Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the Romantic Ballet
301
Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the Romantic Ballet
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819572011 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2011 |
| Series: | Studies in Dance History |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 301 |
| File size: | 481 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
National Dance in the Romantic Ballet
LISA C. ARKIN AND MARIAN SMITH
Historians have long acknowledged the surging interest in folk culture that exerted a potent effect upon artists and scholars in the nineteenth century as the old influences of classicism and Francophilia finally began to be eclipsed. In such disparate works as Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt, Sir Walter Scott's Rob Roy, Smetana's The Bartered Bride, and Victor Hugo's Les Orientales, one may see a burgeoning pride in the folk culture of one's own region and a fascination with that of others.
Much of this new enthusiasm for indigenous folk cultures was inspired by the writings of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), the highly influential historical philosopher who in the late eighteenth century had posited that the evolving concept of nationhood was dependent upon a sense of shared tradition among a homogeneous assemblage of folk. Central to his way of thinking was the belief that the collective consciousness of a nation resided in its religion, language, and folk traditions, and that to honor these home-bred forms of cultural expression was far more desirable, more natural, and more fundamentally human than to embrace the mechanical, artificial ideology of the so-called Enlightenment. He extolled the sweetness of one's own native soil and the beauty of the primitive folk expression that projected the soul of a people. At the same time he promoted the then-radical notion that no one culture was inherently superior to others, but that the various peoples — each possessing a unique and worthy Volkgeist (folk spirit) — should coexist and learn from one another, and, moreover, that such pluralism was a fundamental condition of humanity.
The writings of Herder engendered a new and profound respect for folk culture that permeated European literature, painting, and the performing arts in the nineteenth century. And while the creative impact of folk forms upon writers, artists, and composers of that period has long been an important subject of scholarly investigation, its effect upon ballet has not yet been fully explored. For, though the type of dance referred to variously as "national," "folk," "character," and "ethnic" is acknowledged to have constituted a part of the Romantic ballet, it is still generally treated only as a marginal adjunct in scholarly investigations of the subject, a lesser cousin to classical dance, a folkstyle that provided an occasional means of injecting "local color" but was peripheral to the genuine aesthetic of Romantic ballet.
This viewpoint, we argue, conflicts with the evidence. Indeed, an examination of primary source documents shows that national dance played a far more prominent role in the Romantic ballet than is generally acknowledged today, both in its theory and its practice. And ballet's spectators during the period deemed Romantic (that is, roughly 1830–1850) were actually much more likely to encounter national dance than they were the ethereal ballets blancs now so strongly associated with that period. We believe that the presence of national dance in the Romantic ballet was so great, in fact, as to merit a scholarly exploration far wider in scope than an article-length study can possibly hope to cover. Not only is a straightforward factual chronicle of its existence in order (for national dance is known to have flourished in all of Europe's most important opera houses), but so, too, is an investigation of how national dance was related to the broader social, political, and artistic trends of the nineteenth century. For the marginalization of this idiom in much dance historiography has not only left a lacuna in the study of Romantic ballet per se, but also made national dance virtually inaccessible to scholars in other disciplines who could no doubt draw analogies between its contributions to ballet and the manifestations of folk-derived expression in the other arts. Indeed, a fuller treatment of this topic by dance historians will doubtless lead to its integration into the scholarly discourse of nineteenth- century cultural studies in general.
But in the meantime we are faced with a strange conundrum. National dance played an enormous role in ballet and was considered a salient force within it. Yet, despite its very high visibility on the ballet landscape of the nineteenth century, many representations of that landscape have shrunk its proportions considerably. That is, it has suffered something of the same fate as the "juste-milieu" paintings and the colporteur literature of the same age, which were extremely well known to the nineteenth century but until fairly recently were marginalized as unworthy of serious consideration.
