Introduction

Following the reforms of the 18^th century, the art of ballet further developed into the art form known today in the 19^th century. The 1800s were the remaining years of Charles Didelot’s reign, but in the 1830s, a huge transformation befell the art with the rise of the Romantic Era. From 1831 to 1847, Romanticism ruled the stages of Paris and London in the forms of the works by Filippo Taglioni, Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot. In Denmark, the ballet stage was ruled by August Bournonville, while ballet in Italy evolved under the watchful eye of Carlo Blasis. After its decline in 1847, the era’s many a mark on ballet stayed firm, especially in the evolution of pointe work and the roles of gender. After the end of the Romantic Era came the dawn of a new era in Saint Petersburg with the rising career of Marius Petipa that introduced the Classical Era, the era deemed by many as the “golden years of classical ballet”.

The Romantic Era

The Romantic Ballet was the era that saw the introduction of new elements of Romanticism into the art form of ballet, which subsequently gave way to some of the art form’s most standard traditions. Perhaps the most significant of elements that was given a new home in ballet was the supernatural. A popular genre and concept of the 19th century, the supernatural brought ballet into a whole new dimension of magic, romance, fantasy, tragedy, and the gothic. It especially materialised in a key characteristic of Romanticism, which is supernatural female creatures, such as fairy maidens of the forests (sylphs, wilis, nymphs, dryads, swan maidens, etc) and the waters (naiads, mermaids, sirens, rusalkas, etc), who would lure humans, especially men, into their worlds. These supernatural maidens would become a traditional feature of the Romantic Ballet and gave way to a new type of ballerina role – the fairy ballerina and the ballet stage became her fairyland. This was further materialised in the introduction of the famous so-called “white act” (aka the ballet blanc), which takes place in a magical, supernatural and/or heavenly location and consists of the huge corps de ballet of supernatural or enchanted women, usually dressed in white tutus.

The new Romantic genre and the ballet blanc was first presented in 1831 at the Paris Opéra in Filippo Taglioni’s Ballet of the Nuns, the opera divertissement from the third act of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable. The gothic scenario presents the ghosts of fallen nuns rising from their tombs in a ruined cloister and dancing to seduce the protagonist into committing an act of blasphemy. Taglioni choreographed this ballet especially for his daughter, Marie Taglioni, who became the epitome of the Romantic Ballerina and a ballet icon because she presented an image of such beauty, grace, elegance, and femininity that was deemed otherworldly. This was especially magnified by a trick she had used in which she darned the tips of her shoes to enable her to dance on her toes with profound elegance, adding to the evolution of pointe work. The image caused such a sensation that it was again showcased when her father choreographed La Sylphide for her,which premièred at the Opéra the following year.

The success of La Sylphide paved the way for many other ballets that further exploited the ballerina’s image of perfect femininity, such as Giselle, ou Les Wilis, Ondine, ou la Naïade, La Péri and La Esmeralda, and brought other very significant ballerinas of the era to the stage, most notably Fanny Elssler, Lucile Grahn, Carlotta Grisi and Fanny Cerrito. However, this Romantic image also had consequences for, at the Paris Opéra, the ballerina was sexualised both on and off stage, and her male counterpart, the danseur, was pushed to the background. While the ballerina was deemed beautiful and the object of men’s sexual fantasies and desires, the danseur was deemed ugly and was banished into the ballerina’s shadow, reduced mainly to purely mimed roles and partnering. To further feminise the ballet, the travesty danseuse was introduced, enabling roles that should have been given to the men to be danced by the women in male garb. It is true that the danseur did not disappear entirely – the likes of Lucien Petipa and Arthur Saint-Léon kept male dancing somewhat alive in Paris and London, but only to a certain degree and not enough to change the Opéra’s misogynist policies that idealised the ballerina. However, these policies were not brought to every corner in Europe. While Paris and London were the ballerina’s fairyland, in Denmark, Italy and Russia, both the ballerina and the danseur were active under the eye of August Bournonville in Denmark, Carlo Blasis in Italy and various ballet masters in Russia.

