Consider, for example, his fascination with the ballet master Jules Perrot. Degas painted and drew Perrot several times, showing him as an old man presiding over rehearsals and dance classes or collapsed in a chair. Perrot was by then retired (for one painting Degas worked from an old portrait photograph) but his firm if disheveled presence in these works recalled a tradition that Degas clearly recognized, even as he departed from it in his own art. Thus in The Dance Class Perrot appears aged and shrunken relative to the youthful, full-bodied ballerinas surrounding him. He is partly in shadow, whereas they are all white tulle and light. Yet his darkened feet and legs blend with the floorboards, giving him a planted and weighted feel, accentuated by his carved wooden cane, which provides a visual anchor to the painting. Moreover, he is the only man present, and his brightly colored shirt centers the viewer’s attention: he is a strong presence, like an old oak, even if the dancers mostly mill about him adjusting costumes, seemingly unaware of his authority and the continuity of tradition he represents.
Degas also made two paintings of the ballet of the nuns from Robert le Diable, both of which depict the dancers as blurred and shrouded ghostly figures on a faraway stage. They are seen from the point of view of a group of black-suited gentlemen and musicians, whose sharply articulated presence dominates the foreground of the paintings. Degas’s subject is not the stage but the men, who are restless and inattentive, barely aware of the dance they are watching. Yet the blurred, distant image of the dancers also holds our eye: the nuns of the Romantic ballet are still there, however faintly. Indeed, when Degas wrote a sonnet about the kind of dancers he liked to paint, he looked fondly back to Marie Taglioni, entreating this “princess of arcadia” to “ennoble and shape, smiling at my choice / this new little being, with her bold look.” But he also coveted his dancers’ real and gritty urban stance: “to honor my known taste, let her keep her own savor / And perpetuate in golden palaces her street-bred race.”50
It was an ironic but fitting end to an extraordinary moment in dance. La Sylphide had given ballet a new form, but by the time Degas painted his “street-bred race,” the Romantic ballet was a mere shadow of itself, more symbol than art. Indeed, the future of La Sylphide and Giselle—and ballet—lay elsewhere. Giselle was mounted in Russia in 1842 by a little-known French ballet master and later staged by Jules Perrot himself, assisted by the young French dancer Marius Petipa. When Petipa became ballet master of the Imperial Theaters, he kept the ballet alive, changing it as he saw fit: the mechanical flights were eventually dropped, for example, and the wili dance of Act Two expanded. It was this Giselle that was finally returned to Paris by the Ballets Russes in the early decades of the twentieth century.
As for La Sylphide, it too was exported to the Russian Imperial Theaters, where it survived in bastardized forms well into the next century. But no one preserved and used the memory of this old French ballet more lovingly than the Danes. In 1834 the Danish dancer August Bournonville, who had studied in Paris with Vestris in the 1820s, returned to the French capital for a visit and saw Marie Taglioni dance “her” ballet. Tremendously impressed, he bought a copy of the scenario and took it back to Copenhagen. There he mounted his own version with new music in 1836, and La Sylphide became the basis of an independent and distinctively Danish tradition, a lasting monument to the fleeting memory of Marie Taglioni and her art.
*Saint-Simon believed in the power of industry and science to remake society in a more egalitarian image, and his followers established socialist circles and communes in France in the 1830s and ’40s. His interest in music and the arts led several musicians to align themselves with his cause.
*The Parisian world of the Moulin Rouge would later be nostalgically documented by the filmmaker Jean Renoir in French Cancan (1954), which brings to life his father’s paintings and passion for dance.
My proper calling is for the Romantic … my entire poetic sphere is Nordic. There may be something French in the trimmings, but the foundation is completely Danish.
—AUGUST BOURNONVILLE
At our Theatre, thank Heaven, things are completely different, and despite their propensity for imitation, the Danish people have too sharp an eye for the true and the natural to allow themselves to be fooled by the delusions of great nations.
—AUGUST BOURNONVILLE
Theatrical life seemed to him a magical picture of happiness and excellence.
—HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
(1805–1879) owes his fame to the twentieth century. His ballets, and especially his version of La Sylphide (1836), are now performed the world over, and his school and style of dance enjoy a prominence far exceeding anything they achieved in his own lifetime: the New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Paris Opera Ballet, and London’s Royal Ballet are all deeply indebted to Bournonville’s artistry. In the nineteenth century, however, his ballets were little known outside of his native Denmark, and when they were performed elsewhere, they were often regarded as old-fashioned and quaint: homespun dances from a remote Scandinavian world with scant appeal for a “modern” public taken with grander forms of spectacle.
Bournonville was old-fashioned. Partly this was the consequence of longevity: he directed the Royal Danish Ballet virtually unbroken from 1830 until his retirement in 1877 and in the course of his reign deepened but rarely strayed from his original conception—which was both French and Romantic.* Being Danish helped: in the course of the nineteenth century, Denmark was reduced from a significant Baltic power to an isolated and provincial state, a shrinking territory at the edge of Europe. For ballet, it became an enclave, a world apart where Bournonville’s style could—and did—remain sheltered and untouched well into the twentieth century.
Moreover, Denmark’s legendary political stability made it a safe haven from the revolutionary impulses and social upheavals rending ballet and the arts in France and across the Continent. It was in Denmark that the French Romantic ballet, pressed into distinctly Danish forms, survived best. And when Europe finally emerged from a century of revolution and war, this continuity would prove a boon: in this out-of-the-way Scandinavian capital, artists and dancers could retrieve their own lost heritage, carefully and deliberately preserved for them in fine detail.
August Bournonville was an unlikely Dane. His father, Antoine Bournonville, was a French dancer born in Lyon in 1760 whose career followed the by now familiar pathways of the European ballet circuit: he was trained in Maria Theresa’s Vienna under the tutelage of the great ballet master Jean-Georges Noverre and followed Noverre to the Paris Opera in the late 1770s. But when Noverre was edged out, Antoine moved on: to the Swedish court with its (as one courtier put it) “well-drilled ballet” and enlightened culture. He stayed in Stockholm for some ten years, but when Gustav III was assassinated he moved on again, finding a post—and a wife—in Copenhagen at the more stable Royal Danish Theatre. After his wife died in childbirth, Antoine lived with and eventually married his Swedish housekeeper: it was to her that August was born in Copenhagen in 1805.1
In spite of (or perhaps because of) Antoine’s long residence abroad, he remained resolutely French: he admired Voltaire and Lafayette, applauded the Revolution and was an ardent supporter of Napoleon, whose heroic persona appealed to his proud sense of “glory and honour.” In his memoirs, August later recalled his father’s intense but skeptical Catholicism and his “fiery, brave, and gallant” spirit, fondly noting that he was “a true chevalier français of the old school.” Indeed, Antoine liked to point to his family’s supposed aristocratic pedigree and saw himself as a kind of liberal nobleman manqué. Father and son were close and as August grew up he naturally adopted his father’s ideals, in part because he admired them, but also because they made sense in his own life: August’s earliest memories were of the 1807 British bombardment of Copenhagen during the Napoleonic Wars, in which the city was ravaged and hundreds of civilians were killed (the Bournonville family took shelter in the cellar of a local merchant). Like his father, Bournonv
ille never wavered in his loyalty to freedom, Napoleon, and French ballet.2
Indeed, Antoine trained his son assiduously in the old noble style (he called it “classical”), which for him was not just a craft but a calling, tinged as it was with his own nostalgia for French Enlightenment culture and ideals. Thus ballet was not taught to August as a mere vocation or family inheritance: it was a mantle placed squarely on his shoulders and he felt its weight and obligations. It was probably at his father’s urging that August first read Noverre’s writings, which left a strong mark and would later inspire him to compose his own letters and writings on dance. In 1820 his father took August on a pilgrimage to the source: they visited Paris, where they met with Antoine’s old colleagues and attended performances at the Paris Opera. Rather than cementing August’s loyalty to his father’s artistic heritage, however, the experience opened a breach: Antoine insisted on the “tasteful and correct” forms of the old school, but August found his father’s teachings increasingly “static” and constraining: he quickly saw that the future lay instead with the new athleticism of the Vestris “school” and the daredevil male dancers of the younger generation.3
