Was this progress? We might think so, since the new school moved dance decisively in a direction we recognize today. But it is crucial to remember that at the time opinion was deeply divided. “Blankness” was perceived by many as a loss: the range of social and political associations that went with being a noble or comic dancer was gone, and the new men seemed flat and empty, their astonishing technical feats utterly lacking dramatic content. Moreover, these dancers were often seen as outlandish and their movements “violent,” and although some of the distortions they incorporated into their dancing were known in the boulevard theaters, they looked and meant something different in the bodies of highly trained dancers on the Opera stage: the more virtuosic and athletic they became, the more they seemed to be corrupting and defiling themselves and their art. Vestris, Duport, and Paul may have won over the masses, but by appearing to distort and degrade the noble style, they knocked themselves and the male dancer off the throne he had occupied for so long.
At this point, and not coincidentally, male dancers began to look suspiciously like dandies, those elegant and effete descendants of the incroyables of the Directory who became a prominent feature in Parisian social life in the years after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Dandies self-consciously rejected the sober black suits and trousers of the bourgeoisie and outfitted themselves instead in the finery and frippery of aristocracies past (including “borrowed calves,” padded inserts that teasing children poked with pins). But there was nothing frivolous about their sartorial choices; to the contrary, dandies thrived on discipline and tended meticulously to the details of appearance. Eager to distinguish themselves from the bland bourgeoisie, they looked to aristocratic dress and manners as a source of distinction. Male dancers, whose costumes had always followed high fashion, similarly refused the omnipresent dark pants and suits now worn by their audiences and continued instead to perform in fancy stockings and vests. Holding on to old fashions may have been a practical decision in part (trousers were difficult to jump in), but the result was that dancers looked like disaffected aristocrats. And as if to close the circle, Parisian dandies expressed their disdain for bourgeois sobriety in an enthusiasm for ballet.
The result was predictable, if extreme. By the 1830s male dancers were being reviled as disgraceful and effeminate creatures, and by the 1840s they had been all but banned from Parisian stages. Vestris and the others were remembered as “ridiculous heros” whose exploits were best forgotten. Nor was this a passing phase: for nearly a century to come, male dancers in France would be seen as embarrassing figures unfit to appear in public theaters, their roles performed by ballerinas en travesti. Male dancing plummeted and would not be revived there until the early years of the twentieth century. Vestris’s new school had dispensed with the danseur noble and laid the foundations for modern ballet technique, but the male dancers who invented it had also dug their own graves: without the danseur noble, there was simply no place for men in French ballet.43
It is worth taking a moment to consider the implications of this dramatic reversal. Today, dancers take Vestris’s new school for granted: its steps, training, and forms constitute what we think of as classical ballet. Yet this technique and style of movement—this classical form—grew up in a distinctly, even violently anticlassical moment. To this day ballet contains a strong tension between classical purity and vulgar distortion, between restraint and exaggeration. Thanks to Vestris and the new school, every dancer feels the press to extremes built into ballet technique: a physical drive to virtuosity struggling against the constraints of an older noble image.
Indeed, it was this period of rupture and dislocation that first gave ballet a sense of its own history. Before, it had been continuous, a timeless noble endeavor. But now it was also something else, and people began to refer to the old ballet of Noverre and Gardel as “classical” both in its subject matter and form, whereas the new school broke with the past aesthetically and physically. We might even say that the seventeenth-century debates between Ancients and Moderns had come full circle—not because they were resolved, but because they were internalized and had become part of the machinery of the art. Henceforth, the battle between antiquity and a more contemporary style fit to current tastes would not be an abstract discussion; it would take place in the bodies of dancers. Vestris and the male dancers of the 1820s may have discredited themselves, but the technique they developed survived, and eventually became our own.
