Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the Romantic Ballet

Salvatove Taglioni, King of Naples

Salvatove Taglioni,King of Naples L A V I N I A C A V A L L E T T I Salvatore Taglioni's life spanned one of the most tumultuous periods in European history and a key era in the creation of modern Italy. H e was born in 1789, the year the French Revolution broke out, in Sicily, which was thenpart of the Kingdom of Naples, one of the numerous states ruling Italy. H e made his debut in Paris in 1806, at the height of Napoleon's First Empire, then, in 1808, moved to Naples, where Napoleon had just installed GeneralJoachim Murat, an energetic modernizer, as king. After Murati fall in 1815, the Neapolitan throne was restored to the legitimate Bourbon king, Ferdinand I, an elderly reactionary. Taglioni served under Ferdinand and under his descendants Francis I, who ruled from 1825-1830, Ferdinand 11, who ruled from 1830 to 18J9, and Francis 11, who lost his throne in 1860 to the forces led by Giuseppe Garibaldi, the great Italian patriot, and the King of Piedmont, who sought to unite Italy under a constitutional monarchy on the English model. In November 1860, Victor Emmanuel, the first ruler of the new kingdom of Italy, arrived in Naples: he was the sixth monarch whom Taglioni served. Taglioni died in 1868. Two years later, Italian unification was complete. "The finest living ballet composer in Italy," opined August Bournonville in the 1840s about Salvatore Taglioni.' However forgotten he may be today, Taglioni was the most eminent Italian choreographer of the Romantic period. In part, this was because of the exceptional longevity of his career, which began in 1806, when he made his debut as a sixteen -year-old dancer, and ended three years before his death in 1868.2In part, too, it reflected the prominence of the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples. The largest theater in Europe at the time and the one (according to Bournonville) with the best corps de ballet,3 the San Carlo witnessed the creation of nearly all his ballets. Finally, it was a measure of the sheer number of works he produced there-more than 150. Although Taglioni's career spanned the rise and fall of the Romantic movement in ballet, he himself remained somewhat on its margins. Unlike his older brother Filippo and Filippo's daughter, Marie, he never became an international celebrity. Indeed, Marie, the romantic ballerina par excellence , never once came to Naples to dance in her uncle's production^.^ Moreover, although all the elements typical of Romanticism in general appear in Taglioni's works, they lack the characteristics specific to Romantic ballet. Thus, while he did not avoid fantastic themes, he did not 182 / L A V I N I A C A V A L L E T T I Salvatore Taglioni, lithograph by Luigi De Crescenzo, ca. 1850. The wreathed inscfiption reads, "Born in Palermo in 1791," and each laurel leaf bears the name and year of one of Taglioni's ballets. Dance Collection,New York Public Libraryfor the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and TildenFoundations. embrace the world of fairies, sylphs, and white tutus. Still, one can hardly deny that he was a Romantic choreographer: in their themes and settings, and taste for romance and atmosphere, his ballets reflected the era's fashions . Lasting five or six acts, his ballets were the movie epics of their time: the action was heroic, sentimental, and full of spectacular effects-fires, floods, volcanoes, and whatever other catastrophes the San Carlo's technical staff could manufacture. The pure dance sequences bore little or no connection to the events narrated in the ballet. The soloists inserted bravura variations at willY5 and it was the mimes who carried forward the often highly complicated plot. To understand what was happening, the audience had the help of written libretti, but reading them today one S A L V A T O R E TAGLIONE, K I N G O F N A P L E S / 183 wonders how the dancers could possibly have expressed certain concepts using only their hands and feet. Taglioni cultivated all the genres of the period-mythological heroic, Anacreonic (in which, according to certain critics, he excelled), historical and mythological historical, romantic, allegorical , and even comic. Various genres might appear in a single ballet. Overall, however, the historical genre predominated. Taglioni was born into a family that gave eminent personalities...