Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  Bournonville’s ballerinas were a throwback to an earlier time. Leg extensions were tastefully low and pointe work was kept to a minimum: Bournonville’s La Sylphide was danced largely on half-pointe, and when he visited Paris in the 1840s he was stunned at the strength and advances of Carlotta Grisi’s technique. Film fragments of Juliette Price’s niece Ellen (born after Bournonville’s death but coached by her aunt) show quicksilver, impish movements and an angelic composure, but rudimentary pointe work.* Moreover, in Bournonville ballets the ballerina was rarely partnered. Instead she performed alongside her male counterpart, duplicating his steps in mirror image or in unison, just as women had in the eighteenth century. Modern-day critics have sometimes interpreted this side-by-side structure as “women’s lib” avant la lettre: no misty-eyed women on pedestals in liberal-minded Denmark! But it was in fact a holdover from the baroque era with few political overtones, at least until our own time.

  Yet there was one respect in which Bournonville technique was, and remains, unusually egalitarian: for men and women alike, there is simply no way to cheat. With the arms low (no help hiking the body into the air) and the steps densely compiled and intricately linked, the laws of épaulement rigorously obeyed and the dancer held to strict musical account, it is impossible to fudge a position or finesse a sloppy step: the technique is transparent and imperfections show. Indeed, Bournonville even built little checks into his enchaînements—excruciatingly revealing pauses when the dancer is required momentarily to hold a plié at the end of a jump or turn (in fifth position or on one leg), highlighting even the smallest fault or off-balance finish.

  Bournonville took great pride in his ballet scenarios, but he did not really need them. His dances had a built-in ethics far more convincing than the messages and morals he was so fond of proclaiming in his plots. His dancers appeared good and honest because the dances trained them to move with such extraordinary physical coordination and accord. The joy his dances conveyed did not have to be acted out—it grew from the sheer pleasure of performing his choreography. To this day, his dances are technically more difficult than most, but their rewards are commensurate—not cathartic but cleansing and honest. This explains why Bournonville took dancing to be far more than a skill: it represented, he said, a way of life free from overwrought passions or existential angst. It is no accident that Bournonville enjoyed walking and conversing with the philosopher S⊘ren Kierkegaard, later recalling that Kierkegaard had taught him “that irony is not synonymous with ridicule, mockery, or bitterness, but is on the contrary an important element in our spiritual existence … the smile through the tears, which prevents us from becoming lachrymose.” Bournonville counseled his students: “Apply yourself with equal care to the correct choice of exercises, to your comportment, to an elegant, simple toilette, to your language and to your reading.” To this day Bournonville technique remains clean-cut and judicious: a low-church, family style of ballet.21

  By the 1840s, Bournonville was established and settled. His life was fully taken up with family, friends, colleagues, and his considerable responsibilities both at the Royal Theatre and to his king. He had earned respect and stature: the public appreciated his work and he had gone a long way to defining a native Danish style of ballet. But he was also restless. Acutely aware that Copenhagen was not Paris—nor even Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Naples, or St. Petersburg—he yearned for wider recognition and experience. It was not that he necessarily wanted to move from Denmark, but he had an intense desire to know what was happening elsewhere and to see how his own work fit into the larger European scene.

  Bournonville traveled and corresponded widely, keeping in touch with friends and colleagues (especially in Paris) and feeling out possible future opportunities. His letters and reflections on his travels, however, reveal an increasing sense of frustration. He had embraced the Vestris school and was turning it in the direction of taste, discretion, and a tamer and more controlled virtuosity. To his growing dismay, however, the rest of Europe seemed to be moving in the opposite direction, toward spectacle, pomp, and flashy technical displays. It was not that Bournonville was alone. There were other artists who shared his approach to ballet, many of them friends who had also been in Paris at some point during the pivotal Vestris years. They were danseurs fully invested in virtuosic male dancing and, like Bournonville, they all felt the ground shifting beneath them as Marie Taglioni’s Romantic revolution took its course. These artists had fanned out across the Continent in search of jobs, but they had also kept their old ties. They were a kind of aging ballet diaspora, and in their private letters and conversations we can hear the final whispers of a vanishing style of dance.

