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6 Dance and dancers
MARIAN SMITH
My first conference with the director of the Grand Opera showed me that the introduction
of a ballet into Tannhauser, and indeed in the second act, was considered a sine qua non of its
successful performance. I couldn't fathom the meaning of this requirement ... 1
Thus Wagner begins his account of Tannhiiuser's rough treatment at the

hands of the Parisians. His well-publicised frustration over the director's
insistence that a ballet be added to this work, and his bitterness over the
opera's rude reception by the ballet-mad Jockey Club, might lead one to
believe that all ballet in Parisian opera of his day was imposed artificially
from without. Yet it makes far more sense to regard the French insistence
on creating ballets within grand opera as nothing more than an extension
of the well-entrenched Baroque custom of mixing dancing and singing (in
various proportions) within a single work. Indeed, opera and ballet had
always gone hand in hand at the Opera.
Ballet's vital role at the Paris Opera in the nineteenth century was far
from restricted, however, to the dances that were woven into grand op-
eras. The same great ballet-masters who created choreographies for operas
also created independent ballet-pantomimes, dramatic pieces from which
singers were excluded, and which told a complete story in dance and mime.
Without understanding ballet-pantomime, we cannot fully understand the
role of dance in grand opera, because the latter absorbed so many elements
from the former. Such narrative works had first appeared at the Opera in
the eighteenth century after a handful of reform-minded choreographers,
such as Gasparo Angiolini and Jean-Georges Noverre (already active in
London, Vienna, and elsewhere), had insisted that ballet could flourish not
only in opera, but as a self-sufficient dramatic genre. 2 A series of successful
ballet-pantomimes (for example Psyche, 1790; La Dansomanie, 1800; Paul
et Virginie, 1806; Clari, 1820; La Sylphide, 1832; and Giselle, 1841) created
at the Opera by its first-rate choreographers, composers, librettists, dancers,
set designers and machinists proves the wisdom ofthe reformers' foresight. 3
Yet, in spite of the obvious autonomy of the ballet-pantomime, nobody at
the Opera during the period under scrutiny here had conceived the notion
of presenting exclusively these independent pieces throughout an evening.
Ballet-pantomimes were always performed before or after opera, and con-
tinued to be so until well past the mid-nineteenth century. A check-list of
[93] titles will be found in the Appendix to this chapter.
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94 Marian Smith
Table 6.1 The performance schedule at the Paris Opera, January 1843
Sunday 1 La Reine de Chypre (5-act opera by Halevy with ballets)

Monday 2 Le Guerillero (2-act opera by Ambroise Thomas), La folie fille de Gand (3-act
ballet-pantomime, music by Adam)
Wednesday 4 La Favorite (4-act opera by Donizetti with ballets)
Friday 6 Le Dieu et la bayadere (2-act opera by Auber; a singer and a dancer in leading roles);
La Sylphide (2-act ballet-pantomime, music by Schneitzhoeffer)
Sunday 8 La fuive (5-act opera by Halevy with ballets)
Monday 9 Le Vaisseau fantome (2-act opera by Louis Dietsch); Giselle (2-act ballet-pantomime,
music by Adam)
Wednesday 11 La Muette de Portiei (5-act opera by Auber, with ballet-dancer in mimed leading role)
Thursday 12 Benefit performance for pension fund
Friday 13 Le Guerillero (as above); La folie Fille de Gand (as above)
Monday 16 La Reine de Chypre (as above)
Wednesday 18 Le Philtre (2-act opera by Auber); Giselle (as above)
Friday 20 La Favorite (as above)
Sunday 22 Les Huguenots (5-act opera by Meyerbeer with ballets)
Wednesday 25 Le Vaisseau fantome (as above), La Gipsy (3-act ballet-pantomime, music by Frans:ois
Benoist, Thomas and Marc-AureIe Marliani)
Friday 27 Le Serment (2 acts of the 3-act opera by Auber), La Gipsy (as above)
Monday 30 Guillaume Tell (3 acts of the 4-act opera by Rossinia , with ballets)
a It was not uncommon for operas to be presented only in part. For instance, the last act of Auber's
Gustave III, with its popular ball scene, was often performed by itself; so was Act III of Rossini's Moise.
Thus did the Paris Opera offer both singing and dancing at every per-
formance. Table 6.1 shows this by reproducing the schedule for January
1843.
What were the artistic ramifications of throwing together, under one
roof, so many creative artists· expert in both opera and ballet, and having
singers and dancers perform together on a regular basis; of having the
choreography, sets, costumes and machines ofopera and ballet-pantomime
designed by precisely the same people; of having the librettos and scores of
ballet-pantomime created by artists experienced in both genres? For repre-
sentative examples, one might name the composers Adolphe Adam and
Ferdinand Herold, who were particularly adept with ballet and opera
comique, or the librettists Eugene Scribe and Vernoy de Saint-Georges,
who between them supplied librettos for more than twenty operas and
ballet-pantomimes at the Opera during the July Monarchy.4
Perhaps the most obvious consequence was that ballet-pantomime and
opera had a great deal in common. For example, both favoured complicated
plots, and usually set their action in Europe and its colonies in the medieval
and early modern periods. They relied on many of the same devices and
situations, such as nobles appearing in disguise, a man loving a woman
above his station, and so forth. They made frequent use of on-stage or off-
stage musicians and featured either the corps de ballet or the chorus quite
prominently, populating the Opera's stage with the same types of minor
characters: peasants, pilgrims, soldiers, courtiers, penitents, masquers and
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95 Dance and dancers
huntsmen, to name only a few. Both tended to switch frequently between

