It was an understandable position. After all, Noverre was himself a courtier—he had to be. His professional life (at least outside of London) depended on the beneficence of princes, kings, queens, and empresses, and he lived with wigs, silks, and masks even when he was also against them. This divided sensibility colored everything he did. Thus, like Diderot and Rousseau, Noverre spurned the polished etiquette of the French nobility and was known for his rough manners and impetuous outbursts—but he could also be smooth and charming, and portraits show a perfectly groomed courtier. He was hardly alone: Diderot was voluble, wolfed his food, and offended polite society with his unrestrained enthusiasms, yet when the artist Louis-Michel van Loo painted him at his desk with messy hair he complained that he had not been shown properly wigged. And when Rousseau dramatically renounced Parisian society in the early 1750s, he relinquished his finery—watch, lace, white stockings—but remained painfully self-conscious about his own appearance for the rest of his life.
There were other complications too. In Paris, where Noverre’s Lettres were widely read and admired, he stood in the vanguard of his art, but foreign courts usually hired him as a French ballet master, and his position often depended on his ability to reproduce the traditional grandeur of court ballet. So when Noverre went to Stuttgart, Vienna, and Milan he brought French dancers with him, and did his best to maintain their training in the serious style even as he also composed radical pantomime ballets. Similarly, throughout his career he favored the French costume designer Louis-René Boquet, who had trained with Boucher and whose rococo confections were the height of Parisian fashion and seemed to stand for everything the ballet d’action opposed. Thus, in a convenient turn (which served him extremely well) Noverre represented both French aristocratic style and the Enlightenment critique of it.
In 1760, the year his Lettres were first published, Noverre was hired by Charles Eugene, Duke of Württemberg, to lead a newly founded ballet company at his court in Stuttgart. Charles Eugene was a protégé of Frederick the Great, and belonged to a cohort of German princes whose courts in Berlin, Mannheim, and Dresden became vital artistic centers in the course of the eighteenth century, drawing musicians and dancers from across Europe. A handsome, intelligent, and autocratic man, Charles Eugene built richly appointed palaces and supported a large court in grand style; he loved women and ballet, and had a strong taste for French and Italian music and art. His lavishly refurbished theater seated four thousand and could hold some six hundred performers onstage at a given moment. To finance his self-aggrandizing passions, Charles Eugene recklessly raised taxes, started a national lottery, hawked offices, felled and sold forests, and finally seized the treasury, ruling without the estates for ten years between 1758 and 1768 before he was brought to heel. On the back of this heedless fiscal policy, however, the duke also assembled a first-class opera and ballet company.
He recruited top musicians and designers, and Noverre worked with composers from across Europe: the Austrian Florian Johann Deller, the Alsatian Jean-Joseph Rodolphe, and, most impressively, the Neapolitan composer Niccoló Jommelli, who was lured away from a prestigious post at St. Peter’s in Rome. In addition, the innovative theatrical designer Giovanni Niccoló Servandoni, the costumer Boquet (Noverre’s favorite), and the Parisian dancers Gaetan Vestris and Jean Dauberval also made well-remunerated guest appearances. Noverre himself was furnished with every possible luxury and support: carriage and pair, wine, food and lodging, forage for his horses, and a full—and rapidly expanding—company of dancers (which doubled as the duke’s personal harem). He stayed for seven years and staged some twenty new ballets. Many were fatuous court extravaganzas such as L’Olimpiade in 1761, in which a portrait of Charles Eugene was laid onstage and decorated by Muses, Apollo, Mars, and Terpsichore and then lifted to Parnassus, surrounded by gods. But Noverre also mounted several ballets d’action in keeping with the ideas set forth in his Lettres, including the controversial Médée et Jason.36
Médée et Jason was produced in 1763 on the occasion of Charles Eugene’s birthday celebrations, which included a military review, banquets, processions, a mass, fireworks, and horse ballets; the fountains at court ran with sparkling red wine. In keeping with Italian traditions, the ballet was a freestanding entr’acte entertainment, meant to relieve the gravity of the opera at hand, and not a divertissement woven into an opera in the French style. Thus Médée et Jason, with music by Rodolphe, was performed as a thirty-five-minute interlude between the first two acts of Jommelli’s opera seria Didone Abbandonata—although it could hardly be said that it provided either relief or light entertainment. Instead, it was dramatically taut, bloody, and tragic. We know from contemporary accounts that the ballet told its gruesome story with cadenced, ritualized walking steps that stiffly followed the beat, and broad gestures, broken at moments of high passion by aria-like dances and static, painterly tableaux. Freeze-frame images summed up decisive moments: the children on their knees, for example, begging for their lives as their mother threatened them with a raised dagger. Tense moments were depicted with clenched fists, broken lines, deeply bent knees, and sharply angled elbows. And in a final gory scene Medea appeared in a carriage drawn by fire-spitting dragons, holding her dying child. Unmoved by the child’s cries, she plunged her dagger into the heart of her second son and threw the bloody instrument vengefully at her husband’s feet. He took it up and stabbed himself, falling into the arms of his dying lover as the sky darkened and the palace collapsed in ruins.
