THE HEYDAY OF THE BALLET
“Will the young folks ever see anything so charming, anything so
classic, anything like Taglioni?” The question occurs in “Pendennis,”
and how shall we answer it?
The dance is the most fugitive of the arts. Time makes but slow headway
in obliterating a picture or a statue, and a verse is too elusive for
his grasp; but the dancer’s art dies with her, or rather the dancer
herself outlives it. Painting may preserve some phantom of her grace,
but the soul of the grace is in the motion which it cannot represent.
The dancer lives only in hearsay, in the memory of spectators, and when
the last eye-witness is gone she is no more than a name to posterity.
Taglioni’s is perhaps the greatest name in the annals of dancing, but a
comparison of her art with that of her successors of the present day is
well-nigh impossible. We can only judge of her genius by the echoes of
the applause which have not even yet quite died away.
Marie Taglioni was born in Stockholm in 1804. Her father was an Italian,
her mother a Swede. Her name was already well known in the world of the
theatre, as her father was a _maître de ballet_ and two of her aunts had
been celebrated dancers. But although she was born into the tradition,
she appears not to have been formed by nature to be a dancer. When her
father took her as a child to see Coulon, a famous dancing-master at the
beginning of the last century, the master turned to him and said, “What
the devil am I to make of that little hunchback!” But by years of
assiduous training she overcame any defect of form that may have been
hers by birth.
She made her début in 1822 at Vienna in a ballet which her father had
composed specially for her, entitled _Réception d’une jeune Nymphe à la
Cour de Terpsichore_. Her success there was immediate and it was not
long before the young dancer became one of the “stars” of the Opera.
When she appeared in Paris, however, five years later, in _Le Sicilien_,
her reception was somewhat cold. Perseverance was one of Taglioni’s
characteristics and she determined to achieve the conquest of the French
capital, a measure which was even more necessary then than now to the
dancer who aspired to universal fame. She succeeded and her success
there set the seal upon her artistic fortunes. She appeared successively
in _La Vestale_, _Mars et Vénus_, _Fernand Cortez_, _Les Bayadères_, and
_Le Carnaval de Venise_. She was acclaimed as the greatest dancer of the
day. In _La Sylphide_ she achieved a triumph which resounded throughout
the whole of Europe.
From Paris she extended her conquests to London, where she first
appeared in 1830 in Didelot’s ballet, _Flore et Zéphire_. An incident
which happened during her stay in London is significant of the
discipline upon which her father insisted. He had a small sloping stage
erected in his daughter’s room, in order that she might practise her
steps every night. A gentleman occupying the floor below sent word that
the dancer was on no account to interrupt her practice from fear of
disturbing him. Philippi Taglioni resented the courtesy. “Tell the
gentleman,” he said, “that I, her father, have never yet heard my
daughter’s step--if ever that should happen, I would have no more to do
with her!”
She had been brought to England as a counter-attraction to the famous
Lablache and Malibran, then in the zenith of their popularity in Italian
opera. She at once became the idol of the British public. The theatre
was literally besieged on those nights when she was announced to appear.
It was in England that she found a public ever ready to cry her praises
when her fame was being seriously challenged by younger rivals abroad.
She received a salary paid to no other dancer in the world. She
demanded and obtained a hundred pounds a night, in addition to which
several of her relations had to be financed as well. An inordinate love
of money was one of the least favourable of her traits. One night the
manager of Her Majesty’s Theatre was compelled to come before the
curtain to apologise for the fact that the ballet had not begun, because
Taglioni, sitting in her dressing-room, refused to appear on the stage
until a large sum of money had been paid her on account. Her temper
behind the scenes intimidated even the most hardened manager. One
evening, when the male dancer Perrot happened to receive a greater
amount of applause than herself, she refused to continue the
performance, and accused everybody right and left of having plotted to
dethrone her. But she had only to dance and everything was forgiven her.
She was the spoilt child of the play-going world.
Apart from the glamour which she cast over her contemporaries, Taglioni
exercised a considerable influence over the development of the ballet.