styles and moods - from noisy festive celebrations to poignant soliloquies
or from sedate gatherings to rancorous confrontations, unfolding in such a
way as to afford the audience plenty ofvariety in mood, pacing and musical
style. Both featured sets and costumes designed to look 'authentic' down to
the last detail. Both consisted of dramatic action punctuated with danced
segments. Both made use of spectacle, and tended to feature magnificent
processions and breathtaking special effects, such as the flying sylphides in La
Sylphide, the instantaneous transformation of flowers into flame-breathing
reptiles in Aumer's ballet-pantomime-feerie La Belle au bois dormant, the
eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in Auber's La Muette de Portici or the burning
lake of Hell in the ballet-pantomime Le Diable amoureux (see p. 107 for
details). Characters in both types of work, too, engaged in monologues and
conversations (whether in sung speech or in mime), and audiences could
buy librettos that explained what was going on. Opera librettos laid out
all the sung words, with a few stage directions; ballet-pantomime librettos
provided detailed, scene-by-scene descriptions of the action, occasionally
quoting the actual words or sentences that the characters were supposed to
be 'saying' through gesture.
Personalities and dance styles

Grand opera and ballet-pantomime at the Opera also deployed many ofthe
same dancers, their ballet roles drawing from a single pool of high-ranking
soloists and corps de ballet dancers. Lise Noblet (1801-52), for example,
a leading ballerina of the 1820s and 1830s known for her great lightness,
the elegance in her poses, and the voluptuous quality in her movements,
appeared in the most important ballet-pantomimes of her day, assum-
ing, for instance, the title roles in the ballet-pantomimes Cendrillon and
Clari, as well as creating unnamed solo roles in operas, grand or otherwise:
Rossini's Le Siege de Corinthe (choreographed by P. Gardel), his Guillaume
Tell (Aumer), Ginestet's Franrois Ier aChambord (A. Vestris), Meyerbeer's
Robert Ie Diable (P. Taglioni), Auber's Gustave III (P. Taglioni), Cherubini's
Ali-Baba (Coralli), Mozart's Don Giovanni (Coralli) and Halevy's La Juive
(P. Taglioni). She also created the role of Fenella, the 'mute girl' in La Muette
de Portici, which owed no small part of its great acclaim to her exquisite
miming. Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter 9, this role calls for no dancing
at all.
Lucien Petipa (1815-98) found himself one of the few male dancers
whose fame approached that of his female counterparts in Paris during the
heyday ofgrand opera, for the danseur had been pushed aside in favour ofthe
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96 Marian Smith
Figure 13 Lise Noblet had been appearing at the Opera professionally since 1819; here, wearing
the attributes of irrationality, she dances the role of La Folie (madness, eccentricity) in Auber's
Gustave III. Drawn by Wattier, engraved by Mme Konig, 1833.
danseuse in French choreography (though he maintained his powers in Italy

