Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  The critic for The Globe, which had hosted Romantic poets and writers since its founding in 1824 and (like many of them) had embraced more socialist and utopian ideas after the 1830 Revolution, saw a direct connection between Robert le Diable’s third act, with its “raucous howling” and “groaning” and its heavy steps and “stone-statue” dance (the nuns), and the chaos in Lyon. It was not Robert, he said, but the French people who were damned, and in a flight of idealism he called on women and artists to save the workers from the eternal chaos of revolution. This may sound far-fetched, but Balzac heard the violent despair in Meyerbeer’s music too and wrote about it in Gambara. Hector Berlioz, who had composed an eerie ballet to Goethe’s Faust (1829) and whose Symphonie Fantastique (1830) featured a disturbing movement entitled Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath, detected it as well: “The hand of death still weighs so heavily upon these sad creatures that one seems to hear its impact, the creaking articulations of galvanized corpses, and see the hideous movements they produce. Horrible! Horrible! Unspeakably grotesque! These few pages are in my opinion the most prodigiously inspiring of modern dramatic music.”13

  But it was the German poet and writer Heinrich Heine who provided the most incisive analysis of the opera and its controversial ballet. Robert, he insisted, was not France or the French people but Louis-Philippe himself. Torn between his revolutionary father and his ancien régime mother, he languished in a state of eternal indecision and torment:

  In vain the ghosts of the Convention, rising from their graves in the guise of Revolutionary nuns, try to seduce him; in vain Robespierre, in the shape of Mlle Taglioni, gives him the accolade—he withstands all temptations, all seductions, he is guided by his love for a princess of both the Sicilies, who is very pious, and he, too, grows pious, and finally we see him in the bosom of the Church, priests muttering around him and befogged with incense.

  Heine, whose political sympathies lay with the people and a strong Bonaparte-like leadership, hated Robert—and Louis-Philippe—for being weak and vacillating, and for his studied and disingenuous antiheroic stance: the “bourgeois” king pretended to be liberal while “hiding the scepter of absolutism in his umbrella.” Indeed, Heine could not help slyly noting that at the end of the performance he attended, Bertram fell back to hell through the trapdoor but the machinist forgot to close the trap: Robert tumbled down after him.14

  Taglioni thus cut a strange image: she was both saintly and a force of anarchy and dissolution, Robespierre and the ancien régime wrapped into a single disturbing vision. The theme of unveiling and the shedding of garments, the dancers’ openly sexual movements, the rotted church and nuns gone wrong—all of these things recalled the drama of the revolutionary festivals and the ever-popular trope of the nun-whore and ballerina-courtesan. Some thought this crass and offensive: Mendelssohn called the dance “vulgar,” and one English aristocrat found the sight of these nun-bacchantes simply “revolting.” Taglioni herself was uncomfortable with her role: its X-rated content cut against the grain of her self-consciously demure style. She was, as one critic sympathetically noted, “a bit too angelic to be damned.” She asked to be released from the production, but Meyerbeer and Véron held her to contract and would not let her go, at least not right away. They understood that the power of her performance lay precisely in her discomfort: “too angelic” was part of her allure.15

  Robert le Diable opened ballet to the world of literary Romanticism. In the years to come, a generation of poets, writers, and artists found themselves drawn to Taglioni and to dance. Heine, Stendhal, Balzac, Théophile Gautier, and Jules Janin all wrote about ballet. The poems and stories of Sir Walter Scott and E. T. A. Hoffmann, Victor Hugo and Charles Nodier, served as inspiration for ballet masters, and both Heine and Gautier wrote ballet librettos of their own. Perhaps most important of all, and building on Noverre, these poets and writers understood that ballet was not merely an aspect of opera but had a distinct language of its own: they were its first informed critics. Nor was their role merely responsive or passive, for their writings defined Taglioni’s image and played a critical role in promoting her career. She was, in more ways than one, their creation. She was keenly aware of her debt: poorly educated but curious, she immediately recognized herself in their words, and her personal notebooks were filled with reviews and pithy quotations (neatly copied in her own hand) from the leading figures of French Romanticism, including François-René de Chateaubriand, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, George Sand, Balzac, and (naturally) Gautier himself. Her favorite author, she noted, was Sir Walter Scott.