She finally freed it from the remains of the eighteenth-century
artificiality and affectation which had given a certain grotesqueness to
most of the dancers before her time. She helped to do away with the
rather heavy pseudo-classicism of the earlier ballet; her dancing was
Catholic, if the expression may be allowed, rather than pagan. She
adopted a quality of restraint in her dress and manner. She danced in a
long tunic of white silk-muslin, which reached almost to her ankles and
fell in graceful folds from her figure. Indeed so long was her skirt
that when she was dancing in St Petersburg it is said that the Czar was
compelled to leave his box and take a seat in the stalls. Her hair was
dressed in the style of the Madonna, falling back severely on either
side and encircled by a wreath of roses. Her eyes were usually downcast,
her attitude demure.
As a woman she had few if any pretensions to real beauty; her jaw was
too square, her features too pronounced. Her form also came short of
physical perfection. But apart from her genius for dancing she possessed
an extraordinary charm of manner. With her modest appearance, her
unadorned simplicity, her virginal air of innocence, she seemed to bring
a new atmosphere into the ballet. She was remarkable in winning the
whole-hearted admiration of her own sex. One of her male acquaintances
once asked her if she would not modify her costume so as to display more
of the grace of her figure. Her reply is characteristic. “Sir,” she
asked, “are you married?” He replied that he was. “Well,” retorted the
dancer, “I dance not for you, but for your wife and daughters.”
Her dancing was marked by an entire absence of the false consequence and
bombast of carriage and manner which appear to have characterised most
of the dancers of the time. Its chief note was a certain spirituality.
Taglioni appealed to the spirit rather than to the sense. She seemed
less a being of flesh and blood than some creature of the spiritual
order, always about to take wing and soar away from the earth. Her dance
was remarkable in suggesting flight. One of her most wonderful attitudes
was an _arabesque_ which gave her the appearance of actually flying. She
completely lacked the fire and abandon of her great rival Fanny Elssler.
Her dance was chastened and aspiring rather than voluptuous and
intoxicating. “_La Sylphide_ marks a ballet epoch,” says Mr Chorley, the
author of “Musical Recollections,” “as a work that introduced an element
of delicate fantasy and fairyism into the most artificial of all
dramatic exhibitions, one which to some extent poetised it. After _La
Sylphide_ were to come _La Fille de Danube_ and _Giselle_ (containing
some of Adolphe Adam’s best music), _L’Ombre_ and a score of ballets, in
which the changes were rung on naiad and nereid life, on the
ill-assorted love of some creatures of the elements for an earthly
mortal. The purity and ethereal grace of Mademoiselle Taglioni’s style
suggested the opening of this vein, as it also founded a school of
imitators. Her mimic powers, however elegant, were limited. Her face had
few changes. Her character dances, as in _Guillaume Tell_ and _La
Bayadère_, were new and graceful; but their seduction and piquancy were
to be outdone. When she touched our English ground, however, the sylph
excited as much enthusiasm as the most idolised songstress can now
evoke.”
Perhaps not a little of her popularity was due to the fact that the age
saw in her the concrete expression of the qualities which it most
esteemed. The emotions she expressed were placid, not of the
[Illustration: MARIE TAGLIONE
AS _La Sylphide_]
soul-shattering order. She was the gracious incarnation of the early
Victorian ideal.
Unfortunately, however, the virtue of domesticity was sadly lacking in
her private life. The blame however rests entirely with her husband. In
1832 she married Count Gilbert des Voisins, but the union was of brief
duration, for almost on the morrow of the wedding she was forgotten by
him. She met him twenty years later, so it is related, at a dinner given
by the Duc de Morny. When he appeared she demanded of Morny to know why
he had invited her to dine in such disreputable company. After dinner
Gilbert de Voisins, who feared nothing, not even his wife, had the
audacity to ask to be introduced to Marie Taglioni. “I fancy, monsieur,”
she remarked, “that I had the honour of being presented to you in 1832!”
Taglioni lived long enough to taste all the bitterness of the discarded
favourite. When she became too old to practise her art, and other less
gifted but more youthful dancers usurped her place, she passed swiftly
into oblivion. At the last, the dancer who had been wont to receive the
homage of kings and princes, and the adulation of the public of two
continents, remained without a friend. She lost all her fortune and in
her distress was compelled to give lessons in dancing and deportment.
“It was a sad sight,” says Henri Bauer, “to see her, a white-haired old
lady, escorting a bevy of English schoolgirls in Hyde Park in the
winter, at Brighton in the summer, or, accompanied by a little old
Italian, teaching dances and court curtseys to the proud daughters of
the gentry.”