and DenmarkS ). After making a debut in Donizetti's La Favorite in 1841,
Petipa created roles in the operas La Reine de Chypre (1841, choreographed
by Mazilier) and L'Ame en peine (Flotow, 1846, choreographed by Coralli),
and the ballet-pantomimes Giselle (1841, Coralli and Perrot), La folie fllle
de Gand (1842, Albert), Le Diable aquatre (1845, Mazilier), Paquita (1846,
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Mazilier) and Betty (1846, Mazilier). As the Opera's ballet-master from 1860
to 1868, Petipa contributed choreography to the operas Semiramis (the 1860
production ofRossini's opera), Tannhiiuser ( 1861 ), La Reine de Saba ( 1862),
Don Carlos (1867) and Hamlet (1868).
Marie Taglioni (1804-84), perhaps the most famous ballerina of the
nineteenth century, astonished audiences with her highly individual style
(developed painstakingly under the tutelage ofher father, Philippe Taglioni),
marked by a lightness that seemed to challenge the laws ofgravity. Historians
have focused mainly on her ethereal qualities in the title role of La Sylphide
and her breakthrough pointe technique (to dance en pointe - 'on point' -
is to dance on the extreme tip of the toe). This technique seems to have
begun in ballet shortly before 1820. At first, no special point shoes existed;
the modern point shoe (with toes stiffened with glue) began to appear in
the 1860s. Taglioni was also well-beloved for her great skills in 'national' or
'character' dance, a sort oftheatricalised folk dance (discussed below) that
was tremendously popular in ballet well into the twentieth century;6 her
gypsy dancing in La Gitana7 caused great sensations in St Petersburg and
London. At the Opera, she created leading roles in the ballet-pantomimes
La Sylphide (1832), Nathalie (1832), La Revolte au serail (1833) and La Pille
de Danube (1836) (all choreographed by her father), and in Auber's opera-
ballet Le Dieu et Ia bayadere ( 1830), which is discussed later. She also created
important solo roles in the grand operas Guillaume Tell and Robert Ie Diable,
where she danced as Helena, the mother superior in Act III, eliciting ecstatic
responses: see p. 346.
Later dancers of 'superstar' status at the Opera, however, instead ofjoin-
ing the regular casts of new operas, confined most of their opera perfor-
mances to their own debuts (which required presentations in three separate
works) and guest appearances. In this manner dancers added new inter-
pretations to established grand operas. Fanny EIssler (1810-84: see Fig. 18,
p. 155), for example, gave a debut performance at the Opera in Gustave III
in 1834, and went on to a brilliant career at the Opera (and across Europe
and in North America), gaining particular fame for her character-dancing
(especially the cachucha, a Spanish dance calling for a highly flexible torso
and the use of castanets) and her superb miming. Charles de Boigne's ac-
count ofher cachucha is reproduced on p. 106 below. Ofher 1837 rendering
of Fenella in La Muette de Portici, Theophile Gautier wrote as follows:
rejected by the guards of the chapel where her seducer's marriage is taking
place, she sits down on the ground and lets her head fall into her hands as
she dissolves into a flood of tears. She could have been a figure by
Bendemann, the painter of Jeremiah, or one of the Trojan women of
Euripides. She was as beautiful as an antique statue. Her Neapolitan
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98 Marian Smith
costume, which was completely authentic and severe, fell in large austere
folds that were incomparably stylish ... MIle Fanny plays her role without
any show of coquetry towards the audience, concentrating entirely on her
desperate situation ... 8
Possessed of 'strength, lightness, suppleness and an originality of style

which placed her at one bound between EIssler and Taglioni',9 Carlotta
Grisi (1819-99) made her debut performance at the Opera with Lucien
Petipa in La Favorite in 1841, went on to create title roles in Adam's Giselle
and La folie fllle de Gand, Bergmuller's La Peri and Louise Bertin's opera
La Esmeralda (first given in 1836), and also distinguished herself as a fine
character-dancer. Lucile Grahn ( 1819-1907), the 'tall, slender, loose-jointed
and well formed'lO Danish ballerina whose lightness rivalled that of
Taglioni, made one of her first Opera appearances in Don Giovanni, found
much success in the title role of La Sylphide among many other ballets, and
later, while serving as ballet mistress at the Munich Court Opera from 1869
to 1875, helped Wagner with some ofhis opera stagings (e.g., Das Rheingold
and Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg), and choreographed the Bacchanale
scene in Tannhiiuser. 11 These dancers, like many others, performed in opera
houses outside Paris (e.g., in the French provinces and abroad), in ballet-
pantomimes, operas and in short divertissements, many of them in the
character-style, that shared the bill with opera. Jules Perrot and Carlotta
Grisiwere particularly famous for their 'character' divertissements, includ-
ing a zapateado and an 'original Tarantella directly imported from Naples'. 12
Equally popular was the Pas de quatre choreographed by Perrot for Taglioni,
Grisi, Grahn and the great Italian ballerina Fanny Cerrito, the premiere
of which took place between the acts of Donizetti's Anna Bolena at Her
Majesty's Theatre in London in 1845.
Clearly, audiences often went to the opera house for the multiple plea-
sures afforded by singing and dancing - often by celebrity performers - just
as they often did in the eighteenth century. Moreover, they were familiar with
the three distinct styles of movement in the dancer's vocabulary: narrative
pantomime; classical (or academic) dance; and 'character' dance, as men-
tioned above. Some sense of the contrast between 'classical' or 'academic'
dance (based on codified steps, movements and positions, and sometimes
copying classical statues) and 'character' dance (based on folk dance) may
be gained by reading these comparisons by Theophile Gautier, dating from
1830 and 1839:
A woman who appears ... to pose before your opera glasses in the glare of
eighty footlights with no other purpose than to display her shoulders,
bosom, arms and legs in a series of attitudes that show them off to best
advantage seems amazingly impudent if she is not as beautiful as [the
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Graces] ... Dolores [Serral] and [Mariano] Camprubi have nothing in