  Which brings us to La Sylphide. The ballet was written and conceived by the tenor Adolphe Nourrit, who had performed the lead role in Robert le Diable. La Sylphide had an adequate but undistinguished score by the composer Jean Schneitzhoeffer and evocative sets by the trusted Cicéri. Nourrit, however, did not compose the story for La Sylphide on his own: the ballet was inspired by Trilby, ou le lutin d’Argail (1822), a fantastical tale by the writer and poet Charles Nodier (1780–1844). When Nodier wrote Trilby he had just returned from a trip to Scotland and was smitten with the writings of Scott. Trilby was thus set in a picturesque Highland village and told of the love between a demonic spirit and a young married woman. The spirit visits the woman in her dreams, and when her husband and a local monk attempt to exorcise it she falls into a state of despair and takes her own life.

  Nourrit adapted the story for his ballet. James, a Scottish villager, is betrothed to Effie, a pretty local girl. The wedding is set, but James is haunted by an ephemeral and fleeting spirit of the air: a sylphide. Invisible to all but him, she flits seductively around the stage and finally interrupts his wedding, rudely grabbing the ring before James can place it on Effie’s finger. Wild with confused desire, he abandons his betrothed and chases after the sylphide. But he is trapped in an impossible situation: the sylphide loves James and will perish if he marries another, but she is also entrapped in her nature and will die if she is held, embraced, or pinned down. James, of course, is desperate to attain her, and ill-advisedly takes counsel from a sorceress who gives him an evil magic scarf with which to capture the elusive creature. When he does, however, the sylphide’s wings fall off (and the music echoes “J’ai perdu mon Euridice” from Gluck’s Orpheo and Eurydice). Her sister sylphs swarm to her side, and she dies in their arms. They cover her face with the scarf and lift her, angel-like, into the clouds. Meanwhile, the sorceress appears and cackles knowingly; in the distance James sees Effie marrying another man. Overcome, he gazes at the lifeless sylphide and falls unconscious.16

  The link between La Sylphide and Charles Nodier mattered: he was a vital connection to a distinctive branch of French Romanticism. Nodier’s father had been an ardent Jacobin, and during the Terror the fourteen-year-old Nodier witnessed bloody executions that later filled him with horror and disgust. As a young man, he (like Heine) was drawn to the charismatic Napoleon, though he also despised the emperor’s tyrannical streak (and was imprisoned in 1802 for writing an anti-Bonapartist poem). He became a royalist of sorts, although he was also obsessed and haunted by the Revolution’s grandeur and the freedoms it promised. Bitterly disappointed with what he perceived to be the decadence of his own time and plagued with nervous tension and depression, Nodier plunged into fantasy, mysticism, and the occult arts. He wrote about sleep, suicide, and madness; ghosts, nightmares, and opium-induced states of ecstasy. For him, the imagination was not just an artistic tool—it promised salvation, however fleeting, from the profound disappointments of politics.17

  In the 1820s Nodier hosted an influential literary salon that drew together artists who shared his acute pessimism and sense of cultural exhaustion—what Balzac identified as a profound “disenchantment” with the world. Many of the poets and writers who influenced or cared about ballet were there: Hugo and Lamartine, but also the less well-known writer and journalist François Adolphe Loève-Veimars (c. 1801–1855/6), who shared the group’s keen interest in German Romant
icism. Paris-born, Loève-Veimars was raised in Hamburg, and although of Jewish origins, he later converted to Christianity and was drawn to mysticism, spirits, and the occult. In 1829 he published in Véron’s La Revue de Paris the first translation of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s stories. Hoffmann’s interest in the “sixth sense,” invisible irrational forces, and magnetism fed the French public’s growing obsession with the supernatural, and both Gautier and Heine wrote at length and admiringly about his work. Indeed, the “ballet of the nuns” had been inspired in part by Hoffmann’s story “The Devil’s Elixir.” Loève-Veimars had his own (unfulfilled) aspirations to direct the Paris Opera and was an enthusiastic admirer of Taglioni.