  Thus as early as February 1831, the dancer Albert wrote to Bournonville lamenting the demoralized mood at the Paris Opera in the wake of the July Revolution: “Today’s artists,” he said (carefully excepting Marie Taglioni, who was universally admired), “have no laws but their own whim.” A few years later he wistfully concluded, “The glorious days of the dance are past.” This was not just nostalgia or sour grapes: the younger dancer and ballet master Arthur Saint-Léon (1821–1870) also complained to Bournonville and heaped scorn on the Paris Opera, which he sadly dismissed as a “ruin” of an institution. And it was not only Paris: Bournonville’s old friend Duport had written from Berlin in 1837 noting (in his jagged and unschooled hand) that all but a few artists there had “abandoned the true school” in favor of newfangled fashions. The distinguished teacher Carlo Blasis, who had also trained in Paris with Vestris, wrote from Milan lamenting the demise of ballet into “decadence” and saying that he was doing his utmost to hold the course: “I share your views.”22

  Bournonville did not just take their word for it. He traveled to Europe’s capital cities and wrote at length of his own growing sense that ballet everywhere was at risk or in decline. Paris seemed to him hopelessly crass and materialistic. After a visit to the city in 1841, he complained bitterly that the public was beholden to the claque and the city’s ballerinas shamelessly enslaved to rich protectors and lecherous old men: “Here they love almost nothing but money.” (He visited Napoleon’s tomb to restore himself.) “I would never trade places,” he confided to his wife, “with Albert, Duport, Perrot, Paul, Anatole, etc. They enjoy neither the artistic pleasures nor the great delights that I do, and the cachet celebrity gave them has long since been effaced.” He returned again some thirty years later and grimly reported that (in spite of dramatic intervening upheavals in the city’s political and social life) things seemed if anything worse. Ballet at the Opera was dull and elsewhere the “disgusting cancan” had taken over: “God knows where all these poor girls come from!”23

  Naples had different problems. In spite of its seductive street life and lively operatic tradition, Bournonville found Neapolitan ballet depressingly backward and provincial. At the king’s well-appointed San Carlo Theater, the French-trained ballet master Salvatore Taglioni (Filippo’s brother and Marie’s uncle) churned out ballets at a fantastic rate but earned little respect: even his best dances, Bournonville commented, were treated as pièces d’occasion and were no sooner performed than disposed of. By the 1840s, moreover, a pall of Catholic prudery had fallen across the Neapolitan theater: flesh-colored tights were banned as too provocative, and women and men alike were required to wear ridiculous baggy bright green (“grasshopper”) drawers under their costumes. Men even covered their arms in thick white knit bed jackets. Worse still, the dancers no longer trained regularly, as classes had been abolished for sanctioning immoral behavior (too physical). In this forbidding climate, censorship was rife: no reference to religion, revolution, flags, kings, clergy, or princes was permitted, and any hint of red, white, and blue in a costume could lead to arrest. “You have deadly silence,” Bournonville observed, “guards and bayonets in every corner, and in the proscenium a bodyguard who stands staring directly at the royal family.”24

  If Paris and Naples seemed lost, Vienna held out more promise. Or so Bournonvill
e thought when he was offered a post at the city’s Imperial Opera in 1855. Frustrated and discouraged by the petty politics and poor management besetting the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen at the time, he accepted. It was an important opportunity: here was a chance to showcase and test his work in one of Europe’s leading capital cities. The Viennese, however, were in the grip of music halls and the waltz, and audiences found Bournonville’s ballets—not to mention his ballerina, as we have seen—dull and antiquated. Angered and disappointed, and facing financial and contractual difficulties, Bournonville bemoaned the Viennese taste for ballets featuring voluptuous women and acrobatics and despaired at the imperial city’s overly lavish spectacles. In his memoirs he described how his heart sank when his friend and former colleague Paul Taglioni, the noted ballet master and Marie’s brother, arrived from Berlin to stage a ballet and ordered the excavation of the theater in order to pump fountains of water onto the stage—a spectacular (and expensive) effect that had nothing to do with dancing. All of this made Bournonville feel like a remnant from “a vanished, gentler time.” He returned to Copenhagen the following year and signed a five-year contract at the Royal Theatre.25

