Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  Kaunitz argued tirelessly for continued royal support for the French Burgtheater, but Joseph cut its funding, explaining that the state regarded its productions as “trifles.” The theater limped along on the patronage of high-ranking aristocrats but could not recover. Kaunitz protested angrily at Joseph’s callous treatment of Noverre, to no effect, and in 1774 the ballet master finally accepted a new position in Milan. A noisy group of supporters gathered at the theater to protest his departure, and although Noverre returned briefly two years later with a troupe of dancers, Joseph remained unmoved. That same year, he turned the Burgtheater into a national theater devoted to performances in the (German) vernacular. Noverre was thus cast out from Vienna for the same reason he had originally been brought there: because he was French. As one observer later noted, Joseph “will certainly employ no Frenchman until German plays are performed at Versailles.”42

  When Noverre arrived in Milan, however, he ran smack into a proud civic culture with a long-established opera and ballet tradition of its own. Milan too was ruled by the Habsburgs, a fact the local elite readily accepted (in part as a bulwark against the rival and independent Piedmontese city of Turin), and the patrician classes often worked in the Austrian service. Yet the city had a strong and autonomous civic identity, and like the educated urban elite in cities across Italy, many Milanese had a keen sense of a common Italian literary and artistic heritage. This was not (yet) a political ambition but a cultural identity reaching back to antiquity and the Renaissance. Opera and ballet were part of that heritage, and the Teatro Regio Ducal—which burned in 1776 and was replaced by La Scala—was a central feature of the city’s urban landscape.

  Indeed, the opera house lay at the heart of Milan’s social life and the city’s elite gathered there almost nightly. In winter even the most expensive homes were often poorly heated and badly lit, while the opera house had a large wood-burning furnace and the warmth (and stench) of many bodies in close contact. Seating reflected the social hierarchy of the city, and the most coveted boxes were leased or owned by the nobility. Roomy and elegantly furnished, they functioned as salons away from home, fit for entertaining guests as well as watching the show. Indeed, most boxes included large antechambers outfitted with fireplaces and complete cooking facilities where elaborate meals could be prepared and served by a full retinue of servants. Curtains could be drawn to the house to ensure privacy and opened again when the party wished to see a favorite aria or dance. For men and women of the lower social orders, wines, coffee, and ices were available.

  There was another attraction too: gambling. The opera house held a monopoly on all gambling in the city, and the income from its tables largely financed the performances. Maria Theresa disapproved on moral grounds, but she grudgingly allowed the games to continue as a way of appeasing the urban elite (the lower classes were not permitted to play). Tables were placed at various locations throughout the theater, including one on the fourth tier in the auditorium, where merchants were encouraged to play while they watched the performance. This was not as distracting as it might seem. Because opera was a nightly affair, audiences quickly became familiar with a production and felt free to pick and choose their favorite parts, turning their attention to the stage between meals, games, and visiting. This did not mean they were not attentive, however, and the Milanese freely expressed their opinions, shouting and chanting at the stage, and the artistry of each performance was vigorously discussed and debated.

  Opera, of course, was indisputably Italian. Theatrical dance in Milan (and in other Italian cities), however, had a more sensitive and divided identity. Opera houses typically hired two kinds of dancers: “French” ballerini who performed in the serious style and Italian grotteschi dancers who specialized in pantomime and acrobatic capers or (as one Francophile critic impatiently put it) “irrational caprioling” and “illiberal skipping about.” In the years before Noverre arrived in Milan, ballets had become more popular and the theater had steadily increased the number of grotteschi dancers. Moreover, Italian dancers and ballet masters had long been interested in pantomime: antiquity—not to mention the commedia dell’arte—exerted a powerful pull. Angiolini, who had worked briefly in Milan and hoped generally to raise the level of Italian dance, wrote passionately of his intense “yearning” for the “richness of the ancients” and of his own protonationalist enthusiasms: “If Italy could be all united and put to use the vigor of its powers … how she then could be at the forefront, compete and maintain along with any flourishing and erudite nation first place there in Parnassus.”43

