I. La Sylphide: 1832
If you were
in Paris on March 12, 1832, and decided to catch the premiere of the new ballet
at the Paris Opera that night, you were in for a rare experience: the ballet
was La Sylphide, and she was played
by the soon-to-be-superstar Marie Taglioni.
The plot was simple: Scottish Highlander James, about to be married,
gets tempted away on his wedding day by an otherworldly Sylph. She looks like a girl, but has wings and can
fly, and lives in the nearby woods. He
follows her there, but she keeps flitting away until a witch named Madge offers
James a scarf that will ground her, so that she can be his forever. But when James puts the scarf around her, the
Sylph loses her wings—her life force—and she dies. James is left with his dead dreamgirl, carried away skywards by her sister sylphs, while his ex-fiancée marries his best friend. It’s
a flimsy plot, so why was this ballet a landmark?--Because it came at the right
time, in the right place, and with the right girl.
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| Cholera in Paris |
What would it have been like to be
there at that moment? Paris in 1832,
like most cities at the time, was not a healthy place: it still had its narrow
medieval streets, sewage was a problem, disease was rife, with tuberculosis
common. As a matter of fact, two weeks
after this performance, Cholera appeared in the city, and would eventually take 20,000 lives. The average life
expectancy in 1830 was around 45. If you
want an evocation of Paris in 1832, think Hugo’s Les Miserables; the episode of the barricades chronicles the brief
uprising in the city in that year. Certainly the precariousness of life, and
the preoccupation with the supernatural, helped to fire up the Romantic
movement, now just coming into vogue. Theater,
music and literature provided escape, and ballet, emerging into its own as an
independent art form did too.
To understand 1832, we have to
modify our mindset even more: Just last week, the actress Patti LuPone, miffed
at a woman who was texting on her cellphone
all through a play in which she was performing, grabbed the phone from
the lady’s hands at the end of the second act.
We all know how distracting texting can be, and in a darkened theater,
those bright screens shine like beacons, not to mention the dings and boings.
In 1832, the Paris Opera was not
the one we know now, but on the much narrower Rue de Peletier. Unlike modern theater, the house lights were
kept on, so people could socialize, chatter and flirt particularly if the
entertainment were mediocre. I have the
feeling that audiences then could have at least as much A.D.D. as they do
now. The curtain never went down between
acts, so scene changes (and stagehands), could be seen by everyone. There were
also boxes right at the stage, so that rich playboys could ogle their favorite
actors, singers and dancers up close and personal, and proposition ballerinas
and ladies of the chorus afterwards in a salon adjacent to the stage. Before 1800, stage and house lighting was
provided by flickering candles.
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| The Opera, Rue la Peletier: Robert le Diable in full tilt |
But by the 1820’s, the advent of
gas lighting at the beginning of the century allowed for much more dramatic
theatrical special effects. In 1831, the
Opera presented Giacomo Mayerbeer’s Robert
le Diable (Robert the Devil) with
a spectacular ballet involving Robert, the Devil’s son, cavorting with the
spirits of lascivious long-dead nuns in a ruined cloister at night. Theatrical illusion was
aided by the new
custom of lowering the curtain during scene changes. Devilish Robert caused a sensation, the
opening shot of fifteen years of hybrid spirits, ghosts, fatal and
insanity-causing love, often occurring in exotic locales—if not the
extraterrestrial, at least the supernatural. Such creatures can tempt humans,
but can’t really be life partners; and the Sylphide doesn’t have a name, human
or otherwise. They constitute the Romantic notion of the Unattainable Ideal, and
they usually end badly.
Marie Taglioni seemed to have epitomized the unearthly/earthly dichotomy of the Sylph, or at least her contemporaries
thought so. Critics of the day wrote
elaborate, wordy paeans of praise, but beyond that, everyone who saw her in
this role was enchanted. It’s
interesting because she had rather long arms as well as a stooping posture, and
was not a particularly pretty woman, which set her apart from most ballet
dancers of the period, who were considered fair game for dalliance among men of
the leisure class.
