Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the Romantic Ballet

Introduction

Introduction . L Y N N G A R A F O L A N o era has done more to define the image and essence of ballet than the Romantic decades of the 1830s and 1840s. Indeed, it was in these years, which coincided with the liberal July Monarchy in France and a rising tide of nationalism elsewhere, that ballet as we know it first came into existence. Although individual elements, from the theme of the supernatural to the all-important use of pointe, predated Romanticism, it was only in this period that they crystallized into a new, coherent whole. The result was ballet's reinvention as a modern art. To a far greater degree than its predecessors, the Romantic ballet was an international movement. It flourished from Naples to New York, Buenos Aires to St. Petersburg, thanks in part to the peregrinations of its stars, who dazzled audiences on tours that sometimes lasted for years, and the far-flung engagements of its ballet masters, who remounted in theaters of the periphery works originally produced in the ballet capitals of Paris and London. But there were at least two other sources of this international commerce, and both were distinctly untraditional. One was the service offered by the Paris OpCra-as the AcadCmie Royale de Musique was popularly known-whereby theaters and opera houses could acquire annotated scores for ballets they wished to duplicate on their own stages. This implied not only the existence of a repertory that crossed national boundaries, but also the then new idea that music was as crucial to a ballet's identity as the story. It is hardly accidental that the earliest ballets that survive even in bastardized form in today's repertory -La Fille Ma1 Garde'e, La Sylphide, Giselle-date to the Romantic period.' For the first time, a ballet was seen as entailing a set combination of texts rather than being solely identified by its libretto. Another sign-and source-of the internationalism of the Romantic ballet was the widespread dissemination of its iconography. Lithography, invented in the closing years of the eighteenth century, gave a great boost to printing and the production of multiple, relatively cheap images. "In the printing arts," writes George Chaffee, one of the great twentieth-century collectors of nineteenth-century ballet prints, the Romantic Era was one of the greatest periods in all history. Never before or since have so many "presentation books" poured from the presses-albums of pictures with or without text; gift-books ("Keepsakes " was the happy and homespun English expression),richly dight as a 2 / L Y N N G A R A F O L A mediaeval Book of Hours.. ..The vogue,. .. rising in the 1820's and becoming a rage from 1830 on, resulted in an alliance, a collaboration between artists and poets never before known.2 Of all ballet prints the most highly esteemed were French. Although many of the artists were foreign, the capital of this flourishing print industry-like the capital of the Romantic ballet-was Paris. It supplied the home market and was also, as Chaffee notes, a great export center. Indeed, the quality of French workmanship was so high that foreign designs were sometimes sent to Paris to be drawn on stone and ~ r i n t e d . ~ The images themselves were immensely varied, offering action studies, scenic designs, costume plates, technical illustrations, caricatures, portraits , and ensemble scenes. And they were everywhere-in books, albums, portfolios, and magazines, on sheet music covers, and decorating the walls of lower-middle-class homes. Marie Taglioni never danced in the United States, but she could be seen on sheet music covers published in Philadelphia and New York-an international celebrity created in part by technology. Although Romantic prints could be varied in subject matter, they belonged above all to the ballerina. She haunts them, as she haunts the writing of the era, an icon of femininity, graceful, teasing, mysterious. With her soulful gaze and airy skirts, she inhabited a world remote from home and hearth, the secluded valleys, misty lakesides, secret glades, and wild heaths that in ballet as in fiction, poetry, and opera extolled a Romantic idea of nature even as they coded her as an exotic dwelling on the periphery of European civilization. (One reason such landscapes were so popular on the ballet stage was their novelty: the invention of gaslight had only recently made them possible.) Often she was shown in flight, eluding the arms of...