Upon their return to Copenhagen, August was restless, and his relationships with his father and with the Royal Danish Theatre, where he was apprenticed as a dancer, became increasingly strained. He was ambitious and wanted a bigger world: in 1824 he returned to Paris, where he studied with Vestris and eventually won a place at the Paris Opera. Now his career had really begun. Vestris trained him hard—very hard—and Bournonville became an accomplished dancer whose fleet footwork and pirouettes were much admired (he complained his turns were hindered by a “swaying of the head” but he could still spin seven times and stop with precision). But Paris gave Bournonville more than a polished technique. In his letters home to his father (full of filial assurances that Vestris was not neglecting the niceties of style) we can feel his obsessive and consuming enthusiasm—not with the Paris Opera’s impressive theatrical effects, its lavish sets or fantastical gas lighting, but with the concrete details and intricacies of ballet technique—with “how to do it”—and the sheer physical exhilaration and freedom of dancing. When he first saw Marie Taglioni perform (she was his exact contemporary), it was not her ethereal quality that gripped him but the iron strength in her feet and legs.4
The point is obvious perhaps, but it is important: Bournonville came to ballet through the raw thrill of its steps and mechanics and developed an almost scientific fascination with the anatomical logic of its forms. Working with Vestris was formative, and Bournonville’s loyalty to his teacher was so fierce that he even (uncharacteristically) fought a duel to avenge an insult to Vestris’s reputation. It was not that Bournonville threw his father’s careful training completely aside, but his writings and careful notes documenting Vestris’s classes suggest an unusual sensitivity to the ways in which a movement or pose could be expanded and animated from within, without exaggeration or force. Lightness and speed, precision coordination and the right musical impetus, could create a sense of unbounded freedom within the more static limits of a given step, thus suffusing it with newfound urgency. And so Bournonville (like Marie Taglioni) set out on what would become a lifelong project of mediation and synthesis: the new athleticism and the old classicism, Vestris and his father, Paris and Denmark.
There could be no question about the prominence of Vestris and the French Romantic ballet in Bournonville’s mind. In his memoirs, written much later in life, Bournonville dwelled on his Parisian sojourn and wrote with reverence of the dancers he met there. They were the “ghosts” who appeared before him and held him to artistic account for the rest of his life (“Remember!”). It was a familiar assembly of luminaries: among them were Vestris and Pierre Gardel, Albert, Paul, and Jules Perrot, Marie Taglioni, Fanny Elssler, and Carlotta Grisi. In the years to come, Bournonville would name steps after them, mount ballets in their memory, and train dancers in their image.5
Why, then, at the height of his prowess as a dancer did Bournonville leave the prestigious French capital and return to Denmark, a respectable but remote cultural outpost? The simple answer is that he understood the limits of his own talent. The more interesting truth is that he was in fact more Danish than even he supposed at the time. He intuitively sensed that life (and art) would be more secure in the Danish capital, and although he took the French Romantic ballet as his artistic standard, he also saw its excesses and recoiled from them. He was suspicious of merging the once-distinct genres of dance and wary of the willingness of French dancers (Taglioni aside) to sacrifice decorum to athletic feats. Above all, however, he scoffed at the idea that the danseur might be demoted to the role of a ballerina’s porteur. Much as he admired Marie Taglioni, he despaired at the consequences of her fame for his profession.
In this, Bournonville had the advantage of distance and youth. As a Dane, he did not associate Vestris and the male dancers of the 1820s with a discredited and debased aristocracy. For him, a generation removed from the traumatic legacies of the French Revolution, they were merely exciting virtuosi who occasionally pushed too far. If anything, he saw the male dancer through his father’s eyes and assumed that men would—and should—have the prestige and stature they had enjoyed in Noverre’s bygone age. Bournonville could not grasp the fact that the French danseur noble was dying and would not be revived, but he did see that he might have more opportunities at home.
There was also a part of Bournonville that wanted to return to Copenhagen. It was not just that he felt a certain obligation to his king, Frederik VI, who had generously granted him paid leave from the Royal Theatre to study in Paris. Antoine Bournonville, in spite of his steadfast Francophilia, had imbued his son with an intense emotional loyalty to the Danish crown. This was partly self-interest: the father was ballet master at the Royal Theatre until 1823 and as a royal appointee had immediate entrée into Copenhagen’s small but prestigious social and cultural elite. He was a devoted servant, and Frederik VI later repaid his loyalty by granting Antoine free residence at Fredensborg Castle. But Antoine’s patriotism was also a matter of principle, for the Danish state seemed to embody the freedoms and stability that so eluded his native France. Denmark was an absolute monarchy but its kings had an impressive record of law, order, and fair government. And if Antoine admired the French Revolution, he was also disturbed by its radical consequences; the Danes, at least, had not murdered their king.