common with our own dancers. They have a passion, a vitality and an
attack of which you can have no idea ... There is nothing mechanical
in their dancing, nothing that appears copied or smacks of the
classroom ... 13
[At the time of her debut] we explained how superior were [Dolores
Serral's] suppleness, vivacity and Andalusian passion to the geometrical
poses and the right-angled ecarts of the French school. At that time people
of taste found [her dancing] bizarre, alien, incompatible with the
traditions of good schooling and the rules of good taste. The very mention
of the word cachucha made wigs stand on end and set the [pocket violins]
of ballet-masters screeching. 14
Ballets in operas
Every four- or five-act opera at the Paris Opera featured at least one ballet,
sometimes called a divertissement, created by one of the Opera's ballet-
masters and usually featuring both solo and ensemble choreography. No
fixed rules dictated where these ballets were placed within the opera. More-
over the ballets themselves, like vocal numbers, were subject to alteration,
and were sometimes shortened if deemed less than stageworthy. They were
also subject to the tastes ofthe ballroom (see below), so that their steps were
sometimes re-choreographed to accommodate the talents of debutants or
visiting dance luminaries. Therese EIssler, Fanny's sister, made her debut
as dancer and her own choreographer in a pas de deux in the ball scene
of Gustave III in 1834, for example; Lola Montez danced L'Qllia and Las
Boleras de Cadiz in the ball scene of Don Giovanni during a brief sojourn in
Paris in 1844.
Certain rules, however, did apply to the operatic ballet. First, because
of fairly strict ideas about verisimilitude, the dancing was always externally
diegetic, that is, perceived as actual dancing by other characters. Operatic
ballets therefore were designed to arise naturally from the action (celebra-
tions of battle victories, or masked balls, for instance). The dancers, more-
over, were always of a type supposed likely to dance in real life (gypsies,
slave girls, peasants celebrating weddings, ball-goers, hired entertainers).
One observer noted the consequent analogies between social and theatrical
dance, connections which are discussed in more detail below.
It is the same on stage as it is at our society balls; the attention there is
concentrated on the dancers. One doesn't ever pay attention to the
grandmothers and the old men, because they aren't dancing at all. And if
they did dance, they would be ridiculous. To make the heroes of modern
history jump around is utterly contrary to illusion. Serious medieval topics
lend themselves even less to pirouettes and entrechats. 15
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100 Marian Smith
Table 6.2 Rationales for dancing and divertissements in selected grand

operas (relevant act is indicated in brackets)
1829 Guillaume Tell (I) Village wedding celebration

Guillaume Tell (III) Tyrolean peasants are forced to dance during festivities celebrating
Austria's dominion over Switzerland
1831 Robert Ie Diable (II) Dances are performed at a tournament
Robert Ie Diable (III) Ghostly nuns dance by moonlight in an attempt to lead Robert into
temptation
1833 Gustave III (I) A ballet-master conducts a dance rehearsal for Gustave's opera
GustafWasa
Gustave III (V) A masked ball is given at the royal palace
1835 La]uive (I) Onlookers dance spontaneously as the emperor and victorious
soldiers march into the city of Konstanz
La ]uive (III) Leopold's victory over the Hussites is celebrated
1836 Les Huguenots (III) Roving gypsies dance spontaneously on the banks of the Seine
Les Huguenots (V) The wedding of Marguerite de Valois and Henri de Navarre is
celebrated
1838 Guido et Ginevra (I) At a village festival, Diana the huntress is honoured
1840 Les Martyrs (II) The new proconsul, Severe, is honoured
1840 La Favorite (II) Victory over the Moors is celebrated
1843 Dom Sebastien (II) Zayda's homecoming is celebrated
1844 Marie Stuart (III) A masque is performed in honour of Marie (Queen of Scots)
1849 Le Prophete (II) Villagers dance at Jean's inn
Le Prophete (III) Ice-skaters bring supplies to the Anabaptists' camp and then
entertain the soldiers by dancing
1855 Les Vepres siciliennes (II) Sicilian peasants dance the tarantella; among them are
brides-to-be, whom French soldiers kidnap
Les Vepres siciliennes (III) A ballet ('The Four Seasons') is performed for the Duke of Palermo
Wagner's complaints notwithstanding, librettists rationalised the ballets