  The critic Jules Janin (1804–1874) was a somewhat different case. Fervently legitimist, he initially opposed Louis-Philippe but then became an avid supporter known for his satisfied and dandified bourgeois lifestyle—a kind of Véron of the literary world. Janin’s apartment on the fashionable rue de Vaugirard was crammed with paintings, sculptures, and antiquities, including a curtained alcove containing a large crucifix, a host of rosary beads, and a white lacquered bed decorated with gilt ornaments. At some level, however, he too was ill at ease with the brazen materialism of the July Monarchy: he wrote longingly of the lost spiritual sensibilities of “my beautiful eighteenth century” and saw ballet as an aesthetic antidote to the crass materialism of his time. Like Gautier, he became an ardent “Taglionist” and a constant champion of her art.18

  Even the singer Nourrit might be said to have belonged to this disenchanted group. Known for his fierce political activism and impassioned performances (he was the heroic revolutionary in Daniel Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici and in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell), he fought (and sang) on the barricades in 1830, led audiences at the Paris Opera in rousing performances of “La Marseillaise,” and eventually joined the Saint-Simonian utopian socialists.* Later, however, he too became disillusioned with politics: “the bourgeoisie is killing us” he wrote, “it has taken on all the vices of the old decrepit aristocracy, without inheriting any of its virtues.” Plagued by self-doubt and beset with difficulties in his career and art, Nourrit took his own life in 1839. The composer Franz Liszt, who knew and admired Nourrit, later noted that “his melancholy passion for the Beautiful had already undermined him and under the domination of this haunting feeling his brow seemed to be turning into stone—a feeling always expressed by the breaking out of despair too late for man to remedy it.”19

  La Sylphide drew directly from the well of these despondent but idealistic and nostalgia-tinged feelings. Today we tend to see the ballet as a quaint relic of a misty Romanticism, a paean to impossible love and poetic dreams. But at the time, La Sylphide had none of the smooth assurance of today’s productions. Physically and sensually charged, it was a poignant reminder of the disenchantment felt by the postrevolutionary generation. It was all there: melancholia, spiritual ideals, and suppressed erotic desire wrought into an escapist fantasy. James is a weak and indecisive man, a Robert le Diable–like character driven by his passions: easy prey for a seductive sylphide and a scheming witch. The sylphide, by contrast, is a firm-willed protagonist, a woman of unnerving contrasts and tensions: she is strong but frail, sexually alluring but chaste, in love but fiercely independent. It is no accident that the ballet opens with James slumped on a chair asleep and the sylphide (Taglioni) on her knees at his side: he is dreaming, but she is alert and alive—emotionally remote but filled with desire. (It is she, we later learn, who visits James at night and animates his amorous dreams.) She flits around as the music quickens, agitating his peaceful state, and finally drops a kiss on his forehead. He awakens and pursues her, but in vain—she disappears up the chimney.

  Indeed, the sylphide—light, airy, always in flight—appears perfectly free. In the first act James is drawn to her precisely because she is unconstrained by the mundane conventions of social life, which he is so desperate to escape. Effie, by contrast, is the public face of a good bourgeois woman, bound to hearth and home. With her, James could settle down. He does not quite wish to, of course, and in the second act he enters the sylphide’s wild and forested abode: it is private and intimate, an imagined paradise of nature and impulse teeming with fluttering sylphides who (aided by wires) fly around the stage alighting at whim on flowers and trees. In the forest, Taglioni dances with unpredictable spontaneity, her impetuous, bounding steps a revolt against prescribed choreographic patterns or fixed musical figures. Individualistic to the point of self-destruction, she cherishes her freedom and eschews social obligation. She is the way she dances—fleeting and unattainable, her liberty the condition of her existence.20

  Marie Taglioni in the opening pose of La Sylphide. (4.3)