“I would be young again to dance,” she said to a friend who had asked
her if she would like to live her life all over again, “I would be young
again to dance--but not from any love of life, not to repeat any other
experiences and pleasures.”
Marie Taglioni died at Marseilles in 1884.
The passion for the ballet in the nineteenth century reached its climax
in the amazing rivalry between Taglioni and Fanny Elssler. The
appearance of the Austrian dancer brought about a schism in the cult of
Taglioni. It was fought out with all the fury of the _odium
theologicum_. The two claimants to the sceptre of the dance divided the
world into rival camps. And how shall posterity, to whom both are little
more than shadowy names, make a just award?
Fanny Elssler was born in Vienna in 1810. Her father was Haydn’s copyist
and factotum, and the composer interested himself greatly in the
beginnings of her career. It began early, for at the age of six she was
dancing at a little Viennese theatre in one of the _ballets d’enfants_
then in vogue. She was first taught in the old, stereotyped style of
ballet-dancing which was revolutionised by Taglioni and fell into
disfavour about 1830. Her studies were completed in Italy, where she
passed a great part of her life. She first came into note at Naples and
danced her way through Italy to Berlin and London. Paris she reserved
for her latest conquest. It was when she was dancing at Her Majesty’s
Theatre that Véron, the director of the Paris opera, saw Elssler and
immediately secured her for the next operatic season. The English at
this time, in spite of their enthusiasm for ballet, appear to have
lacked the artistic perception to discover a dancer for themselves. A
great reputation abroad was the only royal road to success on the London
stage. And so it was that they failed to discover what a genius they had
in their midst until it was too late and the new dancer was being
acclaimed in Paris as a serious rival to the incomparable Taglioni.
Fanny Elssler had the advantage over Taglioni in possessing a beauty so
striking that she had only to appear upon the stage when a kind of
passionate shudder swept through the audience, more significant than the
loudest tumult of applause. Her beauty was of the sort that consists
less in the parts than in the harmony of the whole. No single feature
imperiously demanded the homage of the eye, but her perfect unity was
like that of a Greek statue. Her hands and feet were perfectly adjusted
to her limbs; her head was attached to her body by the purest lines of
neck and shoulder; her arms were supple and alert; her strength never
trespassed upon her grace. Her form had a suggestion of masculine
beauty. She has been compared to that ravishing chimera of Greek art,
the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, whose body was united with the nymph
of a river while bathing. This ambiguous quality in her beauty expressed
itself in all her actions. Even in the yielding form and seductive charm
of the dancer there was a hint of the agility, the brusque alertness,
the steel muscles of the young athlete.
She added to her grace of movement an exceptional command of expression.
Her eyes were lit with a certain malicious voluptuousness; when she
smiled a trace of irony played about her lips. In repose her face was
like a marble mask; in action it was capable of expressing the whole
range of the emotions, from tragic grief to the maddest gaiety.
The début of Fanny Elssler in Paris proved to be the great sensation of
the season. Curiosity had already been aroused by the rumour of her
liaison with the Duc de Reichstadt, the son of the first Napoleon--a
rumour wholly baseless as she had never even seen the youth.
Nevertheless the imagination of the large body of Bonapartists then
living in Paris was so fired that they made her début the occasion of a
great demonstration against Louis-Philippe.
The ballet in which she appeared was founded upon Shakespeare’s
_Tempest_. “Tout-Paris” flocked to the theatre. But of all the
notabilities the figure that excited most interest was that of a woman
sitting alone in a small box on the right of the stage. It was Marie
Taglioni. She knew, and everybody else knew, that Véron, the manager,
had brought the new-comer over from London specially to dethrone her.
With a somewhat scornful disdain she had come to take stock of her
rival. Perhaps she anticipated her discomfiture; in any case she can
scarcely have been prepared for the suddenness of her triumph. The new
dancer did not appear until the second of the two acts. Her success was
never in doubt for an instant. Her very first dance created a profound
impression, and the enthusiasm at the close of the performance knew no
limits. As she came before the curtain to acknowledge the thunder of
applause, many eyes were turned towards Taglioni’s box. It is said that
the tears were streaming down the face of the Italian dancer.
