Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  Finally, before bed, she worked for an additional two hours (for a total of six hours per day), this time exclusively on jumps. She began with exercises in which she bent her knees, back straight, in grand plié, so that she could touch the floor with her hands without leaning over, then pushed herself up to full pointe on the tips of her toes—a move requiring enormous power in the back and legs. Finally, in subsequent iterations, the push became a jump. But (unlike today’s dancers) she jumped with bent knees, pressing her full weight into the air with her calves, toes, thighs, and buttocks. She disparaged dancers who straightened their knees too stiffly in the air, springing up “like toads.” The idea was to make the jump appear effortless and soft, rounded and feminine—never stiff or strained with effort. She repeated all of these exercises many, many times, and they formed the basis for her training for years to come.4

  The effect was radical: even in paintings and lithographs made in the 1820s and ’30s one can see that Taglioni’s body was not in the least lithe or wispy but had an impressive and heavy muscularity that gave her unusual strength and endurance. As she herself later remarked, positions that other dancers found exhausting were, for her, mere resting poses. This kind of physical power was not unprecedented: as we have seen, Vestris and the male dancers of early nineteenth-century Paris also developed a strenuous training program, and their bodies were similarly muscular and sinewy. But the likeness stops there: Vestris’s new school openly emphasized bravura tricks, and pirouettes in particular. Moreover, theirs was considered a male technique. Taglioni, by contrast, worked hard to wrap her considerable vigor in a soft aura of femininity and grace. She focused on line and form and had no interest in pirouettes per se: multiple spinning turns had no place in her training or performances. She combined the force of Vestris or Paul with the discreet elegance of a lady.

  Nowhere was this refinement more important than in pointe work. Marie was adamant that the practice of hoisting the body up onto the tips of the toes à la Brugnoli was crass and to be avoided. But she did not disregard the appeal of this new move; instead, she practiced for hours so that she could rise to her toes elegantly, without raising her arms, grimacing, or in any way revealing the effort involved. We know, however, that Taglioni did not dance on full pointe, like today’s ballerinas. Her shoes, which we still have, are not so different from the fashionable street shoes worn by women at the time. Made of soft satin, they had leather soles and a rounded or square toe, with delicate ribbons attached at the arch that laced up around the ankle: they were not hard or boxed like today’s pointe shoe but soft and round except for a layer of supportive darning sewn underneath the metatarsal and toe.

  The undersoles of these old shoes are revealingly scuffed and worn at the metatarsal: Taglioni stood on a very high half-pointe and danced on what today’s dancers would consider an in-between or transitional part of the foot: more than half-pointe, but less than full pointe. This is an extremely awkward place to stand, and nineteenth-century dancers often bound their toes tightly into small shoes (tiny feet were prized, and Marie’s shoes were at least two sizes smaller than those of today’s average dancer), which squeezed and stiffened the metatarsal, making it easier to stand on—but also easier to dislocate bones. These light and fragile but tightly stitched shoes had to support considerable weight and took seam-splitting punishment: Taglioni typically went through two or three pairs in a single performance.5

  Marie Taglioni’s foot on pointe was an object of romantic fantasy across Europe. This print, with its Russian inscription, shows the contrast between sheer muscle (bulging calf) and cloud-like ephemera that so mesmerized audiences. (4.1)

  Taglioni’s dancing was thus a strange new composite: it had a strong French aristocratic cast but was tempered and offset by a wilder Italian virtuosity and the difficulties posed by her own irregular proportions. That it was in the Habsburg capital that she first began to discover the common frontier between these contradictory ways of moving should come as no surprise. Although much had changed since the days of Noverre, Vienna remained a vital cultural crossroads both geographically and historically. It was here that old and new, Italian, German, and French came up against one another—and at moments recombined. But because Vienna was a crossroads, Marie Taglioni, like so many other itinerant performers, soon moved on. As her reputation grew, she was drawn back to her childhood world and ballet’s capital city: Paris.