In the present article, we hope to make a step toward bringing national dance closer toward the mainstream of scholarly research, both in and outside the discipline of dance history. We focus on Paris, a city often regarded as the cradle of balletic Romanticism, although by no means the only venue that warrants close study in this regard.
Our approach is a varied one. We first discuss the popularity of national dance, both on the stage and on the social-dance floor. We then discuss the nature of the Romantic narrative ballet, and how character dance was situated within it. (Please note that we use the term "national" and "character" dance interchangeably in this article, as writers of the nineteenth century frequently did.) We also delve into the rather difficult matter of "authenticity," weighing the words of ballet theorists and critics of the time in an attempt to discern how folk dances were brought to the stage. Then, after discussing the work of Jules Perrot, we discuss the false dichotomy of character dance versus the ballet blanc. Finally, we raise the subject of dance historiography, suggesting that it has been easy to apply twentieth-century performance practice and aesthetic preferences to our assessments of the past, and that this has hindered our attempts to determine what the Romantic ballet looked like in its heyday.
The Popularity of National Dance
Simply put, national dance was performed regularly and frequently in the opera houses of Europe during the Romantic period. It figured prominently within both operas and ballets, and in some theaters was featured in independent danced divertissements as well. Indeed, it must be recalled that audiences were accustomed to great abundance and variety: an evening's entertainment could even consist of a complete opera and a ballet. And national dance was very likely to comprise part of the performance.
Consider the case of the Paris Opéra. From about 1835 until well past mid- century, national dance seems to have occurred in over three-quarters of the performances given there, regularly appearing in both ballets and operas. In May 1841, for example, it was featured in twelve (and possibly more) of the fourteen performances given:
Mon., May 3 Don Giovanni (opera, set in Seville)
Spanish dance during the ball scene (Act II)
Wed., May 5 La Favorite (opera, set in Castile)
Spanish dance during the victory celebration (Act II)
Fri., May 7 Les Huguenots (opera, set in Paris)
Gypsy dance to celebrate the day of rest (Act III)
Sun., May 9 La Favorite (opera, set in Castile)
Spanish dance during the victory celebration (Act II)
Mon., May 10 Le Diable amoureux (ballet, set in Italy and Persia)
Saltarella, cachucha, mazurka
Le Philtre (opera, set in the Basque region)
Evidence is unclear.
Wed., May 12 Guillaume Tell (opera, set in Switzerland)
Tyrolian dance by peasants forced to perform for the tyrant Gesler (Act III)
Fri., May 14 La Favorite (opera, set in Castile)
Spanish dance during the victory celebration (Act II)
Mon., May 17 Robert le Diable (opera, set in Italy)
Evidence is unclear. The pas de cinq in Act II,
performed by five men portraying Sicilian peasants, may have been a pas de caractère.
Wed., May 19 La Favorite (opera, set in Castile)
Spanish dance during the victory celebration (Act II)
Fri., May 21 La Muette de Portici (opera, set in Spanish-dominated Naples)
Spanish and Neapolitan dances (Acts I and II)
Mon., May 24 Les Huguenots (opera, set in Paris)
Gypsy dance to celebrate the day of rest (Act III)
Wed., May 26 La Juive (opera, set in the city of Constance)
No evidence of national dance.
Fri., May 28 Guillaume Tell (opera, set in Switzerland)
Tyrolian dance by peasants forced to perform for the tyrant Gesler (Act III)
Mon., May 31 Le Philtre (opera, set in the Basque region) Evidence is unclear.
Le Diable amoureux (ballet, set in Italy and Persia)
Saltarella, cachucha, mazurka
So character dance was quite a familiar sight on the Opera's stage. It became so pervasive, in fact, that one eulogist on the occasion of Pierre Gardel's death in 1840 could lament that "the dance [is now] composed of only so-called pas de caractère." Théophile Gautier even hyperbolically implied that the character pas was the only type that a danseur should perform (as opposed to the classical pas): "A male dancer performing anything other than pas de caractère or pantomime has always seemed to me something of a monstrosity. Until now I have only been able to support men in mazurkas, saltarellas, and cachuchas."