The newspapers of the following morning without exception published
eulogies of the débutante. The general public, however, was almost
evenly divided between the merits of the rival schools. Open war was now
declared between the two dancers. Taglioni’s reply was to revive the
ballet of _La Sylphide_, in which she had achieved her greatest triumph
and captured the heart of the Parisian public years before. The result
was that the pendulum of popularity swung back violently in her favour.
The admirers of the Austrian retorted by throwing ridicule upon the
affected innocence of Taglioni’s style, which after Elssler’s dancing
appeared altogether lacking in passion and fire.
The war between the Taglionists and the Elsslerites continued for years.
Nothing like it had been known since the rivalry of Pylades and
Bathyllus, when every Roman was either a Bathyllian or a Pyladian, or
the contests between the reds and the blues of the circus in Byzantium.
The Taglionists claimed the victory and the Elsslerites considered their
opponents vanquished. Each party strove to vindicate the perfection of
one or other of two utterly opposed styles of dancing. They were, in
fact, incomparable with one another. Taglioni’s dancing was spiritual,
while that of Elssler was distinctly of the terrestrial order. Elssler
was warmly human, passionate, dramatic; Taglioni when dancing seemed
scarcely to belong to the earth. Elssler introduced into the ballet an
abandon, fire, petulance, temperament, which the strict limits of art
seemed all too narrow to contain. The classical pirouette provided no
adequate outlet for her passion; she demanded the freer motions of the
South and East. She brought to the dance the ardour of the meridian, the
_fougue espagnole_. She was at her best in Spanish dances, especially in
the famous _cachucha_, which she made entirely her own. Théophile
Gautier said that he had seen Rosita Diez, Lola, the best dancers of
Madrid, of Seville, of Cadiz, of Granada, and the gipsies of Albaycin,
but he had never seen anything to approach the _cachucha_ as danced by
Fanny Elssler.
Chorley, the English critic, also agrees in attributing a unique
character to her dancing. “The exquisite management of her bust and arms
(one of the hardest things to acquire in dancing) set her apart from
everyone whom I have ever seen before or since. Nothing in execution was
too daring for her, nothing too pointed. If Mademoiselle Taglioni flew,
she flashed. The one floated on to the stage like a nymph, the other
showered every sparkling fascination round her like a sorceress. There
was more, however, of the Circe than of the Diana in her smile.”
If Taglioni embodied the ideals of early Victorian England, Elssler was
the incarnation of the Romantic movement of the Continent. She was the
new wine that was too strong for the old wineskins of classical
tradition. She had in her blood the northern enthusiasm for the South
which was the keynote of the movement. She drew her inspiration from
Spain, and so her spirit was attuned to that of the Romantics, whose
gaze also was towards the Pyrenees. She falls naturally into line with a
school which cared more for tumultuous movement than for classical
repose, for colour more than for form, for intense immediate sensation
more than for considered and reflective statement.
Some of the magic of Elssler’s dancing is caught in Gautier’s
description of her appearance in the Spanish ballet _El Diablo Cojuelo_.
“Clad in a skirt of rose-coloured satin clinging closely to the hips,
adorned with deep flounces of black lace, she comes forward with a bold
carriage of her slender figure, and a flashing of diamonds on her
breast. Her leg, like polished marble, gleams through the frail net of
the stocking. Her small foot is at rest, only awaiting the signal of the
music to start into motion. How charming she is with the large comb in
her hair, the rose behind her ear, her flame-like glance and her
sparkling smile! At the extremity of her rose-tipped fingers tremble the
ebony castanets. Now she darts forward; the castanets commence their
sonorous clatter; with her hands she seems to shake down clusters of
rhythm. How she twists! how she bends! what fire! what voluptuousness of
motion! what eager zest! Her arms seem to swoon, her head droops, her
body curves backwards until her white shoulders almost graze the ground.
What charm of gesture! And with that hand which sweeps over the dazzle
of the footlights would not one say that she gathered all the desires
and all the enthusiasms of those who watch her?”