  If Taglioni found her style in Vienna, it was up to the French to say what it would mean. When Taglioni made her debut at the Paris Opera in 1827 the public response was sensational, and in the course of the next three years critics poured forth praise, often sputtering superlatives as they groped for a critical language that would do justice to her dancing: “epoch-making”; “a radical revolution in classical dance … four dynasties of dancers, from Mademoiselle Camargo to Madame Gardel, killed off in one strike.” In review after review, critics gratefully hailed the death of tasteless and “violent” dancing in which sweaty, breathless dancers (those Vestris-inspired men) threw themselves into pirouettes, hurled their bodies across the stage, and perched disconsolately on one leg while “knitting” complicated steps with the other. This horrendous school, critics now claimed, had finally been halted in its tracks. Taglioni fused the elegance and refinement of a lost aristocratic past with a new and airy spirituality: she was, as one observer rejoiced, the perfect “Restoration” ballerina.6

  This was not an easy thing to be. The restoration of the Bourbons to the French throne (1815–30) was a legitimist effort to end the French Revolution once and for all and reestablish France as a conservative power based on a gothicized Christian past. Taglioni’s dancing seemed to echo a more general and pressing desire for reconciliation—for healing the country’s sharp social and political divisions. In this sense, Taglioni’s French training stood her in good stead: her air and manners were imbued with a reassuring old-world restraint. But there was much more to her appeal than that. In literature and art a paradoxical Romanticism, bold but deeply nostalgic, had taken hold. Ballet had been slow to follow: mired in its own internal struggles with its aristocratic past, it seemed increasingly marginal. Taglioni came as a revelation because she transcended virtuosity and opened ballet to a whole new range of movement and ideas. Here, finally, was a dancer who, as one critic enthused, “applied Romanticism to dance.” He was right, but what exactly this meant only became clear in the years of political upheaval that followed.7

  In 1830, revolution returned to Paris: in “three glorious days” of street fighting, angry crowds rejected the rigid and reactionary Bourbon monarch, Charles X, who finally abdicated and fled into exile, making way for his more liberal-minded cousin, the Duc d’Orléans. The new king took a new title: he was to be Louis-Philippe I, the first of a new line. And indeed, Louis-Philippe did appear to be different from kings past. His family was known for its opposition to Bourbon absolutism, and he had been raised on Rousseau; his own father had voted for the death of King Louis XVI (and been guillotined for the privilege), and he himself had spent the Terror in impoverished exile.

  Thus when he took the throne, Louis-Philippe did not call himself “King of France” but rather “King of the French.” He was to be the “Citizen King” who flew a tricolor flag, carried an umbrella for a scepter, and presided over France’s first popularly proclaimed “bourgeois monarchy.” His reign was cast as a fresh beginning, a zero-hour monarchy that would break the debilitating cycle of revolution and reaction that continued to rend French politics and culture. And although the reality proved more complicated, the basic idea animating his rule was straightforward: economic prosperity and a stolidly bourgeois ethic of hard work and moderation would tame radical politics. Taking the gains of the Revolution without its excesses, Louis-Philippe hoped to stabilize French social and political life around a juste milieu culture.

  The new regime’s impact on dance was immediate. In 1831, the Paris Opera was placed under the private management of a �
��director-entrepreneur,” although the theater continued to receive royal subsidies in recognition of its importance as a symbol of French high culture, and a government commission also had a say in its affairs. The idea was nonetheless to throw the theater into the marketplace and make it a viable commercial enterprise subject to competition and beholden to public taste. The man awarded the contract was one Louis Véron (1798–1867). Trained as a doctor, Véron had made a small fortune when a pharmacist friend willed him the formula for a popular chest ointment. In 1829, he used some of the money to found a journal, La Revue de Paris, devoted (as he liked to boast) to new literature and art. Two years later he took on the Paris Opera. This was not an act of disinterested public service: in the five short years of his directorship, he made the lumbering institution profitable—and walked away with a substantial part of the proceeds.