  Noverre, a French ballet master imposed on Milan from Vienna, was unwelcome even before he arrived. He and Angiolini had already had a heated exchange in print: having finally read Noverre’s Lettres, Angiolini had lashed out angrily at the bewildered ballet master for claiming to have single-handedly invented the pantomime ballet. Didn’t Noverre know that Hilverding and others (not least himself) had gone before him? Didn’t he realize that the pantomime ballet had a long history stretching back to antiquity—in other words, that it was not French but Italian? Didn’t he understand that serious pantomime had to conform to the laws of tragedy (time, place, action) and that relinquishing them, as Noverre advocated, would result in an inchoate “mass of things”? Noverre responded indignantly (“What have I done to him? What have my Lettres done to him?”), and the dispute took on an international dimension when journals in Florence, Rome, Naples, and some German states took sides—the Germans for Noverre and the Italians (excepting Naples) for Angiolini.

  In spite of the hubbub, Angiolini and Noverre’s ideas were, as we have seen, closer than either was willing to admit. Angiolini (like Weaver and Noverre) had an abiding desire to lift ballet into the sanctuary of tragedy, and he too tied his art to pantomime. But his reasons for wanting to reform dance were very much his own. In spite of his Enlightenment sympathies, Angiolini had only minimal interest in Noverre’s “natural man” and knew nothing of Weaver’s politeness. For him, pantomime meant antiquity—and a distinguished Italian cultural heritage.

  None of this was any help to Noverre. By the time he arrived in Milan, the city was firmly in Angiolini’s camp. To make things worse, Noverre stubbornly brought his own contingent of French dancers and haughtily ignored the city’s own grotteschi performers. Pietro Verri, a literary critic, civic leader, and prominent figure in the Italian Enlightenment, accused Noverre of being “impetuous and proud even to brutality.” He bristled at Noverre’s “regal show of pitying our Italian coarseness” and insisted that Angiolini had had greater success in Milan because he was “cultivated and modest” and made ballets to suit Italian tastes.44

  The ballets Noverre staged in Milan were ambitious and included several “hits” from his years in Vienna. But the Milanese responded coldly. Verri grudgingly admitted that Noverre’s dances were skillfully executed and “excellent” in their “technical aspects,” but he found his pantomime crude and unnecessarily gory. In Agamemnon, five people were slaughtered onstage in a mimed bloodbath that outraged audiences. Accustomed to a lighter Italianate style, Verri could not fathom Noverre’s distinctive blend of elegant French dances and hair-raising pantomime drama set to heavy-handed programmatic music. Scandalized by Noverre’s taste for “blood … revenge, remorse, desperation,” he wrote to his brother in Rome that this may have suited Stuttgart, but Milan was far from impressed: “A stupid nation needs such a slaughterhouse to be moved; it is mustard to a calloused palate: we are capable of stimulus and hence we experience a disgusting sensation in such harsh representations.”45

  In spite of Noverre’s confident exterior, he was deeply stung by the acrimonious tone of his Italian critics. It is no accident that it was in Milan that he began to doubt the whole project of reforming dance. The problem was not ballet; it was pantomime that was dragging him down. In a sharp reversal, he confessed that pantomime now seemed to him a woefully blunt instrument, “the poorest and the most hampered and restricted” of the imitative
arts. Without extensive program notes, he wearily admitted, gesture was unable to carry a plot, and in spite of his best intentions pantomime remained depressingly stuck in its “infancy.” In a sign of defeat, when he staged Les Horaces et les Curiaces he published a thirteen-page program explicating the ballet for audiences unfamiliar with Corneille’s play.46

  The Milanese had worn Noverre down, but they had also called his bluff. His self-consciously high tragic ballets—with their grimaces, exaggerated and angular physical positions, and stiffly regulated rhythmic movements—may have been emotionally intense, but they did not have the credibility and universal appeal he had dreamed they might.