The climax of the famous Taglioni-Elssler rivalry came when, in
defiance of all precedent, Elssler appropriated the most celebrated of
her predecessor’s ballets. Taglioni had made her name famous throughout
the world in _La Sylphide_. She had made the part so exclusively her own
that the pretension of any other dancer to appear in it seemed little
less a desecration than an impertinence. The announcement that Elssler
had determined to challenge her rival on her own ground fell like a
bombshell in the ranks of Taglionists and Elsslerites alike. But in this
instance the ambition of the Austrian dancer overshot the mark. The part
demanded the ethereal grace which none but Taglioni possessed. Elssler’s
performance was almost a failure. Deeply chagrined at the reverse, she
left soon afterwards for America.
Théophile Gautier lamented in a whimsical strain her loss to Europe.
“Ungrateful, she has left us,” he wrote, “she has gone away to America,
to the savages and the Yankees, whom she has wrought to such a madness
with the clatter of her castanets and the swaying of her hips that
senators drag her carriage through the streets and whole populations
follow her with cheers and fanfares.”
In America Elssler aroused a delirium of enthusiasm which put her
brightest European triumphs into the shadow--for America appears to have
a capacity for worship which the older continent has exhausted and for
two glorious years Elssler was its goddess. She was received by the
President of the Union himself, Van Buren, surrounded by his ministers.
During her visit to Washington the wheels of legislation and public
business ceased for a time to revolve. It was decided that Congress
should only meet on those days when Fanny was not dancing. Dollars
rained upon her. Daily she received bizarre and costly presents--massive
gold cigar-boxes and chemises embroidered with precious stones. “At
present she possesses fragments of the coffins of Napoleon and George
Washington,” her companion, Catherine Prinster, gravely
related--suggesting a future pregnant with grim possibilities. When she
returned from the theatre at night crowds followed her with blaring
bands; flowers and carpets were spread for her carriage to pass over;
illuminated arches were raised to brighten her progress. The very
handkerchiefs which she had used after dancing were fought for as
precious relics; the water in which she had dipped her hands was
preserved in bottles; and her admirers drank her health in champagne out
of the shoes in which she had danced the delirious _cachucha_.
On her return from America Elssler paid many visits to Italy, appearing
for several successive seasons at La Scala, in Milan. There she was
caught up in the vortex of international politics. The school of ballet
which had been founded at La Scala in 1811 was encouraged by the
Austrian Government, partly in the hope of providing a safety-valve for
that effervescence of enthusiasm without which an Italian populace
appears unable to exist. The glories of the ballet, it was supposed,
would prevent the popular mind from dwelling too insistently upon the
glories of Italian independence. Everywhere throughout the city was seen
the portrait of the ballerina. The theatre was decorated with roses when
she appeared. Listening to the cheers with which she was received,
Radetzky, the governor, rubbed his hands gleefully and said, “At any
rate they are not plotting any revolutions now!”
1848, however, was the year of Elssler’s Sedan. Revolution was in the
air and the governor sent for Elssler to dance it away. The ballet which
was selected was Perrot’s _Faust_. In the first scene, all the members
of the _corps de ballet_ appeared wearing a medal representing Pius IX.,
the new liberal Pope, giving his benediction to a united Italy.
Unfortunately Elssler regarded the demonstration as directed specially
against herself as an Austrian. Behind the scenes she told the director
that she refused to go on the stage again unless the offending medals
were taken off. The order was given accordingly. The audience was
speedily informed of the cause of the change, and when the _première
danseuse_ next appeared on the stage she was received with a tempest of
hisses. Though she never danced with greater brilliance and grace, the
only response to her endeavours to conciliate the anger of the
spectators was a sepulchral silence from the stalls and a running fire
of insults from the gallery. Bravely she smiled upon them, but the
patriots forgot the dancer in the Austrian and replied with cries of
_Basta! Basta!_ She fainted. At last the idol had fallen. She was
looked upon merely as the instrument of the foreign domination. She
tore up her contract with the impresario and returned to Vienna.
Elssler retired in 1851. The end of her career was in striking contrast
to that of Taglioni. In spite of a prodigal charity she had accumulated
a fortune of a quarter of a million. She preserved the freshness of her
youth to the last. In society she was always the most elegant figure.
She was beloved by the poor. In Milan it had been her wont to send all
the flowers she received to be placed before a statue of the Virgin in
the Church of San Fedele. In Vienna she was as famous for her charities
as for her dancing. The final curtain was rung down upon the long
rivalry of the two dancers in 1884, when the Austrian capital went into
mourning for the death of Elssler and Taglioni died poor and forgotten
in Marseilles.