A satirical sketch of Jean-Georges Noverre’s Jason and Medea, emphasizing the ballet master’s use of heightened dramatic gesture to tell a story. (2.1)
Everything was subordinated to pantomime. Reversing the usual collaborative proceedures, Noverre liked to create the steps and mime before working with a composer, who was then faced with the task of setting the ballet master’s ideas to music. Rodolphe’s music contained traditional dance forms but was also highly programmatic, with extended passages of orchestral word-painting depicting events and designed to help the pantomime along. With an eye to Charles Eugene’s taste for lavish spectacles, Noverre thus forged a hybrid balletic form whose power lay in an unlikely mix of past tastes and present fashions: grand siècle pomp overlaid with heightened Garrick-style pantomime and self-consciously angular, asymmetrical imagery and static tableaux. Audiences today might find Noverre’s ballet heavy-handed and overwrought, but at the time it struck a deep chord with those who were impressed with grandeur but also craved a more intensely emotional theatrical experience.
Noverre made several ballets in this vein, but in 1767 Charles Eugene’s collapsing finances finally forced him to cut back his theatrical ventures. Noverre was abruptly fired along with half of the ballet company, and Jommelli left two years later. The golden moment for music and dance was over in Stuttgart, at least for a time. News of Médée et Jason filtered back to the French capital, however, and when the Stuttgart company disbanded, Noverre’s dancers fanned out across Europe and his ballets were staged from Paris to Naples and as far afield as St. Petersburg. These productions typically made significant concessions to local tastes (in Paris they added dances) and were often performed to different music, but they nonetheless served to spread Noverre’s ideas and reputation.
The fact that Noverre’s ballet d’action had found a home in Stuttgart, however, was significant. It pointed to a pattern: as long as Paris was fashionable, ballet would be in demand, and German princes and cultural leaders attempted to graft French taste and ballet onto their courts and cities by sheer force of will and cash. Yet this did not necessarily mean that ballet established a foothold in German life. It was always a guest art, which floated uneasily on the surface and was at various points washed away in waves of anti-French German nationalism. Indeed, well into the twentieth century German opera houses would continue to play host to European (and later American) dancers looking for generously endowed theaters and a modicum of artistic freedom. In some measure it was precisely t
he fact that Stuttgart did not have a fixed balletic tradition that mattered: Charles Eugene allowed artists and ideas to mix with fewer constraints than the staunchly conservative Paris Opera would permit. The reform of French ballet thus naturally took place outside Paris. Breaking its grip was easier from afar, and Württemberg was one of the first places to try.
Yet Noverre, like most ballet masters of the eighteenth century, still lived an itinerant existence. He was always scrambling for the next job—and arranging bookings, costs, costumes, transportation, hired dancers, and his own fees. When Charles Eugene let him go, he wrote to the Polish king and to London, but to no avail; finally he accepted a position in Vienna at the court of the Empress Maria Theresa. When he arrived, however, Noverre found that pantomime ballet had already been fully established: artists there had independently, and for their own reasons, already set out to reform dance and opera. Indeed, they had taken a more radical course than even Noverre could abide.
Vienna was a pivot of European theatrical life. As the seat of the Habsburg monarchy, the city lay at the center and crossroads of a vast empire stretching from the Alps to the Carpathians and from the Adriatic to the coast of Flanders. For performers, it was a magnet, drawing artists from Paris, Venice, Naples, Rome, Turin, and Milan and spinning them back out onto a circuit extending to the German states and St. Petersburg. Other cities may have had more wealth and greater theatrical traditions, but in the mid-eighteenth century the road for most dancers and ballet masters eventually led to and through Vienna.
