with pliés, and the class gradually increased in complexity and momentum as older students and professionals took their turns. “The Dancing School” was a picture of a tradition and a blueprint for the future. Bournonville seemed to be reminding himself (and his dancers): this is what matters, this is what we must stick with and develop. Moreover, although the steps and exercises recalled Vestris, they were unmistakably a statement of Bournonville’s own aesthetic and style.

  As time passed, Bournonville’s deepest instincts seemed to lead him back to the themes of Danish Romanticism. In 1854 he created A Folk Tale, a three-act ballet inspired by a range of familiar sources, including Thiele’s collection of Scandinavian folk stories and Hans Christian Andersen’s enchanting fairy tale “The Elfin Hill.” The music was composed by Niels Gade and J. P. E. Hartmann, both known for their interest in Nordic themes: Hartmann had set Oehlenschläger’s “The Golden Horns” to music and would become one of Bournonville’s closest collaborators, and Gade went on to compose Elf Shot, also based on Nordic mythology.

  By this time, however, the artistic climate at the Royal Theatre was changing. The playwright Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791–1860) had taken up its leadership in 1849, and he was skeptical about ballet generally. He and his followers had turned against Danish Romanticism, weary of its fairy-tale worlds and flights of fancy; they were drawn instead to parody, satire, and vaudeville, and prized reason and structure over free-flowing imagination. Hans Christian Andersen coolly referred to them as the “Form Cutters Guild.” By 1854, Bournonville was feeling betrayed and besieged at home and in his own theater, and by his own account, A Folk Tale was an impassioned defense of his artistic position and a direct attack on the flat cynicism of these “practical and rather unpoetic times.” 33

  In A Folk Tale, Bournonville brought everything he knew to the fore. It was a glowing portrait of Scandinavian folk life and another pitch-perfect transposition of the French Romantic ballet into Nordic forms: a Giselle of the North. Giselle’s quaint German village thus became a Danish countryside, and the wilis turned into elf maidens and trolls. Bournonville’s distinctive achievement was to make these Nordic folk speak the language of classical ballet as if it were their native tongue. To our eyes today, A Folk Tale can seem silly and far-fetched, but at the time it rang true: Bournonville judged it his best and most Danish work, reminiscent of the “golden days” of Valdemar and Napoli. In a telling aside, the music for the final celebratory scene of A Folk Tale was so popular with the Danish public that it became, and remains, standard fare at Danish weddings.34

  The ballet tells the story of Hilda, a beautiful country heiress, who is switched at birth with a baby troll, the wild and cantankerous Froken Birthe. Hilda thus grows up in a dirty troll mound raised by a rough troll woman who plans to marry her off to one of her two troll sons, Diderik and Viderik (traditional troll names, apparently). Birthe, meanwhile, is raised in the lap of luxury and betrothed to a handsome nobleman, Junker Ove. Naturally, in the course of the ballet the mistake is discovered, and in the end Hilda is united with Ove, while Birthe (promised rich treasures by the troll woman) settles down with a greedy and troll-like suitor.

  If the plot was thin, however, the scenic effects were not. To the sound of “subterranean music” a grassy knoll “raises on four flaming pillars” and reveals the troll underworld. There are gnomes working a forge, the Troll Woman flipping pancakes, and the wild Diderik and Viderik wrestling, pulling each other’s wiry hair, and scampering about. But the ballet is not all trolls. Soon after Ove meets Hilda, he is besieged by elf maidens, wispy and ethereal women who torment and seduce unmarried men by circling and dazzling them with a misty fairy dance. They were, as Andersen put it, wicked spirits who dance “with long shawls, woven of haze and moonshine.” Like trolls (and wilis), however, these pagan creatures shrink from Christian symbols, and so in the ballet their magic is broken by holy water (poured by the angelic Hilda), the image of St. John, a golden goblet, and a crucifix. The final celebrations take place on a midsummer eve, with processions, banners, garlands, jugglers, Gypsies, and a joyous maypole dance—a Scandinavian Napoli.35