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| Foyer de la Dance, where Rich Guys and Ballerinas meet; Taglioni isn't here |
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| Taglioni on her toes |
But she made viewers believe that she was beautiful and not
quite of this world. Great dancers are
great athletes—musical ones. Marie was
all this, and also had an exceptional genetic pedigree: her maternal
grandfather was a celebrated Swedish opera singer, her mother a dancer, and her
Italian father’s side formed a veritable dynasty of dancers (grandfather,
father, aunt, uncle, brother). Most of
her extraordinary ethereality, though, was formed by years of rigorous
training, and sustained by very hard work—she would practice two hours a day
for her whole career, and to prepare for her debut in Vienna in 1822, her father put her through an exhausting boot camp (pardon the pun), working her six hours a day. She was also fortunate
to have her father, Filippo, not only her personal trainer, but also a personal
choreographer and business manager. She
was said by legend to have invented toe dancing. In fact she didn’t, but with her father’s
training and her own personal determination, what she herself did was to extend
the technique and so integrate it into her dance style that she really seemed
to float—and she did all this while wearing a corset and soft shoes!
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| Taglioni's Costume and a shoe, both in St. Petersburg. Photo by Emma Johansson |
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| Taglioni Corsets |
By the time she created the Sylph,
she was 28, and had been dancing in public for ten years, and appearing at the
Paris Opera for five. But La Sylphide
made the most perfect use of her talents and though she danced many other roles
until her retirement at age 43 in 1847, she would always be THE Sylph, and
appeared in it in many European capitals, including in Russia, where crazy fans
once cooked one of her shoes (used or new?) and ate it.
It is not surprising that La Sylphide became an instant Romantic
Movement icon. For the next decade and a
half, sprites of water, air, fire and even trees continued to haunt (and elude)
mortal men. Though the basic lines of
her white costume was really a shortened version of ladies’ fashion of the
time, it turned around and made evening wear lighter and more gauzy, and there
was even a line of “La Sylphide” corsets. An English stagecoach line was named
in her honor, as was a new type of flower. One of Taglioni’s most enthusiastic fans, the future
Queen Victoria, had a doll with her costume, and there were paper dolls too. The commercial possibilities spread—and
eventually, years later, the sylph graced a brand of American bourbon.
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| Taglioni cutouts |
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| La Sylphide Bourbon (1860). At least one sylph appears to be topless |
We can try and evoke that magic
evening of March 12, 1832, but we can’t really. In the pre photographic era, pictures of
dancers are stylized to a period ideal, and can assume postures impossible in
the real world. Performance in any genre, be it ballet, opera, popular songs,
or theater are ephemeral things, and even works with a long history change over
time as new artists conform to their own times. After all techniques and fashion both evolve. La Sylphide didn’t outlast its performer
for that long; art and style move on, and by 1858, when it was last seen in
Filippo’s version, it was already charmingly archaic, and its last performer,
Emma Livry died tragically young in a fire.
A second version, choreographed by August Bournonville in 1836 with new
music, does survive to this day, but now altered by modern reinforced toe shoes,
changes in dance technique, if not choreography, and of course the only lights
during performance are on the stage.
In the 1970’s Pierre Laclotte
attempted a reconstruction of Filippo Taglioni’s ballet, and tried to come as
close as possible to the original by careful research. You can watch two different performances of
it on Youtube. But he wasn’t at the
original debut, and once again staging, lighting and the darkened theater
prevail (if nobody is using a cell phone).
It remains a loving tribute, but its producer is a 20th-21st
century guy in a different culture.
La
Sylphide has been studied, analyzed, deconstructed and reconstructed many
times during the last 30 years by critics and dance history scholars. To us, here, now, it will always be a quaint
and charming anachronism. Dissecting it
is like trying to dissect the dead goose to find out how she laid golden
eggs. Nobody can really know how Taglioni
danced. It was a pop-culture golden
moment, and changed everything for that time on. And we can still have that kind of experience. Wait for Part 2!
________________________________________________________________________
The two best books dealing with the Sylph and Taglioni are:
Ivor Guest, The Romantic ballet in Paris, Alton
(Hampshire), Dance books Ltd., 2008.
Guest
offers a complete view of the period 1815-1847, putting La Sylphide,
And Taglioni into superb cultural
and artistic context. He is the
preeminent ballet historian of 19th century Paris and London, and
all his numerous books are fascinating.
Marian Smith (ed.), La Sylphide: 1832 and Beyond, Paris 1832 and
Beyond, Dance Books, Ltd. 2012
This is a
multi-authored volume of scholarly decostructions of many aspects
of La Sylphide.
The Web: Just
Google ‘Taglioni” and “La Sylphide” and you will find a plethora of websites,
information and images, a lot of it solid, a lot of it not. Interesting for the curious, but read Guest
first to get the Right Stuff.
You can watch two performances of Laclotte's La Sylphide on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm-9_OpzWUE 1972 - a little blurry
I really enjoy your postings, Judy. Can't wait to see how you link Darth Vader into this discussion!
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