Eventually, like every era, the Romantic Ballet began to decline in the late 1840s, though it continued for several more years in London. In Russia, things were already changing and with the retirements, relocations and/or deaths of some of the Romantic Ballet’s leading figures – Marie Taglioni retired in 1847; Jean Coralli choreographed his last ballet in 1847 and retired in 1854; Jules Perrot relocated to Russia in 1848 – saw the emergence of new choreographers and dancers, and further evolution in the art of ballet.

Ballets of the Romantic Era

The post-Romantic Ballet

The era of the post-Romantic Ballet marked something of a new direction in ballet, though many of the traditions in the Romantic Ballet had cemented their place in the art form. The theme of the supernatural, although still present, was no longer the primary subject for new ballets in the Paris Opéra repertoire and the fairy ballerina was not the trending icon she had been before. The lessening of the focus on the supernatural had already started in the early 1840s, but the policies that kept the ballerina in the spotlight and the danseur in her shadow remained. One of the most notable of Romantic traditions that stayed was the ballet blanc, a tradition that was especially exploited to the maximum in Saint Petersburg as Marius Petipa’s career as a choreographer began to rise. Another was another step in the evolution of pointe work. After Marie Taglioni darned the tips of her shoes, which gave way to the idea that there could be a special shoe to allow the ballerinas to stand on their toes, the idea was manifested into just that in the hands of Italian shoemakers, who crafted pointe shoes with a hard block. However, the flame of the Romantic Era had begun to die out, especially after the retirement of Marie Taglioni, so by the 1850s, the Paris Opéra was starting to lose its light, but there were individuals who worked to keep that light alive.

With the retirements of Filippo Taglioni and Jean Coralli, and the relocation to Russia of Jules Perrot, the Paris Opéra and London made way for two new choreographers of the era – Joseph Mazilier and Arthur Saint-Léon. Both had been premier danseurs of the Romantic Balletand had partnered the Opéra’s top ballerinas and when their times to take up the role of Ballet Master came, they aimed to carve their own marks and continue the legacy left by their predecessors. Mazilier choreographed his first full-length ballet in 1839 and would go onto choreograph fifteen ballets in total until his retirement in 1857. Saint-Léon’s choreographing would take him both in and out of Paris to London and Saint Petersburg. Some of the top ballerinas of the Romantic Era continued to dominate the stages of Paris and London, but also the stage of Saint Petersburg, most notably Carlotta Grisi and Fanny Cerrito, with Cerrito also sharing her abilities as a choreographer. After the respective retirements of Grisi and Cerrito in the 1850s, the Opéra saw the rise of new talent in ballerinas such as Carolina Rosati, Amalia Ferrais, Emma Livry and Giuseppina Bozzacchi. In the end, however, all efforts to keep the Paris Opéra’s seemingly immortal legacy of the 1830s and 1840s alive proved to be in vain as the Opéra declined in the 1850s and 1860s. By 1870, the ballets of the Romantic Era were no longer active in the repertoire (for example, Giselle was performed for the final time in Paris in 1868) and the Opéra was plagued by several tragedies with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the tragic deaths of Emma Livry and Giuseppina Bozzacchi, and that of Arthur Saint-Léon, whose death extinguished the last flame of the Romantic Era. Three years later, the very last remnants of the Romantic Ballet literally went up in flames when the Salle Le Peletier, the theatre where the great ballets of the era had premièred, was destroyed by a fire on the night of the 29^th October 1873.

While ballet was in decline in Paris and in London, and a great era had come to an end, it was in Russia that ballet was flourishing. Jules Perrot ruled as Ballet Master of the Imperial Ballet in the 1850s with the staging of the many ballets (his own and those of others) that disappeared from Paris and London. This tenure also saw Carlotta Grisi and Fanny Elssler dance on the Russian stage in some of the roles they had created in Paris and London. Following his departure from Saint Petersburg, Saint-Léon was called to succeed him, but it was in the hands of another Frenchman that the art form would reach its peak.