When Noverre arrived in 1768, Maria Theresa had been empress for twenty-eight years and Vienna had become a truly cosmopolitan city, with a nobility drawn from the German and Italian states, Spain, and the Austro-Hungarian lands, including Silesia, Bohemia, Moravia, and Lorraine. This elite spoke French (though many were also fluent in German and Italian) and Maria Theresa and her husband, Emperor Francis I, were especially partial to French culture and art. Court life could be lavish but was also more relaxed and open than its French counterpart. Indeed, the very fact of Maria Theresa’s rule cut against convention: she was a woman and the emperor was at first merely her consort. Inclined to domesticity (she nursed her own children when they were ill), the queen coveted her privacy and appreciated pomp and informality in equal measure. Francis was a Freemason and self-described “hermit in the world” who preferred hunting and billiards to theater or cultivated living. And so, although the Viennese adopted the forms of the French court, their own lives were never as rigid or constrained.37
In keeping with its cosmopolitan character, Vienna had two theaters: the French Burgtheater and the German Kärntnertor; each had a ballet company composed largely of Italian dancers. French influence, however, was also strong. The Viennese ballet master Franz Hilverding had been sent (at royal expense) to Paris in the 1730s to train at the Opera with the distinguished dancer Michel Blondy, nephew and student of Louis XIV’s own ballet master, Pierre Beauchamps. Hilverding returned duly wigged, masked, and fully versed in the French serious style and was perfectly adept at the pastorals and allegorical ballets typical of the French theater. However, he soon reversed course. Like Marie Sallé, he asked his dancers to remove their masks and to enact serious dramas in pantomime, “true poems subject to the same rules as tragedy and comedy.” He staged ballets of Racine’s Britannicus and Voltaire’s Alzire, though we know little of what these looked like.38
But this was only the beginning of what turned out to be a major drive to reform. In 1754, Maria Theresa appointed Count Giacomo Durazzo, a widely traveled Genoan with strong ties to France, to direct the Burgtheater. Durazzo was close to the empress’s chancellor, Wenzel Anton Kaunitz, a sophisticated Viennese aristocrat who had worked and lived in Turin, Brussels, and Paris and who became a staunch supporter of ballet and the French Burgtheater. Durazzo’s idea was to merge French and Italian musical and theatrical traditions as a way of expressing Habsburg diplomatic policy. To this end, he brought in the Bohemian composer Christoph Willibald Gluck and established contact with the Parisian producer Charles-Simon Favart, who fed Durazzo a steady stream of French comic operas. Gluck seemed the perfect match: well versed in light Italian operatic traditions, he quickly absorbed new musical styles and skillfully adapted Favart’s productions to local tastes. Hilverding worked with this team but when he left to take up a post in St. Petersburg in 1758, Durazzo hired his student, the Florentine dancer and ballet master Gasparo Angiolini, to take his place.
Angiolini was a cultivated man with significant literary interests. He was married to the dancer Maria Teresa Fogliazzi, a voluptuous beauty from a prominent Parma family (Casanova also pursued her), and the couple moved easily in the circles of educated society. Angiolini corresponded with Rousseau and with the Italian Enlightenment figures Giuseppe Parini and Cesare Beccaria, and was later active in Jacobin politics in Milan. In 1761, Kaunitz introduced Angiolini to the librettist Ranieri de Calzabigi, who had just arrived in Vienna after an extended stay in Paris. Calzabigi was a devoted partisan of the French Enlightenment, and his ideas concerning music and opera echoed those of Diderot and the writers of the Encyclopédie.
It was an extraordinary convergence of artists and ideas: together Gluck, Calzabigi, and Angiolini broke from French comic opera and produced a new kind of “reform” opera and ballet—and they did so in the same years that Noverre was working, quite separately, on similar ideas in London and Stuttgart. Under the pull of Enlightenment thinking, they too envisioned a taut and serious drama that subordinated music and dance to words and, above all, to action. Ballet divertissements in the French style had no place in their dense and streamlined art: as Calzabigi impatiently noted, the dancers would simply have to wait until the end of the tragedy to perform their stunts. Pantomime, however, was different. In 1761 Gluck and Angiolini created Le festin de pierre, ou Don Juan, which included extended pantomimes tightly integrated into the plot: furies with blazing torches tormented Don Juan, and demons gesticulated at the gates of a fiery hell before plunging him (and themselves) into the abyss.