In the offhand comments and customs of ballet's habitués across Europe, too, one may find countless expressions of the notion that character dance was commonly considered a normal part of ballet. In the London publication, The Natural History of the Ballet Girl, a description of the daily routine of the typical corps dancer finds her hastily changing her costume in the dressing room "between the pas de fées of the opening scene and the villagers' mazourka of the closing one." A contingent of male dancers from the Paris Opéra (including Lucien Petipa, the first Albrecht) was invited to take part in a polka competition with several highly skilled members of the social-dance elite (the polka being considered a complex folk-derived dance at the time), and knew the dance so well that they were able to beat their opponents handily. Michel Saint-Léon, in the Württemberg court, taught both classical and character pas to the royal princes and princesses. Manufacturers of ballet souvenirs — statuettes and lithographs, for example — sold images of ballerinas both in "classical" and "character" garb. Young ballet students in St. Petersburg were sometimes granted scholarships on the basis of their character dancing. And so on.
It is also crucial to recall that, though the sight of the corps performing character dance was a familiar one — critics often described ensembles of coryphées performing perhaps a mazurka or bolero — the greatest ballerinas and premiers danseurs of the Romantic period performed national dances as well. That is, national dance was not the province of lesser dancers, nor of those whose body types precluded their excelling in the danse d'école style. Nor was it ceded strictly to those (like Fanny Elssler) who found it particularly congenial to their talents. It was an art that the highest-ranking soloists were fully expected to perform, along with mime and classical dance. Lucile Grahn, for example, the first Danish Sylphide and a dancer renowned for her steadiness on pointe and her lightness, made a great impression with her tarantella in the divertissement Le Pécheur napolitain. Carlotta Grisi and Jules Perrot, who together helped create the role of the ethereal Wili Giselle, also performed many a character dance both separately and together, including the zapateado at the close of the Viennese season in 1838 and an "original Tarantella directly imported from Naples" (to name only two of their joint triumphs). Lise Noblet, another dancer known for her lightness and the elegance of her poses, also delighted audiences with her Spanish dancing. With her sister Félicité she performed a Spanish dance in La Muette and achieved a triumph that Gautier describes as follows:
The great success of the evening was the Spanish dance by the Mmes. Noblet. Their entrance was eagerly awaited. They appeared in white satin basquines, threaded and bespangled with silver, with roses in their hair, and wearing the high ceremonial combs — in fact, the whole fantastic costume of Dolores Serral. Then, to the strains of a melody that was as naive as all folk tunes are and fragmented into equal divisions by the babble of the castanets, they danced the most daring and brazen pas ever to have been seen at the Opéra. It was phenomenal, outrageous, unimaginable, but it was charming. Imagine swaying hips, spines arching back, arms and legs thrown into the air, the most provocatively voluptuous movements, a hot-blooded fury, and a diabolical attack — truly, a dance to awaken the dead. ... The two sisters were applauded as never before, and ... they were called back and made to start the pas, El Jaleo de Jerez, all over again.
And Marie Taglioni "enchanted the world" with her Spanish dancing as La Gitana, a role which also called for two gypsy dances (one of them danced to music in which bottles, cauldrons, glasses, and saucepans were used as instruments). This ballet, which Taglioni performed dozens of times to great acclaim beginning in 1838, including four seasons in Russia and three in London, generated a Taglioni souvenir iconography second in richness and variety only to that of La Sylphide. It also firmly established her reputation as a solid character dancer, a reputation that has been largely forgotten, perhaps because historians have so strongly emphasized her triumphs as the sylph.