carefully so that they would fit into the opera's story, even if they did not
usually figure in the main action of the opera (see Table 6.2). Some ballets,
of course, did help drive the opera's narrative forward: angry insurrection-
ists are spurred on by events taking place during the ballets in Les Vepres
siciliennes Act II and Guillaume Tell Act III; the morally indecisive title char-
acter faces a terrible temptation in the ballet of Robert Ie Diable, Act III.
Yet even ballets taking place during respites from the main action could
function dramatically. Some could reflect by analogy a crucial aspect of the
plot: thus the masque performed as a divertissement for the title-character
in Louis Niedermeyer's 1845 opera Marie Stuart - a depiction of Esther tri-
umphantly replacing the fallen queen Vashti - echoed Queen Mary's hopes
in her struggle with Queen Elizabeth. Some could exert dramatic irony, as
in Les Huguenots Act V, a gay celebration which, unknown to its revellers,
would come to a ghastly conclusion. Ballets of the light-hearted variety
could also counterbalance the heavy, often bloody, scenes upon which so
many grand operas relied - the skaters' ballet in Le Prophete provides in
this way a happy (though dramatically relevant) respite from the growing
tensions generated by John of Leyden's rise to power.
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Example 6.1 Jean-Madeleine Schneitzhoeffer, 'Ecossaise' from La Sylphide, edited from a

manuscript orchestral part.
Ecossaise
Entree du corps de ballet
Allegretto J = 120 ,.-.,
61stViolins '~I!I£
By presenting (character' dance, moreover, an operatic ballet could help

set the locale in a convincing manner. This was no trifling achievement:
a chief attraction of these works was their ability to transport audiences
to distinctive places by using as much seemingly realistic detail as possible.
Gautier's assessment ofFanny EIssler's tarantella in the ballet-pantomime La
Tarentule (1839), music by Casimir Gide, gives some sense ofthe audience's
strong association of movement vocabulary with locale, and indeed, the
potency of the belief that movement style was essential to one's place of
birth (akin to Herder's conviction that (Climate, water, air, food and drink,
they all affect language ... '16):
Mlle Eissler ... dances a tarantella which gladdens and excites you. In turn
coquettish, fiery, witty, she portrays with wonderful intelligence that
ardent character which is found only on the volcanic soil of Italy ... 17
Dancers in opera would thus serve as an extension of the elaborate mise-

en-scene, providing living, moving scenery which further sharpened the
audience's sense ofutter removal from its everydaylife to an unfamiliar place.
And composers frequently contributed to the effect by supplying dance
music tailor-made to evoke the locale in question. Dance music, as Pietro
Lichtenthal wrote in his musical dictionary of 1826, (must be characteristic
and analogous to the locale where the action takes place, thus the dance
airs of the Indians, the Scots, the Hungarians must have the character of the
music of their countries ... '18 Example 6.1 shows a stylised Scottish dance
from 1832.
Mixing mute and sung roles at the Opera