  Paul Taglioni exemplified the problem. He and Bournonville had known each other briefly in Paris in the 1820s, and Taglioni had later settled in Berlin, where he worked on and off as ballet master from 1835 to 1883. In these years, Berlin grew with the Prussian state and its ballet expanded to fill the city’s imperial self-image. Taglioni made a career of producing bloated and spectacular ballets that were popular with the authorities but notably lacking in poetry or refinement. He had taken a different path out of the Vestris tradition of male virtuosity: where Bournonville counseled tasteful restraint, Taglioni pushed for catchy effects and pyrotechnics. In the 1860s, Saint-Léon described Taglioni’s extremely popular Flick et Flock as “a sort of faery with every known trick—out of date rococo groups, no delicacy, not a witty idea—and, if only one could forget it, the cocking-the-snook dance.”26

  Bournonville made several trips to Berlin, but the most memorable was in the early 1870s, not long after the German victory in the Franco-Prussian war. He attended Taglioni’s ballet Fantasca and was stunned by its “massive corps de ballet” featuring some two hundred girls arrayed with military precision, each of whom made four or five costume changes in the course of the show. The final scene was such a revelation of kitsch that Bournonville threw up his hands: the fairy Aquaria, he wrote, finally “unites the faithful lovers in her magnificent Aquarium, where pike and perch swim above their heads and the bridesmaids lie picturesquely grouped in open oyster shells, surrounded by coral, polypi, and boiled lobsters!”27

  Russia was something else entirely. Bournonville had long been aware of the attraction of St. Petersburg to dancers; many of his Parisian colleagues had taken up positions there, and one of his students, the Swedish dancer Pehr Christian Johansson, had also gone to work for the Imperial Theaters.* But Bournonville was reticent, if also intensely curious: Russia was a “mighty kingdom” but it also seemed to lie “beyond the pale of civilization.” In the 1840s Bournonville (who had never been there) scornfully dismissed the country: “Russia isn’t worth a damn, [people] are lethargic, blasé, the pay is poor.” This was not exactly true: in fact, the tsar was willing to pay quite astonishing sums if the name was big and French enough. Johansson, as Bournonville must have noticed, first ventured there as Marie Taglioni’s partner, under the safe cover of her fame.28

  It was not that Bournonville lacked opportunities: he was well connected and had taught ballet to several Russian diplomats in Copenhagen. Indeed, he claimed to have received (and refused) many offers to mount ballets in St. Petersburg—one in particular in 1838 from the future Tsar Alexander II, who attended, and admired, a performance of Valdemar while visiting the Danish capital. But it was only in the early 1870s, when Bournonville sensed that Russia was becoming a major artistic presence, that he pushed himself to visit. It helped that in 1866 the Danish princess Dagmar (Bournonville had taught her ballet) had married Alexander’s son, the future Alexander III: this high-level connection eased his anxieties and smoothed his way.

  Bournonville was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of theatrical life in St. Petersburg. The scope and quality of the dancers’ training was enormously impressive, and Bournonville marveled at the well-funded school and strong curriculum, the “airy and comfortable dormitories … and even a little chapel!” He had a keen respect for their ballet master, Marius Petipa, with whom he shared a common past: Petipa was French and had also worked in Paris with Vestris. Yet Bournonville was alarmed by the ballets he saw in St. Petersburg, which seemed to him “lascivious” and acrobatic, art reduced to “wretched buffoonery.” Upset, he confronted Petipa and Johansson:

  They admitted that I was perfectly right, confessed that they privately loathed and despised this whole development, explained with a shrug of the shoulders that they were obliged to follow the current of the times, which they charged to the blasé taste of the public and the specific wishes of the high authorities.