Théophile Gautier, perhaps the most discriminating critic of the ballet,
said of Fanny Elssler that she was the most vital, the most precise, the
most intelligent dancer who ever graced the boards of the stage. Her
dancing had not the exquisite lightness, the purity of gesture and
attitude, the ethereal qualities of Taglioni; but in dramatic
significance, in fire, passion and imagination, her art never has been,
and probably never will be, equalled.
After the disappearance of the two immortal rivals, who was to carry on
the great tradition? Gautier gives us the answer: “For a long time,” he
writes, “women had said--What can come after the misty grace, the decent
abandon of Taglioni? For a long time men had asked--What can come after
the provocative verve, the spirited and wanton caprice, the purely
Spanish fire of Fanny Elssler? Carlotta Grisi has come--light and chaste
as the first, vivacious, joyous and precise as the second, only with the
inestimable advantage of counting no more than twenty-two Aprils and of
being fresh as a nosegay wet with dew.”
Carlotta Grisi was born in 1821 in a remote mountain village of Istria.
At the age of seven she was dancing in Milan at La Scala, where Perrot
discovered her. She profited by the excellent tuition of the great
_maître de ballet_, and subsequently danced in Naples, Venice, Vienna
and London. Those who witnessed her
[Illustration: CARLOTTA GRISI
IN _La Péri_]
début at the Paris Opera House in _Zingaro_ wondered whether she would
become more famous as a dancer or a singer. Her voice was so pure and
just that Malibran, the famous operatic singer, advised her to devote
herself entirely to music. But guided by that inner voice which speaks
infallibly to all great artists she decided to remain faithful to the
dance. She was the _première danseuse_ at the Paris Opera from 1841 to
1848.
Grisi was of medium height; her feet exquisitely shaped; her limbs
clean, nervous, of great purity of line; her complexion so fresh that
the only use she made of rouge was to revive the fading colour of her
pink dancing-shoes. Her expression had a childish _naïveté_, a gay and
communicative happiness. This fresh and almost infantile gaiety was the
keynote of her dancing. When she appeared upon the stage she seemed to
bring with her the freshness of her native mountain air and the sparkle
of the sun upon the snow.
What _La Sylphide_ was to Taglioni and _El Diablo Cojuelo_ to Elssler,
the ballet of _Giselle_ was to Grisi. It was the work of three famous
men: Heine furnished the subject, Gautier wrote the scenario and Adolphe
Adam composed the music. The scene was laid among the mountains, at the
season of the gathering of the grapes. At the vintage fête Giselle
danced with such unwearied zest that her mother said to her: “Luckless
child, you will dance yourself to death, and when you die you will
become a will-o’-the-wisp. You will go to the ball at midnight in a robe
of moonshine and with bracelets of dew-pearls on your cold white feet.
You will entice lost travellers into the fatal circle and you will lead
them, all warm and breathing, into the icy waters of the lake. You will
be a vampire of the dance!” Grisi’s most marvellous dance was her dance
of death and resurrection as a fairy-spirit. Giselle sickened with
despair of love until she lost her reason. Her madness did not take the
form of an Ophelia-like melancholy. She began to dance, she danced ever
more swiftly and furiously. As she danced, a gleam of reason came to
her; she remembered her sorrow and, resolving to end it and her life
together, she ran upon the point of a sword. Wounded to death she went
on dancing swooningly, and after some last disordered steps died in a
marvellous kind of choregraphic agony. In the next act came her no less
wonderful dance of resurrection. After she is dead, her grave in the
forest is discovered by the fairy troop. She is awaked by magic from her
long sleep. She rises and dances with a tottering motion like one still
dazed with dream. Gradually her limbs forget the contraction of the
grave-clothes; the cool air of the night and the light of the moon
restore her gaiety; delightedly she takes possession of space and
abandons herself to the ecstasy of her new fairy life. Grisi made of the
ballet a true poem, a kind of choregraphic elegy, full of tender charm.
More than one spectator who had never expected to be moved by a
_rond-de-jambe_ or _arabesque_ was surprised by tears. Henceforth the
part was impossible for any other dancer and the name of Carlotta became
inseparable from that of _Giselle_.