Dancers regularly appeared in operas, but in three works created around
1830 they were actually cast in principal roles, playing opposite singing
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102 Marian Smith
characters. In La Muette de Portici the mute peasant girl's tragic love affair
with Alphonse, the viceroy's son, plays its part in the popular insurrection
against the Spanish in the Naples of 1647. In Auber's Le Dieu et la bayadere
a mute Hindu temple dancer falls in love with a mysterious stranger who
is being persecuted by a cruel despot; in La Tentation (officially styled a
'ballet-opera'), a spectacular retelling of the Temptation of 5t Anthony, the
four principal roles are· equally divided between singers and dancers. 19 In
order to maintain standards ofverisimilitude, some of the silent characters'
gesturing was carefully rationalised, whereas such precautions were deemed
unnecessary in the ordinary ballet-pantomime: thus, Auber's bayadere had
newly moved to a foreign country and could comprehend but not yet speak
its language; his mute girl of Portici was assumed to have been silenced by
'a terrible event' (see Chapter 9 n. 22).
Though the hybrid approach to casting taken in these popular works
is not typical of the Opera's output during the whole age of grand opera,
it is nonetheless noteworthy, for it helps demonstrate further the Opera's
responsiveness to trends in the Boulevard theatres, which had often fea-
tured mute characters alongside singing (and sometimes speaking) ones in
the casts of vaudevilles, melodrames and pantomimes in the 1820s: some
are mentioned in Chapter 9. 20 The influence of opera comique upon these
mixed-cast works is also apparent, silent characters having featured therein
for some time. Hybrid casting also demonstrates that ballet and opera
characters - who, after all, shared the Opera's stage at every performance -
were comfortably capable (occasionally, at least) of face-to-face 'conversa-
tions', in which phrases ofsung recitative alternated with mime accompanied
by pantomime music. Consider, for example, the dialogue in Example 6.2
between princess Elvire and Fenella, in which the latter is asked to identify
her betrayer. In this case the rhythm of the pantomime music offers the syl-
labification and expression of the text that the silent character is conveying
Example 6.2 Auber, La Muette de Portici, Act I scene 5: Fenella mimes: 'He who deceived me ...
he who gave me this scarf ... he who betrayed me ...' Elvire: 'Well? Who is the guilty one?'
Fenella (pointing): 'It is he!'
ELVIRE
FENELLA points out ALPHONSE
II ~ ~, ...
- ~
~
~
Eh bien? Le cou - pa - ble? C'est lui!
~~b,a. #e-~ ___
g .,..
~1±.
--:
GrebesITa l ~
.•. r.
~
r I
t
~ ....
t
//~
~
I
~ - ...
~ ~-i
['C'estlui!']
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in gesture ('C'est lui' ['It is he']), a musical tracing of unspoken text. This
technique was often used in ballet-pantomime.
Later, as the ballet-pantomime gave way to more abstract danced works,
and ballet characters broke away from the practice of conveying specific
words, they ceased to share a language with opera characters. So subsequent
opera-ballets (e.g., Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada (1892) and Stravinsky's Le
Rossignol (1914)), though few in number, tended to cast ballet dancers
as other-worldly spirits, or birds, or shades; as creatures incapable of and
uninterested in language, instead ofas flesh-and-blood humans who readily
communicated with characters who intoned language. Yet, clearly, it still
made sense around 1830 at the Opera to create ballet characters who shared
a language with singing characters. The strong presence of mute characters
at the Opera - appearing every night in ballet or ballet-pantomime and
often using elaborate gestures to convey ideas - helped make this sort of
mixed casting feasible.
Between ballet and the ballroom

The close connections between prevailing social-dance customs and theatri-
cal ballet can scarcely be overstated. Most obviously, the lTIusic composed
for ballet at the Opera sounded quite like that encountered in the ballroom:
a chain of dances, in a variety of dance metres, often simply and regularly
phrased, with prominent melodies and light accompaniments, often closing
out with a galop. Particular melodies frequently migrated from the Opera
to the ballroom and parlour, often in the form of quadrille arrangements.
In fact, 'Most Parisians almost always dance an opera before they see it',
observed one critic. 21 In this spirit, public dance events could be rendered
'theatrical', bringing them closer to staged dance and imparting to ordinary
people a vivid sense of participation in the action depicted in an opera.
Maribeth Clark has unearthed a marvellous example ofthis: music from Les
Huguenots arranged as a quadrille and played at a summer dance garden en-
tertainment in 1836, in which fireworks were set off during the final figure,
mimicking the violent closing scene of the opera. An eyewitness described
the experience of the public dance thus: 'the bandstand, the pavilion, the
trees, all are enveloped at the same time in a rapid explosion, the flames
of which take on different colours successively while one hears firearms
sounding from all directions.'22
It is probable that even the choreography of the on-stage ensemble
dances, as opposed to the more virtuosic pas de deux and pas de trois, was
closer in skill level to social dance of the era (which required instruction
and entailed fairly complicated ballet steps) than we generally acknowledge.
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104 Marian Smith
Consequently, it is hardly surprising that audience members occasionally