If men distorted ballet in the aftermath of the French Revolution, women preserved it. They were not wild or athletic; they were dramatic and enchanting. Those women who did try their hand at the tricks and bombastic maneuvers practiced by men were dismissed as indecent, and the most talented and ambitious ballerinas turned their sights instead to the more subdued and established art of pantomime. Emilie Bigottini, following in Marie Gardel’s footsteps, set the tone in 1813 when she performed the lead role in Milon’s new ballet Nina, ou La Folle par Amour to enormous success. Thanks in large measure to her poignant acting, the ballet became a staple in the Opera repertory and in its wake pantomime classes were established as a regular feature of dance training at the Opera, inspiring a generation of young female dancers to emulate her example.44
Why did Nina and Bigottini strike such a chord? The plot, after all, was boilerplate, lifted from an old comic opera. Nina, daughter of a comte, is in love with the simple and adoring Germeuil, who courts her in a charming village scene—offering flowers, moving his seat closer to hers, taking her hand, and the like. Her father approves their union, but when the governor of the town arrives and suggests that Nina marry his son, the old comte cannot refuse. Nina is distressed, and Germeuil is frantic—in a state of high despair he flings himself into the sea. Hating her father and certain that her lover is dead, Nina gradually descends into madness. Without uttering a word, Bigottini was able to convey the girl’s increasingly tenuous hold on reality. In a dance that prefigured the mad scene of Giselle (1841), she touchingly and with limp despair reenacted her courtship with her lover.
Bigottini’s appeal in this and other ballets was twofold. First, she seemed to be almost single-handedly upholding a dying art. In sharp contrast to her male counterparts, she did not indulge in vain acrobatics, but maintained a naturally noble demeanor and used her body to communicate fine and delicate human emotions. As one critic rapturously put it, she brought forward the great tradition established by Noverre, who had made ballet “a dramatic work” rather than a mere “exercise in dance.” But even more important, Bigottini managed to pick up where Marie Sallé had left off, making the case once again for women as the true artists of the dance. She was much more than a one-dimensional coquette or rosière, and the depth and emotion of her acting reaffirmed the dramatic possibilities for all ballerinas. As male dancers were indulging in thrilling but dramatically obvious tricks, women were becoming more mysterious and internal.45
The problem, of course, was that Bigottini was hardly a dancer. She was a pantomime actress, and although she had shown that a woman could carry the dramatic weight of a ballet, she had done so with her face and gestures, not with the formal steps, postures, and movements of ballet. In this sense, Bigottini represented more of an end than a beginning, and her supporters were right when they lamented that she was the final gasp of the old pantomime ballet, which took stories and words rather than movement or music as its primary inspiration.
Yet Bigottini was also the beginning of something new. For the idea that women might replace men as the protagonists of ballet, that they might occupy the coveted places originally reserved for kings and heroes at the head of the art: this was a real breakthrough. The Revolution had done its work. In France, the old danse noble lay in ruins and the way had been cleared for the modern ballerina. It would take more than a pantomime actress, however, to fully effect the dramatic reversal that the revolutionary era had set in motion. It would take a woman who could gather up the scattered pieces of the old art and make sense of them in a ne
w way. She would have to find a new ideal and a new style, but she could not ignore the past: she would have to beat the new school at its own game—master the male technique of Vestris and Paul and return ballet to a high art on different and distinctly feminine terms. Such a woman did not yet exist, but in 1832 the Romantic imagination invented her: she was Marie Taglioni, La Sylphide.
*The theme of the parish priest who rips off his robes to reveal sans-culotte dress had also appeared in the 1793 opera La Fête de la Raison.
The very essence of ballet is poetic, deriving from dreams rather than from reality. About the only reason for its existence is to enable us to remain in the world of fantasy and escape from the people we rub shoulders with in the street. Ballets are the dreams of poets taken seriously.
—THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
Romanticism and modern art are one and the same thing … intimacy, spirituality, colour, yearning for the infinite.
—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
I submit that style, too, is an answer to a common want; but not so much to formulated problems as to felt difficulties of an emotional kind.…Style is fundamentally a pose, a stance, at times a self delusion, by which the people of any period meet the particular dilemmas of their day.