  If Noverre had failed in Milan, he still had one last prospect: the Paris Opera. In 1770 the dauphin (crowned Louis XVI five years later) married Marie Antoinette. Shortly after her arrival in Paris the Austrian princess set out to revitalize the Opera. Gluck followed her from Vienna in 1773, and in the course of the next five years he began to wrench the guarded Parisian musical establishment out of its slumber. In 1776, the young queen blithely defied the custom of promoting from within at the Opera and appointed Noverre as ballet master, a move that provoked a heated response from the established interests at the theater and created an atmosphere of tension and heightened anticipation among audiences. The philosophe Jean-François de La Harpe wrote euphorically that it was about time Paris should have “the greatest composer of ballets we have known since the Renaissance of the arts, and the worthy rival of Pylades and Bathyllus.” “A bridge of gold,” it was said (not always solicitously), had been laid to make Noverre come.47

  Even before Noverre’s arrival, however, ballet at the Opera had begun to show signs of change. In 1775 the ballet master Maximilien Gardel proposed a ballet d’action in honor of Louis XVI’s coronation at Reims. Although the king canceled the performance at court so as not to seem too extravagant with the royal purse, and the ballet was also mothballed at the Opera, which was reportedly reluctant to mount “a genre of ballet unknown in this country,” Gardel’s scenario was published along with a powerfully argued manifesto. In it, Gardel mounted a full-scale defense of Noverre and of the ballet d’action. He was seconded in the press, which noted in a swipe at the Opera that Noverre’s work had been wrongly and stubbornly resisted by men who hated freedom and change.48

  Several months later, Gaetan Vestris, who had worked with Noverre in Stuttgart, mounted a production of Médée et Jason that met with resounding success—no doubt in part because Vestris shrewdly larded the tense ballet with light danced divertissements to suit Parisian tastes. Later that year, the Opera circulated a white paper on how to save the institution from “imminent and total ruin.” Music, it was pointed out in a laudatory reference to Gluck, was undergoing a “revolution,” but ballet had been left woefully behind. It was repetitious, tired, and a drag on the whole institution. The only solution, the memo said, was to follow Noverre’s example, which provided living proof that ballet too could become a vital and serious art.49

  In spite of this apparent opening, when Noverre arrived he found himself in the difficult position of being allied with Gluck, whose success with the public had done nothing to endear him to the dancers at the Opera. They hated his streamlined reform productions, in which their beloved dances were often ruthlessly cut. Worse, Noverre was seen by some as an outsider supported by a foreign queen, and many of the dancers dug in their heels and did their best to sabotage his ballets, indignantly boycotting rehearsals, giving deliberately lackluster performances, and misplacing their costumes. The public, however, was more sympathetic—especially when it came to Noverre’s lighter works, which featured richly decorated sets and long passages of inventive dancing in the noble style, framed by a simple pantomimed plot. Many of Noverre’s ballets drew on comic opera themes or presented familiar nymphs and fauns, cupids, dancing flowers, shepherdesses, and butterflies, all familiar fare much appreciated by Parisian audiences.

  Predictably, Les Horaces and Médée et Jason were more controversial. Some ventured that Noverre’s pantomime was too powerful and aroused dangerous passions; others worried that these ballets threatened to undermine French high culture by translating venerated texts such as Corneille’s Les Horaces into demeaning gesticulations or by reducing fine French manners to crude actions. The German critic Johann Jacob Engel, writing in another context, had noted incredulously that Noverre had attempted to express the phrase “May the earth swallow up Rome!” by having a woman point to the back of the stage with great vigor, presumably designating Rome. Then, with overly energetic movements, “she suddenly opened, not the jaws of a monster, but her own little mouth, and repeatedly raised to it her closed fist, as though she would have wished with great enthusiasm to swallow it whole.” Another critic pointedly observed: “I dislike seeing the children of Jason whose throats have been cut in the course of a dance by their dancing mother, die in time to music under her rhythmical blows.”50

  But even these worries could not obscure the fact of Noverre’s general public success: his compositional technique of piling on effects with dances, tableaux, quick-paced mime sequences, and ample doses of ceremonial display appealed directly to the French taste for spectacle, and his ballets were generally welcomed for their pomp, variety, and skillfully wrought designs. Most important of all, Noverre’s serious pantomimes—even when they inspired sharp criticism—were lauded for raising ballet to a new level and accepted as proof that a ballet could carry its own artistic and narrative weight. Noverre’s intense emphasis on pantomime, it was said, endowed dance with a dramatic raison d’être it had heretofore lacked.