tried to make their way to the stage and join in the galop of the ball scene in
Act V of Gustave III, so accustomed were they to throwing themselves into
the fray under similar conditions in social-dance settings.
Not even the more virtuosic steps devised for the soloists in these diver-
tissements, however, would have struck an audience as being the exclusive
province of theatrical dance. For it was customary in ballrooms for profes-
sional ballet dancers to perform specially choreographed divertissements,
sometimes entailing abstract numbers such as <The Four Seasons', or <The
Four Quarters of the World', in which each season or region would be
represented in a solo pas. Choreographers then transferred this custom to
the stage by including such variations as entertainments for fictional noble
dinner guests, for example, <The Four Seasons' performed for the Duke of
Palermo in Verdi's Les Vepres siciliennes. So the Opera's spectators were likely
to find even in these abstract operatic ballets a point of reference from their
own personal experiences, instead of seeing them, as we might do today, as
stylised and slightly puzzling intrusions.
The character-dances that so frequently cropped up both in ballet-
pantomime and in operatic ballets also constituted a vital part of the social-
dance scene in Paris. They were eagerly executed by everyday Parisians, who
flocked to amateur dance studios for instruction after the wild success in
1834 of four visiting Spanish dancers (Dolores Serral, Mariano Camprubi,
Manuela Dubifion and Francisco Font) recently hired at the Opera both
for its carnival balls and in La Muette de Portici. Their performances were
<brilliant, alive, poetic, strongly coloured, captivating, full of charm, seduc-
tion, passion and fire'.23 Character-dances were frequently included in hired
ballroom entertainments as well. EIssler and Taglioni, for example, danced
a variety of them at an Opera ball during Carnival season in 1834/35:
the great success obtained at the last Carnival [i.e. the appearance of the
four Spanish dancers in January 1834] gave rise to the idea of seeking a new
success with an array of national dances of the different peoples of Europe,
and in some local dances from our southern provinces. Thus we will see
[at a Carnival ball] the execution, by the top ballet dancers of the Opera,
led in turn by MIles Taglioni and Eissler, of the pas styrien, the mazurka,
the bolero and the fandango from Andalusia, Neapolitan tarantellas and
dances of the Languedoc region, las Treias and 10 Chibalet ... 24
Voyeurism and ballet

Ogling the danseuses at the Opera - sometimes through <cannon-sized'
binoculars25 - was a favourite Parisian sport, practised unabashedly by
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Figure 14 'A regular at the Opera' (anonymous artist, November 1844): as a season-ticket
holder he is permitted to go backstage and stands in the wings. Other images similarly
published in L'Illustration show regulars sitting in their boxes, armed with even bigger
binoculars.
the Jockey Club and other men, and frequently mentioned in the press.
Theophile Gautier memorialised the phenomenon thus:
And how attentive everyone is! Look at them levelling and focusing their
binoculars, not those light country binoculars that fit into a jacket pocket,
but large military binoculars, twin monsters, optical howitzers that will
make future generations think we were a race of giants!26
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106 Marian Smith
Even the gauzy below-the-knee Romantic tutu, the costume of sylphs and
Wilis which is often read today as a symbol of purity, served quite the
opposite purpose in some nineteenth-century erotic literature, as Tracy C.
Davis has pointed out. 27 (National' costumes, too, could strike the spectator
as erotic. Consider this description of Fanny EIssler's cachucha by Charles
de Boigne:
Those swayings of the hips ... those provocative gestures, those arms
which seemed to reach out for and embrace an absent being, that mouth
which asked to be kissed, the body that thrilled, shuddered, and twisted,
that seductive music, those castanets, that unfamiliar costume, that short
skirt, that half-opening bodice, all this, and, above all, EIssler's sensuous
grace, lascivious abandon and plastic beauty were greatly appreciated by
the opera-glasses of the stalls and boxes ... 28
In any case, the managers of the Opera capitalised on the sex appeal of the
danseuses by admitting members of the Jockey Club and sele~ted male pa-
trons (deputies, peers, upper ministerial employees, journalists, (in a word ...
all the people whose relationships could be useful or at least' agreeable' to
the Opera director29 ) to the foyer de la danse, the warm-up"studio where
the female dancers stretched their bodies before curtain-up. In this cosy
space, wealthy and powerful men could make the acquaintance of their
favourite danseuses, flirtations sometimes playing themselves out in more
private venues under a system of (prostitution legere'.
Indeed, many female dancers found prostitution ('legere' or otherwise)
tempting because, without outside income, many ofthem were too destitute
to pay for food, fuel and lodging. 3o Of the many dancers at the Opera, only
the (premier sujets' were paid well. So inadequate were the corps dancers'
salaries, in fact, that many of them suffered from malnutrition. (Most
dancers at the Opera came from the lower classes or from theatrical fam-
ilies and, sadly, were accustomed to such harsh working conditions.) As
Julie Daubie's famous study of poor women in France (La Femme pauvre
au XIX e siecle, 1869) had concluded, during the mid-nineteenth century
women could not achieve financial independence even when working full-
time, because they were so terribly underpaid. That women working on the
stage had an opportunity to attract patrons, and hence increase their income,
was widely recognised. Daubie even accused powerful French government
officials of habitually expending government funds (supporting the arts'
by patronising actresses and dancers, and accused dance teachers of telling
their young female students: (Your art consists of poses and provocations
which should have a powerful effect on the senses of the spectators: 31
Yet, no matter how repugnant the Opera's overt salesmanship of the
danseuse's sexuality, it need neither obscure the practical reasons for their
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sometime prostitution, nor suggest (as it did to Wagner) that ballet at the
Opera was meritless as art. For dancing and pantomime were as crucial to
the Opera's success as was singing. And if we wish to recapture from our
distant vantage point some sense of the spectators' experience at this house
during the age of grand opera, and their generally warm regard for dance, it
is crucial to recognise not only the prestige conferred upon ballet by long-
standing French tradition, and the dramatic power of ballet-pantomime
(a genre well appreciated by the Opera's audience), but the close kinship
between ballet and social dance - a kinship which could make the ballet
divertissements within grand opera familiar, accessible and welcome.
Appendix 6.1 Select list ofballet-pantomimes in alphabetical order, showing