—JACQUES BARZUN
know Marie Taglioni. We know her from prints of La Sylphide, the Parisian ballet that made her famous in 1832: she is a wispy, winged creature, a confection of white tulle and rose perched delicately on toe, torso tilted slightly forward as if she were listening to a faint song. She is birdlike, quaint, and almost cloyingly sweet, and if there is a thought in her head, it is lost in the mists of her vaporous ethereality. She is the pink-tights-and-toe-shoes ballerina of girlish dreams—and feminist nightmares. Yet Marie Taglioni was one of the most important and influential ballerinas who ever lived. She galvanized a generation and drew some of Europe’s best literary minds to dance; she was an international celebrity—ballet’s first—and set the pattern for Margot Fonteyn, Melissa Hayden, Galina Ulanova, and others to follow. More than that, she radically changed her art: La Sylphide laid the way for the toe-shoes-and-tutus ballet we know today.
If Taglioni’s dainty, candy-coated image seems to undercut her artistic significance there are reasons. First, the image cannot tell us how she moved: it is static and incomplete, an inaccurate representation of her talents. But most importantly, it is anachronistic: what Taglioni looks like to us now is not what she looked like to audiences in the 1830s. They saw something quite different. To understand why she became an icon of her art, we thus need to climb behind the dreamy picture of the ballerina and see her—and La Sylphide—through the eyes of the men and women who first acclaimed her.
Marie Taglioni was born in 1804 into an extraordinary dynasty of dancers at a time of enormous flux and change in the art. Her father, Filippo Taglioni, was an Italian dancer from a long line of grotteschi performers. But if the family excelled in acrobatic and comic dancing, it also had a strong allegiance to the old French noble style. Filippo’s father, Carlo Taglioni, was a dancer from Turin, which at the time was French-speaking and Francophile, and in 1799 Filippo himself had made the pilgrimage to the French capital to study in the old noble style with Jean-François Coulon; Filippo’s brother and sister, also dancers, trained there too. He joined the Paris Opera briefly and worked with Pierre Gardel in La Dansomanie. And although he would leave in 1802 for Stockholm, Vienna, and a career on the German and Austro-Italian circuit, Filippo had been in Paris at a critical juncture: just after the Revolution, when the noble style was battered and changing but still, at least in the hands of old-guard artists like Gardel and Coulon, more or less intact. He thus belonged to the last generation of ballet masters with an aesthetic loyalty to the ancien régime. This mattered as Filippo Taglioni would later insist on a certain old-fashioned composure in his daughter’s otherwise iconoclastic dancing.
Marie was born in Stockholm, where her father was ballet master at the Swedish court (her mother, Sophie Hedwige Karsten, was the daughter of a well-known opera singer). But ballet in Stockholm was not what it had once been, another indication of the changing and unstable political circumstances shaping dance at the time. Ballet had a long history in Sweden stretching back to the seventeenth century, when its monarchs imported the ballet de cour in emulation of the French absolutist state. But after King Gustav III was assassinated in 1792, a growing sense of national pride and a rising merchant class and bourgeoisie forced an erosion of aristocratic privilege. Ballet was attacked as an expensive and immoral art that distracted society from more important religious and social duties. Sensing a dead end, Filippo moved on.
It was an itinerant existence, and the family was often separated. In 1813 Filippo was performing in Italy and Sophie was in Kassel with Marie and her brother when the Cossacks arrived in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat by the Russians. Ever resourceful, Sophie disguised herself as the wife of a departing French general and fled with her children to Paris. There they lived a frugal but stable life in modest rented apartments or (in one case) in rooms above a grocery. When Filippo could not send money, Marie’s mother gave harp lessons and took in sewing. Following family tradition, Marie studied ballet under Coulon, but she was an unlikely candidate for the dance: poorly proportioned, with a bent posture and skinny legs, she was famously ugly and endured endless teasing from her fellow students about her awkward and misshapen physique. Critics were later no more kind. One noted that she was “ill-made … almost deformed, quite without beauty and without any of those conspicuous exterior advantages that generally command success.”1
In 1821 Filippo was appointed ballet master for the court opera in Vienna. In a moment of spontaneous enthusiasm he arranged for Marie’s debut in the Habsburg capital, but upon her arrival from Paris, he panicked: in spite of her lessons with Coulon, Marie’s technique was below par and he knew she would never pass muster with Viennese audiences, accustomed to ever more bravura dancing. For Vienna too had changed: this was no longer the home of Maria Theresa and the confidently Francophile court of the ancien régime that had applauded the talents of ballet masters such as Noverre. In the early years of the nineteenth century the city had twice been defeated and seized by Napoleon, its people subjected to a humiliating occupation and devastating inflation and the Empire nearly dismembered. Metternich had come to power and made Habsburg rule an exemplar of conservatism, which—until the revolutionary upheavals of 1848—successfully moderated (and repressed) the growing social and political tensions that threatened to undermine imperial authority.