  Other ballets on Nordic themes followed, including The Mountain Hut (1859), The Valkyr (1861), and The Lay of Thyrm (1868), which all drew on Norse mythology or medieval subjects. There were patriotic dances, such as The King’s Volunteers on Amager, Bournonville’s 1871 tribute to the citizens who defended Copenhagen during the Napoleonic Wars, which had so impressed him in his youth; and little Danish fables, most notably A Fairy Tale in Pictures, enacting a favorite story by Hans Christian Andersen. Coming full circle, in 1875 he created Arcona, which told of a Crusade during the Age of Valdemar. None of these ballets was really new, but that was the point: Bournonville made it his business not to change. In these ballets he strove to shore up and defend the ideals, as Andersen put it, of “happiness and excellence” in art. Tellingly, the last ballet Bournonville ever made was a cycle of four tableaux in honor of Adam Oehlenschläger (1877).36

  All of these works helped to fix the Danish Romantic ballet in place and secure the tradition for posterity. But Bournonville went further: as he was making ballets, he was also trying to write them down. On three separate occasions, in 1848, 1855, and 1861, he attempted to lay out a system for recording dances on paper, which he called Études Chorégraphiques. He worked hard to invent a notation system because he knew that ballet would never be recognized as an equal of theater or music until it had a written language of its own, but he was also driven by anxiety—an intense desire to codify ballet technique and “set down” the tradition as he knew it, lest it be lost to time. The notation was awkward and has never been widely used to document dances, but Bournonville’s neatly coded texts are a touching reminder of his yearning to preserve his art. Even more revealing, however, are his manuscript notes: in Bournonville’s cross-outs, rewrites, and at times almost superstitious grasping at some magical organizing principle (in one instance he became fixated on the number five—five positions, five genres, and so on), we can feel his urgent preoccupation with the fundamental precepts of ballet, and his intent to return it to its most basic forms.37

  Bournonville also produced letters, articles, books, and not least his own memoirs. My Theater Life is a sprawling multivolume work published in three installments in 1848, 1865, and 1877–78. Its hefty volumes contain an abundance of autobiographical information, but they are also an eclectic collection of lists of his ballets, homilies, travelogues, notes on celebrities he knew, and sharply worded polemics. Their tone can be stiff and the author’s reflections on his own life frustratingly impersonal, but this hardly matters. Bournonville’s memoirs were not meant to narrate his life: they too were a defense of his art.

  The impression they leave is of a stern but kindly minister preaching his faith to a malleable public, all too easily led astray. Bournonville gently scolds his readers for rejecting serious ballets such as his choreographic ode to the artist Raphael (a flop) and his plan (unrealized) to choreograph the Oresteia. He laments the popular taste for cheap thrills and disparages popular venues such as the Tivoli Gardens, which opened in 1843 and offered a wide range of family entertainments. His highest moral indignation, howeve
r, is reserved for the “frenzy” over the beautiful, charismatic, but poorly trained Spanish dancer Pepita de Oliva, who won enthusiastic support in Copenhagen and across Europe for her dances. “I wept,” he wrote, “at the desecration of my lovely Muse.”38

  Bournonville knew, however, that high-minded words and skillfully performed ballets, however entertaining, were not necessarily a sufficient defense. He saw that to protect his art he also had to secure its institutional base. Thus he spoke out energetically on behalf of his dancers and worked tirelessly to improve their lives—especially those on the bottom rungs. In 1847 he reorganized the theater’s ballet school (which had existed in one form or another since 1771), establishing two classes, one for children and another for adults. He saw himself as a paternal figure or patriarch: one photo taken late in life shows him sitting firm and upright, surrounded by a large group of devoted and well-behaved pupils.