genre, number ofacts, librettist/author, composer/arranger and
choreographer. Anonymous authorship is, by tradition, credited to the
choreographer.
1829 Belle au bois dormant, La Ballet-pantomime-feerie, 4; Eugene Scribe, Ferdinand

Herold, Jean Aumer
1846 Betty Ballet-pantomime, 2; Joseph Mazilier, Ambroise Thomas,
Mazilier
1823 Cendrillon Ballet-feerie, 3; Scribe, Fernando Sor, Albert [pseudo of
Franc;:ois-Charles de Combe, also known as Franc;:ois
Decombe]
1820 Clari, ou la Promesse de mariage Ballet-pantomime, 3; [?], various composers arr. Rodolphe
Kreutzer, Louis Milon
1800 Dansomanie, La Ballet-pantomime, 2; [?J, Etienne-Nicolas Mehul, Pierre
Gardel
1840 Diable amoureux, Le Ballet-pantomime, 3; Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges,
Franc;:ois Benoist/Henri Reber, Mazilier
1845 Diable aquatre, Le Ballet-pantomime, 2; Adolphe de Leuven, Adolphe Adam,
Mazilier
1839 Gipsy, La Ballet-pantomime, 3; Saint-Georges,
Benoist/Thomas/Marc-Aurele Marliani, Mazilier [each
composer wrote one act]
1841 Giselle, ou les Wilis Ballet fantastique, 2; Theophile GautierISaint-Georges,
Adam/Friedrich Burgmuller, Jean Coralli/Jules Perrot
1838 Gitana, La [St Petersburg] Ballet, 3; Philippe Taglioni; Hermann[?] or Johann Philip
Samuel Schmidt, Taglioni
1842 folie fllle de Gand, La Ballet-pantomime, 3; Saint-Georges, Adam, Albert
1832 . Nathalie, ou la Laitiere suisse Ballet, 2; [?], Adalbert Gyrowetz/Michele Carafa, Taglioni
1846 Paquita Ballet-pantomime, 2; Paul-Henri Foucher, Edouard
Deldevez, Mazilier
1806 Paul et Virginie Ballet-pantomime, 3; [?], R. Kreutzer, Garde!
1843 Peri, La Ballet-fantastique, 2; Gautier/Coralli, Burgmuller, Coralli
1790 Psyche Ballet-pantomime, 3; [?J, Miller [Ernest Louis Muller],
Gardel
1833 Revolte au serail, La Ballet-feerie, 3; [?], Theodore Labarre, Taglioni
1832 Sylphide, La Ballet-pantomime, 2; Nourrit, Schneitzhoeffer, Taglioni
1839 Tarentule, La Ballet-pantomime, 2; Scribe, Casimir Gide, Coralli
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6 Dance and dancers

Thus Wagner begins his account of Tannhiiuser's rough treatment at the

Sunday 1 La Reine de Chypre (5-act opera by Halevy with ballets)

huntsmen, to name only a few. Both tended to switch frequently between

Personalities and dance styles

danseuse in French choreography (though he maintained his powers in Italy

Possessed of 'strength, lightness, suppleness and an originality of style

Graces] ... Dolores [Serral] and [Mariano] Camprubi have nothing in

Table 6.2 Rationales for dancing and divertissements in selected grand

1829 Guillaume Tell (I) Village wedding celebration

Wagner's complaints notwithstanding, librettists rationalised the ballets

Example 6.1 Jean-Madeleine Schneitzhoeffer, 'Ecossaise' from La Sylphide, edited from a

Allegretto J = 120 ,.-.,

By presenting (character' dance, moreover, an operatic ballet could help

Dancers in opera would thus serve as an extension of the elaborate mise-

Mixing mute and sung roles at the Opera

~~b,a. #e-~ ___

Between ballet and the ballroom

Consequently, it is hardly surprising that audience members occasionally

Voyeurism and ballet

Appendix 6.1 Select list ofballet-pantomimes in alphabetical order, showing

1829 Belle au bois dormant, La Ballet-pantomime-feerie, 4; Eugene Scribe, Ferdinand

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