Beneath this staid and controlled public veneer, however, there was an edge. Cultural life had an undercurrent of nervous anxiety, openly expressed in dance. In these years the Viennese were avid social dancers, and they poured into palatial dance halls and entertainment complexes (the Apollo Palace accommodated four thousand) designed in part to “civilize” and contain the giddy energy of its patrons. Like Parisians, they danced the waltz; this popular dance, derived from Austrian and German folk forms, had by now become the emblem of an agitated and stirring Romanticism. Goethe’s Werther danced it with his beloved at a ball—and, deprived of her love, committed suicide. Weber elevated it to the realm of concert art with his dreamy Invitation to the Dance (1819).2 In early nineteenth-century Vienna the waltz still had some of its crude stomping movements, and although these were gradually smoothed away (gliding replaced the hops), the dance remained physically and sexually charged—the elegant sliding steps meant increased speed and vertiginous effect.
Similarly, at court the weight of tradition in dance had shifted away from Paris and toward Milan. Grotteschi Italian performers, with their openly acrobatic and sensational style, dominated ballet performances. It was not just the men—women too were unrestrained in their bravura. In one spectacular trick, attributed to the dancer Amalia Brugnoli, dancers blithely hiked themselves onto the tips of their toes and perched there for all to see: toe dancing. Among Italian dancers on the German and
Austro-Italian circuit this new trick stuck and became a widely performed feat. Thus the origins of what we today call pointe work lay not in a poetic vision of the ethereal, as is often thought, but in a crude stunt that was then later refined by Taglioni and others into something more elegant and elevated. This was neither the first nor the last time that popular Italian traditions would prod and undercut ballet, pushing it in new and unexpected directions.3
All of this changed Marie Taglioni. Faced with virtuoso dancers like Brugnoli and the fact of her own physical limitations and underdeveloped technique, she set out to remake herself. What followed was a seminal six-month training session, which she later described in notes for an unpublished memoir. On a raked practice floor erected in their apartment on the fashionable Graben, Filippo Taglioni trained his daughter daily: two hours in the morning dedicated to a series of arduous exercises, repeated many times on both legs, and two hours in the afternoon on adagio movements in (as she put it) “the antique manner,” in which Marie honed and refined the poses and postures of ballet, matching them to the line and proportions of Greek statuary. In emulation, she disdained the coquettish smiles and airs typical of ballerinas at the time and insisted instead on simple costumes and a placid and contented idealized facial composure. As she worked, Taglioni pushed her dancing in two seemingly opposed directions: simplicity and virtuosity. She stripped away a century of aristocratic affect and honed the exploits she and her father had picked up from Italian dancers.
But—and it is an important but—Taglioni also had to work around her own physical limitations. Her rounded back made her lean forward slightly (her father begged her to stand more upright), and lithographs show that she incorporated this stance into her technique, cunningly shifting her balance and realigning her limbs to accommodate her awkward proportions and foreshortened stance. She never looked perfectly aligned, a fact that contributed to her allure: slightly distorted proportions and compensatory adjustments gave her dancing a kind of compressed energy, not unlike the women painted by Ingres. Moreover, Taglioni further disguised her defects, and increased her range of movement, by developing extraordinary muscle power. When she trained, she held each pose to the count of one hundred—an agonizing challenge for even the strongest dancers today. Once she mastered a pose facing front, she would execute it again while slowly pivoting her body (often on half-pointe), like a rotating Greek statue.
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