  This was not an entirely fair description of the pressures and difficulties facing Russian ballet at the time, but it conveys Bournonville’s sense that he was an island apart—that from Paris to St. Petersburg his kind of ballet was increasingly outmoded and passé.29

  What made Bournonville feel so alone, then, was not really a lack of artistic companionship—many of his friends and colleagues shared his aesthetic ideals as well as his sense of disorientation. The problem was that finally, as the century wore on, almost none of them seemed willing to stand the old ground. For all his worldliness, Bournonville could not see that the problems they faced were very different from his own and that history and the circumstances of their own lives were leading these artists away from the Paris of Auguste Vestris and Marie Taglioni. Bournonville, however, resolutely refused to budge. Gradually and almost unconsciously, the map of European ballet changed in his mind: he came to believe that Copenhagen—not Paris, Berlin, Milan, or St. Petersburg—was ballet’s best hope, and maybe even its last.

  The reasons for this, moreover, had as much to do with politics as with art. As Bournonville was quick to point out, in 1830 there had been violent upheavals in Paris, Brussels, Vienna, and Warsaw and across the Italian and German states; in 1848 things had gone from bad to worse. But the Danes had been left unscathed. To be sure, in March 1848 some two thousand people had gathered at Copenhagen’s Casino Theater to draw up a list of demands for King Frederik VII, but they need hardly have bothered: the king duly informed them that the ministry had already resigned. “If you, gentlemen,” he told them, “will have the same trust in your king as he has in his people he will lead you honestly along the path of honour and liberty.” The crowd dispersed, and Denmark made a “velvet” transition out of absolutism and into constitutional monarchy.30

  These impressive developments, however, were quickly overshadowed by rising linguistic and cultural nationalism in the Danish-controlled but predominantly ethnically German duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. In the spring of 1848 the situation became untenable: the Danes sent forces to the area and eventually quelled the uprising—but only after two years of bitter fighting and negotiations. Like most steadfastly liberal Danes, Bournonville rallied. He joined the King’s Volunteers and offered his services as a translator to the Foreign Ministry, but his proudest contribution was a new production of Valdemar. Men leaving for the front appeared as extras in the show, and when Svend lost the battle of Grathe Heath and Valdemar was crowned king, the public called out, “That’s what should happen to traitors! Down with traitors!” In his memoirs Bournonville fondly recalled that when Valdemar finally “burst the chains of tyranny and blessed the whole kingdom,” both the audience and the cast broke into a patriotic ballad “as if with one voice.”31

  In the coming months, Bournonville did more. He turned his theatrical skills to political festivals and charitable events, and when the Danes finally prevai
led over their rebellious provinces he helped mount the lavish celebrations in Copenhagen’s Rosenborg Castle Gardens—including a ballet performed on the quarterdeck of a warship (constructed for the occasion), joined by enthusiastic sailors who spontaneously leapt onstage to participate in the festivities. He was also charged with organizing the banquet at the town hall for the returning troops in 1851 and applied himself to the task with heartfelt emotion, later recalling his deep gratification at having been a “benefit to higher Danish folk life.”32

  The patriotic euphoria of 1848–50 dissolved in 1864 when the Schleswig-Holstein problem reemerged and led to a direct conflict with Prussia. Overconfident, Denmark abrogated an international agreement; Bismarck sent troops, and the Danes were summarily routed. It was a wrenching national humiliation: Denmark lost Schleswig-Holstein to Prussia and its southern border moved several hundred kilometers north. The country had lost some 40 percent of its territory and was now even smaller and more Danish than it had ever been. For many Danes, Bournonville among them, these difficult events deepened an already fierce loyalty to king and country—two years after the 1864 defeat Bournonville revived Valdemar one more time, to sold-out houses.