  As critics and satirists endlessly reminded their readers, Véron was almost a caricature of Louis-Philippe’s bourgeois man: vain and self-important but also hardworking and an astute businessman. The German poet Heinrich Heine despised his “red jolly face with its small blinking eyes” buried in fashionably high shirt collars and called him “the god of sheer sensuous materialism … sneering at all spirit or soul.” Indeed, Véron said he wanted to make the Opera the “Versailles” of the bourgeoisie. To this end, he lowered ticket prices—but only so much: his audiences were made up largely of government officials, professionals, and businessmen. To make his audiences feel more at home Véron redesigned the theater. The interior was stripped of ornament and gold and redone with cozier and more subdued colors and themes, the boxes were reduced in size and the temperature regulated with state-of-the-art steam heat, and the benches in the parterre and galleries were outfitted with backs or replaced with comfy armchairs.8

  Véron also had a flair for marketing. He lived an extravagant, dandyish life that earned him ample press and notoriety. His carriage was pulled by a handsome fleet of horses with scarlet ribbons flying in their manes, and he liked to parcel out jewels and luxurious gifts to his dancers—on one occasion reportedly inviting members of the corps de ballet to dinner and presenting each with bonbons wrapped in thousand-franc notes. Véron understood all too well the attraction of beautiful ballerinas, and to facilitate the “exchange of goods” between them and their rich admirers, he opened the foyer de la danse—the room where dancers warmed up for a performance—to inquiring gentlemen. In 1833, a group of these gentlemen went so far as to institutionalize their obsession for ballet: they formed the Jockey Club, located adjacent to the theater and purportedly devoted to Anglophile equestrian affairs, although the activities of its members tended more to social gossip and the “protection” of ballerinas.

  Finally, Véron recruited Auguste Levasseur (and paid him splendidly) to form and lead what became known as “the claque.” This was a group of professional clappers hired to guide public opinion. Levasseur consulted closely with Véron, attended rehearsals, and studied the score for a given production—but he also took bribes from artists and their supporters. On the night of a performance, he marked himself by sporting brightly colored clothing and strategically placed his men throughout the audience (Véron and the artists provided the tickets, gratuit). Levasseur carried a cane, which he tapped at the appropriate moment, unleashing a round of applause, bravos, and stomping by his men designed to carry the public in its enthusiasm. This was not resented; to the contrary, Véron’s claim that the claque was a moderating force that “put an end to all quarrels” and stopped “unjust coalitions” of fans from disrupting performances appears to have been widely accepted.9

  Nothing, however, could moderate the storm that greeted the premiere of Robert le Diable in 1831, and in particular the “ballet of the nuns” in the third act, featuring Marie Taglioni as the mother superior. The opera is best known as the first of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Grand Operas: it was a five-act extravaganza that stretched over four hours in length and included an expanded orchestra, a large chorus, lavish stage effects, and extended ballets by Filippo Taglioni. Originally conceived as a shorter comic opera, it included a melodramatic libretto by the veteran boulevard writer Eugene Scribe and spectacular sets by Pierre Cicéri, who had also made a career crossing over from the opera to the boulevard theaters.

  Satirical print of the claque in action: with their enlarged hands and flushed faces, these paid fans attempt to shape taste and seem to overpower the rest of the audience, which appears gray and unformed in the background. (4.2)

  Echoing themes from Goethe’s Faust and Weber’s Freischütz, Robert le Diable deployed every trick of the trade to pull audiences into an eerie and supernatural world. During the ballet, for example, a strange and lurid moonlight set the mood, conveyed by gas jets suspended in boxes from the flies. Gas lighting, introduced to the theater in 1822, was still novel and impressive. Meyerbeer went further still, saying that he wanted the scene to have a “diorama-like” effect, drawn on the even more innovative techniques developed by Louis Daguerre in which large paintings were spectacularly lit from behind and moved in a circular fashion around an audience (prefiguring film). To accentuate the stage lighting, Véron and Cicéri dimmed the house chandeliers and cut the footlights, thus plunging the audience in darkness and making the stage a glowing focal point. Trapdoors, vast tableaux, and warped visual perspectives echoed the music and helped evoke the troubled state of Robert’s mind.10