  He realized, moreover, that professional training in dance alone was not enough, so he campaigned to establish primary schools within the theater’s dance academy—schools directed, as he once put it, “by proven individuals whose religious and moral piety is in keeping with the high mission of theatrical art.” In 1856 the first step was taken and dance students received tuition in the homes of their instructors; in 1876 the Royal Theatre formally established a proper academic school for artists within its walls. It was an achievement that echoed (and may have been inspired by) Grundtvig’s pioneering educational reforms, so widely discussed and admired in Danish society at the time, and perhaps too by the Russian Imperial example.39

  Bournonville did not stop with schools: he also worked to establish fixed regulations for dancers’ pay (achieved in 1856) and fought to secure pensions for his performers (a private fund was set up in 1874). These were modest but substantial achievements, which foreshadowed the impressive cradle-to-grave benefits Danish dancers would eventually receive in the twentieth century. More generally, Bournonville argued long and hard for a national theater and ballet supported by the state. In the years following the military debacle of 1864, for example, he struck out at the politicians and economists of the Danish Parliament, firmly dismissing any suggestion that the arts might be “luxuries altogether unsuited to an agricultural and cattle-raising nation” or that “little Denmark” could no longer afford a ballet. Tired of this “old saw,” Bournonville took the high ground: theater, he explained, was not only a business or an entertainment but “a school which has its definite mission, of equal importance for both morals and taste.”40

  By the time Bournonville died in 1879, Denmark had its own distinctive school and style of classical ballet: he had spun Danishness into the French Romantic ballet and created a Danish national art. It was a school in the largest Athenian sense—a way of dancing that was also an ethic of dancing. At times Bournonville’s writings and art could seem almost too good and upright, edging toward sanctimony, but his unerringly consistent and clear classicism more than compensated. Bournonville produced some fifty ballets, but it was not the trolls and elf maidens, brave Danish heroes and gallant fishermen, that best exemplified his art: it was the dances within these ballets, the street scenes from Napoli, “The Dancing School” from Conservatoriet, the fleeting steps of La Sylphide. These shards of ballets—compact pieces of pure dance invention—told the real story of his art. It was a conservative story, orthodox even, in its impulse to tie ballet to its own past. But its orthodoxy was also its greatest strength: Bournonville saved something important from the French tradition. Thanks to him, the teachings of Auguste Vestris were locked firmly into the structures of Danish ballet. Male dancing, so embattled in Paris, had a new school of its own.

  Bournonville’s students picked up where their ballet master had left off. In the years after his death, Danish dancers devised a training program designed to perpetuate and preserve Bournonville’s art: six fixed classes to set music, one for each day of the week, including steps and dances drawn from ballets such as La Sylphide and Conservatoriet. (The Friday class contains many of the variations from Conservatoriet, preserved more or less intact.) The idea was for dancers to repeat these classes, day after day, ad infinitum, learning by heart their rules and ways of moving and passing them on—and so they have, religiously, for decades to come. Thus generations of dancers, following in Bournonville’s path, pinned their own futures to his past. It was a fitting tribute. But if Denmark could make a virtue and an art of holding ballet back, the rest of Europe had no such luxury or desire. They were moving on.

  *Bournonville took up a post in Vienna in 1855–56 and worked in Stockholm for three seasons, from 1861 to 1864.

  *Nourrit’s dramatic suicide provoked the following sensible reflections from Bournonville, who wrote in his memoirs: “The most beautiful theatrical career is not the one that brings the most gold and triumphs, but that which leads to a peaceful old age and a natural death.”

  *Ellen Price was the inspiration for Copenhagen’s famous statue “The Little Mermaid,” depicting the mermaid from Hans Christian Andersen’s eponymous story.

  *Johansson trained with Bournonville in the 1830s in Copenhagen. He left Sweden in 1841 for an engagement in St. Petersburg with Marie Taglioni. When she returned to Paris, however, he stayed: he married a fellow Swede, had six children, joined the St. Catherine Swedish Church in St. Petersburg, and became an important teacher at the Imperial Theaters.

  Man, this is not seeing, but hearing and seeing, both: ’tis as if your hands were tongues!

  —LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA, quoting the cynic Demetrius about a pantomime performer.

  They try to make lips of their fingers.

  —JOHN RUSKIN

  All violent movements, exaggerated poses, and wild turns stem from Italian ballet.

  —AUGUST BOURNONVILLE

  Down the centuries, Italian virtuosi have been famous for having produced floods of trompe l’oeil, trompe the mind, and trompe the heart. They have filled libraries with admirable love poems inspired by no vulgar passion but by a highly developed ability to make harmonious and technically perfect combinations of words. They can write impeccable essays proving the absolute opposite of what everybody knows is the truth.