  As Taglioni flitted across the stage, she appeared ephemeral and light, as if she had left the dross of the world behind. Yet in order to produce this spiritual or supernatural effect, she did not defy gravity or her own physicality: on the contrary, to stand—or flit—on toe is to send the body weight down into the ground with ever-greater force, creating an illusion of lightness. The tips of her toes were comparable to today’s stiletto heels, taken to an extreme: the full weight of the body was concentrated onto a small pinpoint, making the body appear to float or ascend. The idea was not to take off but precisely to skim the floor, hinting that the dancer belongs to both human and supernatural worlds and that she can hover eternally between them. It was thus a dance built on paradox: a weighted weightlessness and muscular spirituality that made Taglioni seem both earthy and elsewhere at the same time.

  The Scottish setting added to the Romantic pathos: in the early nineteenth-century French imagination, the Highlands stood for a proud people reclaiming their distinctive national life from an oppressive English overlord. The ancient Gaelic writings of Ossian—the supposed Homer of the Scots—were translated and much admired. It would later be revealed that Ossian and the whole kilted Highland cultural tradition that gave him life were as ephemeral as the spirit creatures that inhabited La Sylphide: the tradition had been invented from whole cloth by Scots as a cultural weapon in their struggle against the English. But at the time Sir Walter Scott was an engaged partisan, and when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo and Paris occupied, the kilted Highlanders (who played a small part in the war) paraded the city’s boulevards. Their heroism and colorful costumes captured the Parisian imagination, and Scott’s novels were translated, fêted, and widely read. In La Sylphide, James was thus an Ossian-like figure, a common-man poet in search of high ideals in the mythic forests of Scotland.

  The image of the sylphide, however, had other origins. She was not the invention of Nourrit, Nodier, or Taglioni: sylphides belonged to a long heritage of occult superstition and magic, part of the world of the merveilleux that had inspired ballet masters at least since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was an oral and popular tradition, but in the late seventeenth century the French abbé (and occultist) Montfaucon de Villars had written a book detailing some of its widely held beliefs. The world, he noted, contained four essential elements, air, earth, water, and fire, and each element had a corresponding “genie”: sylphs, gnomes, undines, and salamanders, respectively. Sylphs and sylphides, he explained, were made of pure atoms of air and yet they were mortal; the elements of which they were composed could decompose. They were less than angels but more than men, enemies of the devil and servants of God. Alexander Pope drew on the abbé’s work when he wrote of sylphs in The Rape of the Lock (1712), and his poem was later the pretext for a ballet in Paris.

  In late eighteenth-century France this kind of occult thinking was taken up by anti-Enlightenment writers and illuminists—people who really did believe in angels, spirits, devils (and sylphs). But sylphs and sylphides were not just airy and angelic: others also saw them as sexual creatures who visited in the night “to bestow supreme happiness,” although paradoxically they were also perfectly chaste (whether they could make a woman pregnant was a matter of some speculation). Afte
r the Revolution, the appeal of sylphs and sylphides did not diminish. To the contrary: in the early nineteenth century, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas (père), among others, wrote poems about them, and the popular songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger composed a song, “La Sylphide,” to the tune of “Je ne sais plus ce que je veux.” Nodier, Gautier, Heine, Hoffmann, and others were all taken with these “invisible nations” of magical figures.21

  But perhaps the most revealing writing about sylphides came from François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), doyen of early French Romanticism and a seminal figure in French literary and political life. Born to an impoverished noble family in Brittany, Chateaubriand, like Nodier, came of age with the disruption and violence of the Revolution. Barely twenty-one when it erupted, he was deeply affected both by its “gigantic conception” and by its blatant cruelty and terror. Overcome by the exhaustion and collapse of everything he once knew, Chateaubriand served in the émigré army and went briefly into exile in London. His disillusionment with the optimism of Enlightenment rationalism deepened; “awash in passion” (as he put it) and plagued by intense feelings of ennui, he became increasingly absorbed in the idea of a preabsolutist Christian and medieval past that might revitalize politics and open the way to the unbounded spirituality he so craved.