In 1762 Gluck, Calzabigi, and Angiolini went on to create the poignant opera Orfeo ed Euridice, and three years later Gluck collaborated with Angiolini on Semiramis, a full-fledged pantomime ballet with a plot taken from Voltaire’s tragedy. In his own Semiramis, Voltaire had written a dissertation sur la tragédie ancienne et moderne; never bashful, Angiolini used the occasion to write a similar “dissertation” on pantomime ballets in which he explained (in words that echoed Noverre) that the point was to break away from the fairy-tale “enchanted worlds” typical of French opera and make audiences feel “those interior shivers which are the language with which horror, pity and terror speak within us.” Indeed, Semiramis was twenty intense minutes of murder, revenge, betrayal, and matricide.39
It was also an abject failure. Unwisely, Angiolini and Gluck had staged their grim ballet on the occasion of the marriage of Maria Theresa’s son, Archduke Joseph, and it was found “far too pathetic and sad for a wedding feast.” Court and town, one observer noted, were “revolted” by the ballet’s dire action, in which the dances had been performed “not with the feet but with the face.” Angiolini, it seems, had gone too far. He had failed to make any concession to the Viennese taste for French ballets and was henceforth obliged to return to a lighter mix of pantomime and dance. But in spite of its failure, Semiramis set down an important marker. Here, finally, was a pure pantomime dance—no ruffles, no French pas, no comic leavening. It was Noverre taken to its logical conclusion, and few (least of all Noverre himself) could accept its rigid denial of balletic ornament in favor of a heavy, plain-cloth pantomime art. Semiramis thus stands at the outer limits of eighteenth-century reform ballets. Its sustained intensity and violent imagery made it less a ballet than a manifesto: heartfelt and impassioned, but too earnest and unrelenting to satisfy those accustomed to a more flowery and entertaining balletic style.40
When Noverre arrived in Vienna to take Angiolini’s place, the
path to the ballet d’action thus lay before him fully paved, and the ballet master easily picked up where his predecessor had left off. Noverre worked with Gluck on Alceste in 1768, and the composer obligingly hid the singers in the wings and had dancers pantomime the drama on stage. In 1774 they created a monumental work: Les Horaces et les Cu- riaces, with music by Joseph Starzer (a longtime collaborator of Angiolini). Extending to five acts and with a resolutely programmatic score, the ballet told the story of Corneille’s play in a series of dances, tableaux, and pantomimes. But unlike Angiolini, Noverre met with enormous success in Vienna, no doubt because he tempered his action-driven tragic ballets with ample French dances and lavish effects: “I multiply incidents and theatrical tricks, I accumulate tableaux and pomp.…I have preferred richness to firm consistency.” Vienna was thus an ideal setting for Noverre: the combination of conventional French court tastes and the radical reforms pioneered by Gluck and Angiolini were tailor-made. He staged some thirty-eight new ballets in Vienna, and the empress was so pleased with the results that she entrusted Noverre with the coveted task of instructing her daughter. He thus became ballet master to the future queen of France, Marie Antoinette.41
In spite of his triumphs, Noverre’s life in Vienna was also difficult and insecure, and it is not surprising that in the course of his engagement there he wrote continuously to London and Stuttgart in hopes of securing another position. For Noverre had arrived in Vienna at the tail end of French cultural ascendancy—he was part of its last spectacular gasp, and he was acutely aware of the precariousness of his own position. Durazzo had left in 1764, and the year after, following the death of Emperor Francis I, Maria Theresa’s son Joseph had become co-regent and taken charge of theatrical life in the capital city. Joseph was upright and serious, even severe, and he scorned the etiquette and trappings of the monarchy and aristocracy. He despised the ceremony and obligatory social activities of his mother’s court, preferring instead the rigors of military discipline and the intimacy of a private domestic existence. Determined to reform the empire in the interests of his people, he hoped to create an accessible German-language theater—a people’s theater—free of aristocratic control. He thus had little but disdain for Noverre and his “French” ballets.
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