  —LUIGI BARZINI

  , classical ballet should have been Italian. The roots were all there: in the lavish Renaissance and baroque court dances staged by Italian princes and nobility; in the refined manners so perfectly articulated by Baldesar Castiglione, a Florentine whose gilt-bound Book of the Courtier (1528) was one of the earliest and most influential statements of the rules of courtly comportment so essential to the forms of early ballet; in the commedia dell’arte and traveling mountebank performers whose gymnastics inspired many of ballet’s jumps and tricks. One could find still deeper roots in the graceful statues, choral dances, and animated pantomimes of antiquity, and in the related Italian propensity for gesture and a native (and especially Neapolitan) skill for making “lips of their fingers.”

  In his book La Mimica (1832), the archaeologist Andrea de Jorio documented gestures used by common people in Naples: figure 1 indicates silence, for example, and figure 5 signals contempt. De Jorio believed that the language of gesture could serve as a bridge back to antiquity and a way into the stories depicted on vases found at Herculaneum and other ancient sites.

  The Italians also had opera, of course. As we have seen, the Renaissance Florentine academies where opera was first performed did much to lay the foundation for the French ballet de cour. It is sometimes said that the Italians subsequently went the way of opera while the French turned more toward dance and ballet. But this was not so. The Italians did have ballets, and their ballets were independent from opera from very early on—in sharp contrast to the French, who meshed song and dance. Indeed, by the mid-seventeenth century Italian ballets were separate stand-alone spectacles performed between the acts of an opera. A three-act serious opera, for example, would customarily feature two self-contained ballets, each with its own plot and music, usuall
y composed by a separate composer (often unidentified) or in some cases by the ballet master himself. Because these dances have mostly been lost we tend to forget (or minimize) their importance, but at the time they were a prized feature of theatrical life. Thus while the French fretted over the theory and practice of where, when, and how to fit opera into ballet (and ballet into opera), the Italians neatly separated the two and moved on.

  Nor was ballet Italian opera’s poor cousin: audiences from Milan to Naples loved their ballets and complained angrily if they were abridged or omitted. Naturally, ballets were especially appreciated if an opera lagged, but even when the opera was a favorite the public anticipated and welcomed a break in the intensity of the dramatic action. When Charles Burney visited Naples in the 1770s he was disappointed to find that the king’s San Carlo Theater (which was temporarily closed) had a monopoly on dances, leaving other theaters with little choice but to perform an opera straight: “For want of dancing the acts are necessarily so long, that it is wholly impossible to keep up the attention; so that those who are not talking, or playing at cards, usually fall asleep.” There was occasional grumbling in the other direction too, especially from composers and librettists interested in a taut, dramatic buildup. Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, for example, objected vigorously when the resident ballet master in Bologna wanted to add the customary entr’acte ballets to Alceste in 1778 (it was finally agreed, exceptionally, to place the ballets at the end of the opera). But for the most part ballets grew more rather than less important and spectacular as time went on. In 1740 ballet companies at Italy’s major opera houses had an average of four to twelve dancers; by 1815 most had expanded their ranks to between eighty and one hundred dancers.1

  Italian dancers, moreover, had a strong and confident style. Many excelled in mime and animated gesticulations mixed with leaps, turns, and acrobatic feats “similar to flying,” and their style was often called “grotesque” for its deliberate physical exaggerations. (The Neapolitan dancer Gennaro Magri recalled throwing a leg up with such force that his feet flew out from under him: he landed on his face and broke his nose.) Italian dancers typically came from the lowest social orders, as they did in Paris, but unlike their French counterparts the Italians did not pass through a school or court, nor did they emulate the etiquette and manners of the elite; if anything, they mocked them. The dancing of the grotteschi had a sense of freedom and abandon that stood in sharp contrast to the obsessively self-conscious hierarchies that burdened French ballet. If this sounds appealing, it was: as we have seen, Italian performers were much sought after in European courts and theaters, and their influence was deep and far-reaching. From Jean-Baptiste Lully to the Vestris and Taglioni clans—and not forgetting the many lesser-known and since forgotten itinerant dancers—the art of ballet owed a strong debt to the Italians.2