Social Dance. Rhapsodic assessments of character-dance performances liberally dot the newspaper review of ballets and operas of the Romantic period, and it is clear that audiences of the day were no less demonstrative when it came to character dance than they were for opera and danse d'école. Sometimes, in fact, character dance struck observers as even more exciting than the other types of opera-house fare. Heinrich Adami suggests as much in his résumé of Fanny Elssler's eight-performance season in Vienna in the summer of 1837:
In eight performances, Fanny danced the Cachucha twenty-two times, yet who can boast that he knows this dance completely or can say that the twenty- second performance was not just as interesting as the first. That this should be so is the finest victory of natural grace over art, just as a rose, though seen a thousand times, is still a rose and the queen of flowers.
I have been present at many a stormy evening in the theatre, but I have never witnessed such general and unrestrained excitement as at the last appearance, and particularly after the Cachucha had been performed a third time.
Yet shouting approval, applauding wildly, demanding encores, and throwing flowers onto the stage (as audiences were wont to do) was not the only way that members of the public could express their enthusiasm for national dance. They could also dance it themselves, fitting foreign dance styles to their own bodies, much as they donned costumes to wear to public balls.
In the 1830s and 1840s, in fact, there was a veritable national-dance craze on Europe's public dance floors. Amateur dancers flocked to dance studios to take lessons in national dancing. They rented and purchased national costumes to wear to public balls. They purchased sheet music for character dance arranged by composers for amateur consumption, and books on the subject of national dance (one of which featured the mazurka, the cracovienne, the polonaise, the tarantella, the anglaise, the bolero, the cosaque, the fandango and the pas russe). They even danced quadrilles — a type of social dance normally constructed of classical steps — that had been stylized according to national tastes. One dancing master, for example, concocted the so-called "Empire Quadrille," in which each section of the dance imitated a different national style. Another adapted the Polish mazurka "after the laws of the French quadrille" so that the "inconveniences" of its complexity and improvisatory nature could be "obviate[d]." His quadrille-mazurka provided a "sample, a foretaste of the mazurka"; "a sort of compromise" between the characteristic freedom of the Polish dance and the French inclination toward the incorporation of classical steps and familiar sets of spatial figures. A Parisian journalist addressed this idea of contrast between traditional social dances and the newly popular national dances, writing in 1833, "the banal and fastidious contredanse will be definitively put to rest [at the Opéra balls] to leave room for this variety of dances that are executed in Russia, Italy, and Germany — the polonaise, the fandango, the waltz, the mazurka [that] will become acclimated to Parisian soil." Indeed, one can imagine that these character dances did allow those who danced them a greater range of movement than did the "fastidious contredanse." As another observer put it, social dancers "understood the happy alliance that could be forged between stiff French dance and loose Andalusian dancing."
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
National Dance in the Romantic BalletFeminism or Fetishism: La Révolte des femmes and Women's Liberation in France in the1830s
Marriage and the Inhuman: La Sylphide's Narratives of Domesticity and Community
Redeeming Giselle: Making a Case for the Ballet We Love to Hate
Women of Faint Heart and Steel Toes
Blasis, the Italian Ballo, and the Male Sylph
Ballet Dancers at Warsaw's Wielki Theater
The Arrival of the Great Wonder of Ballet, or Ballet in Rome from 1845 to 1855
Salvatore Taglioni, King of Naples
Jules Janin: Romantic Critic
What People are Saying About This
"There is nothing in print with the depth of scholarship, diverse points of view, or range of material offered by these fascinating and exciting book. It is significant and much needed."
"There is nothing in print with the depth of scholarship, diverse points of view, or range of material offered by these fascinating and exciting book. It is significant and much needed."—Barbara Barker
""This absolutely significant book treats an important period from a number of fresh points of view, letting new methodologies shed light on events that are now almost taken for granted. If anyone in academia is questioning the present scholarly status of dance, these essays will banish their doubts.""—Selma Jeanne Cohen
"This absolutely significant book treats an important period from a number of fresh points of view, letting new methodologies shed light on events that are now almost taken for granted. If anyone in academia is questioning the present scholarly status of dance, these essays will banish their doubts."