Throughout the respective tenures of Perrot and Saint-Léon in Saint Petersburg, the career of Marius Petipa was rising. He had arrived in Russia in 1847 as Premier Danseur and served as assistant to Perrot, but his abilities as a choreographer were not kept hidden. Between 1855 to 1861, he choreographed several one and two-act ballets for his wife Maria Surovshchikova-Petipa and in 1862, he got his big break with the creation of his grand ballet The Pharaoh’s Daughter. The success of the colossal ballet earned Petipa the rank of second ballet master under Saint-Léon and for the next nine years, he would create more ballets that give way to another new era. By the time he danced his final role in 1868, Petipa had made his mark as one of the art’s most prominent choreographers and after Saint-Léon’s departure, Petipa rose to the rank of Premier Maître de Ballet of the Saint Petersburg Imperial Theatres. The 1870s was a different era in Saint Petersburg than in Paris and London as it saw the art of ballet flourish by Petipa’s hand. The genre of the Grand ballet was his signature mark with its colossal productions of grand décor and its structure of three or four acts of dance, mime and Petipa’s signature divertissements. In his first decade as Premier Maître de Ballet, Petipa added nine new ballets to the Imperial Theatre’s repertoire, which were especially created for the theatre’s Prima Ballerinas, Ekaterina Vazem and Evgenia Sokolova and its Premier Danseur Lev Ivanov, the most famous and successful ballet was La Bayadère, created for Vazem and Ivanov in 1877. The post-Romantic Era saw the end of a golden era in Paris and London and the rise of a new golden era in Saint Petersburg.

The Classical Era

The era of the Classical Ballet has been labelled as the era of Petipa. The first decade of his tenure as Premier Danseur made way for more successes in the 1880s, which saw him create nine new works and revive three nearly forgotten ballets of the Romantic Era – Paquita (1881/82), Giselle (1884) and La Esmeralda (1886). The 1880s also saw the rise of the choreographic career of Lev Ivanov, who retired from the stage in 18… and was appointed second ballet master to Petipa. His career as a choreographer began in 1885 when he and Petipa collaborated on the Russian staging of Peter Ludwig Hertel’s La Fille mal gardée. The choreographic collaboration of Petipa and Ivanov would significant for both men’s careers.

The 1880s also saw another important era in ballet history – the era of the Italian dancers in Saint Petersburg, with the arrivals of Virginia Zucchi, Elena Cornalba, Emma Bessone, Enrico Cecchetti and Carlotta Brianza in the Imperial Russian capital. This marked another significant development to the art form with the introduction of the Italian school to the French-style school of Saint Petersburg and the spectacle genre the féerie to the Russian stage, a genre that was especially popular in Italy at the time and would manifest in several of Petipa’s ballets in the 1880s and 1890s, most notably The Sleeping Beauty. Under the direction of Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the composer who would become ballet’s most prominent was brought to Saint Petersburg – Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who composed the three most famous ballets known today and gave Petipa the opportunity to showcase three Italian ballerinas – Carlotta Brianza, Antonietta Dell’Era and Pierina Legnani. With the combination of Petipa as ballet master, the French and Italian styles, symphonic-style ballet music scores and the influence of the féerie, ballet had taken a new step forward and would prove to have a lasting influence on the art form. Long gone were the days of the Romantic Era: the Classical Era firmly made its own mark.

Sources

• Nadine Meisner (2019) Marius Petipa, The Emperor’s Ballet Master. New York City, US: Oxford University Press
• Ivor Guest (1953) The Ballet of the Second Empire. Middletown, Connectivut, US: Pitman & Wesleyan
• Ivor Guest (1954) The Romantic Ballet in England. Hampshire, UK: 2014 ed. Dance Books Ltd
• Ivor Guest (1985) Jules Perrot: Master of the Romantic Ballet. London, UK: Dance Books Ltd
• Ivor Guest (2008) The Romantic Ballet in Paris. Alton, Hampshire: Dance Books Ltd