The perfect art of these three dancers, Taglioni, Elssler and Carlotta
Grisi, raised the ballet during the term of their fame to the highest
degree of excellence which it had ever reached. To their names must be
added those of Fanny Cerito, who was known in Italy as the “fourth
Grace,” and Lucille Grahn, who according to some critics combined the
ideal form of Taglioni with the realism of Elssler and the sprightliness
of Carlotta Grisi. These two dancers would probably have been without a
rival in any less brilliant epoch than that of the marvellous forties.
In England the ballet may be said to have reached its apogee on the 12th
of July 1845. On that memorable day four of the foremost dancers of the
age, Marie Taglioni, Carlotta Grisi, Fanny Cerito and Lucille Grahn,
danced a _pas de quatre_ before Queen Victoria. The bringing together of
such a glittering constellation of stars on a single stage is best told
in the words of the impresario who conceived and accomplished the
achievement.
“With such materials in my grasp as the four celebrated _danseuses_,
Taglioni, Carlotta Grisi, Cerito and Lucille Grahn, it was my ambition
to unite them all in one striking _divertissement_. But ambition, even
seconded by managerial will, scarcely sufficed to put such a project
into execution. The government of a great state was but a trifle
[Illustration: FANNY CERITO
IN _Ondine_]
compared to the government of such subjects as those whom I was
_supposed_ to be able to command; for these were subjects who considered
themselves far above mortal control, or, more properly speaking, each
was a queen in her own right--alone, absolute, supreme.... But there
existed difficulties even beyond a manager’s calculations. Material
obstacles were easily overcome. When it was feared that Carlotta Grisi
would not be able to leave Paris in time to rehearse and appear for the
occasion, a vessel was chartered from the Steam Navigation Company to
waft the sylph at a moment’s notice across the Channel; a special train
was engaged and ready at Dover; relays of horses were in waiting to aid
the flight of the _danseuse_ all the way from Paris to Calais. In the
execution of the project the difficulty was again manifold. Every
twinkle of each foot in every _pas_ had to be nicely weighed in the
balance, so as to give no preponderance. Each _danseuse_ was to shine in
her peculiar style and grace to the last stretch of perfection; but no
one was to outshine the others, unless in her own individual belief.
Lastly, the famous _Pas de Quatre_ was composed with all the art of
which the distinguished ballet-master, Perrot, was capable.
“All was at length adjusted. Satisfaction was in every mind; the _Pas de
Quatre_ was rehearsed--was announced; the very morning of the event had
arrived; no further hindrances were expected. Suddenly, while I was
engaged with the lawyers in my room, poor Perrot rushed unannounced into
my presence in a state of intense despair. He uttered frantic
exclamations, tore his hair, and at last found breath to say that all
was over--the _Pas de Quatre_ had fallen to the ground, and could never
be given. With difficulty the unfortunate ballet-master was calmed down
to a sufficient state of reason to be able to explain the cause of his
anguish. When all was ready, I had desired Perrot to regulate the order
in which the separate _pas_ of each _danseuse_ should come. The place of
honour, the _last_ in such cases, as in regal processions, had been
ceded without over-much hesitation to Mademoiselle Taglioni. Of the
remaining ladies who claimed equal rights, founded on talent and
popularity, neither would appear before the others. ‘Mon Dieu!’
exclaimed the ballet-master, ‘Cerito will not begin before Carlotta, nor
Carlotta before Cerito; there is no way to make them stir--all is
finished.’ ‘The solution is easy,’ said I; ‘let the _oldest_ take her
unquestionable right to the envied position.’ The ballet-master smote
his forehead, smiled assent, and bounded from the room upon the stage.
The judgment of the manager was announced. The ladies tittered, laughed,
drew back, and were now as much disinclined to accept the right of
position as they had been before eager to claim it. The order of the
ladies being settled, the _Grand Pas de Quatre_ was finally performed on
the same night before a delighted audience, who little knew how nearly
they had been deprived of their promised treat.”
It is scarcely possible now to conceive the excitement which this
performance created. It overshadowed for the time every other national
interest. The reports were eagerly awaited by the Continent. Foreign
courts received accounts of it enclosed in the official despatches. It
was a European event.
But even in the heyday of its prosperity there was a premonition of the
waning of the popularity of ballet. In the very year of this triumphant
dance, Jenny Lind was heard for the first time in London. The human
voice was about to drive the speechless ballet from the theatre.