August’s mother was even more intensely loyal. He noted her “stern” demeanor and devout Lutheranism, and indeed her ethics and upright character dovetailed perfectly with the high moral tone of Danish bourgeois society. August felt her influence keenly: in his childhood she took him to church weekly, and after the service he was required to summarize the sermon to her satisfaction. Moreover, what little formal teaching he had came at the hands of a serious-minded divinity student—although he also spent time on a farm in Amager with the family’s vegetable and milk man, a picturesque pastoral setting he would later attempt to recapture onstage. His real education, however, came from his father’s library of French and Danish literature and his on-the-job experiences performing child roles in the theatrical works of prominent Danish artists and writers.6
This was the golden era of Danish Romanticism. In the early years of the nineteenth century, inspired by German thought and their own literary past, Danish artists and writers turned away from classical themes and set out to rediscover Scandinavian folklore, Norse mythology, and what they took to be the heroic age of medieval Denmark. In 1802 Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850) set the tone with “The Golden Horns,” a poem that longingly invoked the “Light from the North / When heaven was earth.” Three years later he published Aladdin, derived from the Arabian Nights, and in 1819 wrote the influential Gods of the North. By then, there were others: B. S. Ingemann (1789–1862) wrote epic historical novels glorifying medieval Danish kings; folklorists such as Just Mathias Thiele, inspired by the Brothers Grimm and Walter Scot
t, published volumes of native folktales and legends; and Danish sculptors, composers, and painters used these and other sources to explore and develop Nordic themes in their art. It was a tightly knit group: they dined together, assembled for private readings, concerts, and exhibitions, and ritually attended productions (often their own) at the Royal Theatre, where the most prominent among them were awarded special complimentary seats, courtesy of the king.7
This cultural outpouring also had an urgency born of humiliation. The British bombardment of the city was only the first of several devastating political and territorial setbacks: the proud Danish fleet, once the envy of Europe, was decimated and the country never regained its naval presence. By 1814 Norway had been lost to Sweden and the Danish state plunged into bankruptcy. Moreover, Copenhagen itself was in many ways troubled and inbred: although the elite lived in comfortable homes and on elegant estates, the city (like other capital cities at the time) was otherwise poor and filthy, with open sewers, rats, and a populace crowded into slums within the old ramparts and plagued by disease, prostitution, and squalor. With the exception of the Royal Theatre, public life was constrained. Restaurants and cafés were dark and unwelcoming, and although popular theaters offered puppetry, traveling shows, carnival booths, and the like, the bourgeoisie preferred private entertainments in the comfort of their own homes, far removed from the grimy streets below. For all its heroics and whimsy, the Danish golden age was fed by a strong undercurrent of political and social anxiety, and the fairy-tale quality of its art was at least in part escapist.
It also represented, however, an intense desire to develop the “goodness” and moral authority thought to reside deep in the Danish national character (and this was something that would be strongly reflected in Bournonville’s ballets). Nowhere was this more evident than in the enormously influential work of N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872), an iconoclastic Lutheran bishop and accomplished historian and poet. Grundtvig spent nearly a decade studying Nordic and Anglo-Saxon literature and sought a religious and educational revival based on the virtues he saw in pagan Norse mythology and—following a trip abroad—English educational institutions, which impressed him with their freedom and creativity, so different from Denmark’s dour Lutheran “black schools.” Building on the influence of German pietism, which had already inspired Danish communities to eschew Church bureaucracy in favor of a more direct link to God by faith alone, Grundtvig eventually established a network of rural, grassroots “schools for life,” where students were encouraged to participate in discussions and debates and to take charge and arrive at compromises together, on their own authority. The idea was to return communities to their own resources, moving them away from deadening religious texts and pompous official decrees. Grundtvig wanted to give people the tools and responsibility to govern themselves. His ideas spread and although they also spawned fierce oppositional evangelical movements, the long-term result was the creation of an engaged and literate religious and civic culture.
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