  Inspired by a fourteenth-century legend, the opera tells of Robert, who, unbeknownst to himself, is the son of a mortal mother and the devil. Robert loves a Sicilian princess, Isabelle, but his devil father (disguised as a loyal companion, Bertram) secretly foils his ambitions to win her hand and connives to seduce Robert to hell instead. He urges Robert to seize the magic cypress branch lying on the tomb of Saint Rosalie in an old and abandoned convent cloister, telling him that he can use its black magic to attain Isabelle. Weak-willed and susceptible, Robert goes to the monastery, where he encounters a group of ghostly nuns risen from the dead—and bent on his destruction.

  These are no ordinary nuns: in life they had violated their religious principles and lapsed into an existence of debauchery and decadence. In death they were bound to the devil. Thus, in the eerie light of the monastery—which Cicéri modeled after the ruins of the sixteenth-century cloister at Montfort-l’Amaury—the mother superior, Héléna (Marie Taglioni), and a group of the Opera’s most voluptuous women emerge from their graves or from the hellish depths (ascending through trapdoors in the floor); others enter from the wings, clothed in full religious habit with arms crossed in deathly repose at their chests. As they dance, however, the holy garments fall away and their true characters are revealed: dressed in thin white tunics, they ply Robert with wine and perform lascivious dances. Robert tries to escape, but they form lines that sweep him into their midst and they circle threateningly around him, as the music builds.

  One contemporary artist depicted these women as half-nude bacchantes, with wild hair and bare legs thrown up in chaotic ecstasy; another lithograph, by contrast, portrayed them as genteel young ladies with ringlets and white dresses. Taglioni was both: seeing that Robert’s conscience is strong, she abandons her orgiastic seduction and instead performs a “graceful and decent” dance, all the while leading him unwittingly to the fated branch of Saint Rosalie. She kneels before him pleadingly: he succumbs, kisses her on the brow, and takes up the branch. As he takes it, however, thunder crashes, the nuns turn to specters, and demons swarm the stage in an “infernal chorus” that rages until the curtain falls. In the final acts, Taglioni’s seduction notwithstanding, Robert is saved—not by his own courage or inner conviction but thanks to the efforts of his half-sister, who inadvertently discovers that the devil’s time is up: Bertram is sucked back to hell through the trapdoor, leaving Robert blissfully free to marry his beloved Isabelle.11

  Robert le Diable was one of the most successful operas of the nineteenth century: within three years it had been performed a hundr
ed times, and by the mid-1860s it would accumulate a stunning five hundred performances. At its premiere on November 21, 1831, however, the impassioned public and critical response had as much to do with politics as it did with art: two days after the premiere, the silk workers of Lyon led a violent uprising. Several left-wing groups attempted to escalate the revolt, but the workers wanted order and settled: nonetheless, the incident served as a threatening reminder that the forces of radical change had not been stayed by Louis-Philippe’s accession to the throne. To the contrary, the “social question” was increasingly urgent and would continue to plague the regime until Louis-Philippe’s fall in the revolutionary upheavals of 1848. Critics who wrote about Robert le Diable in the weeks and months following the Lyon uprising could not help themselves: they saw the opera through the lens of France’s revolutionary past and present—and Taglioni played a central role.

  For the critic of the legitimist Gazette de France, Robert represented France. Like him, the country had been born of a venerable monarchy and a revolutionary demon, and “she has two opposed natures, two contradictory tendencies, two competing advisors.” Taglioni and her “criminal women” (as another critic called them) represented a vile revolutionary force disguised as purity. In Taglioni’s saintly image and classical perfection, Robert saw “his mother’s features; but soon enough, besotted and subjugated by one of these daughters of hell,” he seizes the branch and joins his fate to the devil. France faced a similar dilemma: “Two principles dispute our soul and our will; one drags us down, surrounding us with prestige and flattering our passions; the other points up the path traced by the hand of our common mother, and with it the way to safety, rest, happiness. Shall we let ourselves follow Bertram and his perfidious recommendations?”12