  It was not just that the French now accepted the Italian custom of the freestanding balletic interlude; the change was much deeper than that. The weight and prestige of the Enlightenment stood behind Noverre’s pantomime ballets and gave them unique artistic and moral authority, even when they seemed to some crude or overly melodramatic. The ideas in his Lettres, echoed by others in France and across Europe over decades, had sunk into the cultural soil and taken root. It was a striking development, and audiences and observers marveled at the change. By the 1780s it was clear that French ballet and opera were no longer attached at the hip: ballet had won its independence. It was, as one critic put it, a “work apart.” It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this change. For the first time, ballet was recognized by the highest theater in the land as a self-sufficient art that could explain itself without words—better than words.51

  In spite of this public acclaim, Noverre did not last at the Opera. No match for the intrigue, gossip, and powerful cabals that dominated its administration, he fought to keep above the fray, but many of his ideas and proposals melted into the bureaucracy or were silenced by his enemies. But politics was the least of his problems. Noverre’s rivals were turning out new ballets with irresistibly populist themes—pantomimed comic operas—and the ballet master rightly saw that his more serious pantomimes were no competition for these appealing confections. He had nothing but disdain (sharpened perhaps by jealousy) for the concessions his colleagues willingly made to boulevard tastes, and yet his own rigorously regulated pantomime in which gestures were performed in strict synchrony with the music seemed increasingly stiff and plodding by comparison. And if Baron Grimm lamented that at least Noverre held out for dramatic substance, the box office repeatedly proved the superior popularity of lighter fare. Embittered and depressed, Noverre scrawled a seventeen-page invective to the management; in 1781 he left.

  It was the end of an era. In the 1780s, the Paris Opera turned sharply away from Noverre’s ballets. The French Revolution of 1789 would diminish the cachet of Parisian culture in foreign courts, and although his work had a longer life in other places, with time it faded everywhere. In 1791, Noverre wrote hopefully to Gustav III of Sweden, “I would regain at your court my youth and my talents.” But Gustav was assassinated before he could respond. The courts and cities that had given Noverre sustenance in the past had closed t
heir doors: Maria Theresa died in 1780 and Vienna was in the hands of Joseph, Stuttgart had faded, and Milan was hostile. London remained, and Noverre continued to work there occasionally, bringing bands of disgruntled French dancers to its lucrative commercial theaters. But in spite of these activities, he was a broken man. His writings turned sour and resentful, tinged with melancholy. The art of dance, he lamented, no longer held out much hope: serious pantomime presented insurmountable obstacles, and the noble style was being “dishonored” in its own Parisian temple by vacuous popular forms. His own Lettres, he said, had been nothing more than the naive “dream” of an idealistic youth.52

  What Noverre could not see, of course, was that his life and art stood for something much larger, something that reached from Weaver in London to Sallé and Diderot in Paris and Gluck and Angiolini in Vienna and Milan, with repercussions in the many far-flung cities where pantomime ballets were performed. The desire to reform dance had many local variants, but like the Enlightenment to which it belonged, it was also a broad movement with shared goals across borders. In the end, however, it was Paris that mattered most: the French Enlightenment gave ballet its greatest push and most enduring legacy, even if the changes it inspired were first enacted on stages far from the center. And if the debates about pantomime and how to reform dance seem to us remote, we should not forget just how urgent they seemed to the artists and writers engaged in them at the time. They genuinely believed that the powerful language of gesture could endow the effete forms of ballet with the force of a new dramatic art. It seemed possible that pantomime might lift ballet out of the ancien régime and into a new world, making dance the study of man, not the plaything of kings.