THE BALLET IN SCANDINAVIA
The Danish ballet and Bournoville’s reform; Lucile Grahn, Augusta
Nielsen, etc.--Mrs. Elna Jörgen-Jensen; Adeline Genée; the mission
of the Danish ballet.
I
The French ballet dominated civilized Europe for centuries, as did the
French fashions, manners, language, art and social traditions. The high
society of every country was outspokenly French, and so were its views
and entertainments. How much even Germany was in the grip of French
ideals can be seen best from the efforts of her eighteenth-century
writers and reformers on behalf of their own national traditions.
Lessing was most bitterly fighting the French influence in German
life and art. It was only natural that semi-aristocratic Sweden
and Denmark felt the French sway. Stockholm introduced the ballet
during the last part of the eighteenth century, but used it for the
most part as an accessory of the opera. Taglioni, the father of the
celebrated _ballerina_, was employed as a ballet-master in Stockholm
where, in addition to his actual stage work, he was training dancers
for the ballet corps. He was succeeded by no one else than the great
Didelot, who later became a director of the ballet and ballet school
in Petrograd. But Sweden strictly followed the footsteps of France
and Italy and never took another direction. The Swedish ballet of the
nineteenth century was strictly French-Italian.
But the Danish ballet, which had been founded at the same time with
the Swedish, took a different turn. The early part and middle of the
nineteenth century mark a great turning point in the history of the
Danish stage dance. This is wholly due to the patriotic efforts of
its great reformer, Bournoville, who did not like the foreign flavor
of such an important art as dancing, and, moreover, found the stiff
style, artificial manners and the incoherent relation between the music
and dancing too crude and outmoded for a new era. On the other hand,
the method of training the dancers was lacking in system and seemed
too insufficient to make any thorough artists of the young men and
women who wished to make their career as dancers. Vincenzo Tomaselli
Galeotti, who had been for half a century an autocratic figure and
ballet-master of Denmark, emphasized either the acrobatic Italian or
the stereotyped French styles. For Galeotti the Danish ballet was
perfection itself, but not so for Bournoville.
Antoine Auguste Bournoville was born in 1805 in Copenhagen, where
his father had been a dancer and assistant conductor under Galeotti.
Already at the age of eight he danced in small parts in Copenhagen.
But it was not until 1829 that he made his real début in _Gratiereness
Hulding_. In 1824 he made a trip with Orloff to Paris where he saw
Vestris and Gardel, whose instruction and art inspired him to do for
the Danish ballet what they had done for the French. After a tour in
Austria and Italy, Bournoville settled down in Copenhagen and began to
reform the stage of his native land.
Bournoville’s main reformative idea was that a dancer should first of
all have a perfect technique, and then be an individual and not a dead
figure in a spectacular design. The technique of the Milan school was
to him one-sided, striving for gymnastic effects at the expense of the
musical and thematic requirements of a composition. Taglioni had just
made her reputation on the foundations that Bournoville had laid for
the Danish ballet. Virtuosity had been the danger of the old school.
Admiration was centred exclusively in the difficulty of the execution
of the steps. The _pointes_ and _pirouettes_ had been regarded as
the highest form of accomplishment. Bournoville realized that this
step, when it is abused, becomes the curse of ballet dancing. While
recognizing that it was absolutely necessary for momentary use, when
completing an attitude or giving a suggestion of ethereal lightness (as
of the poise of a winged being alighting for an instant upon the earth)
he combated the tendency to base the significance of the dance only on
this. On other occasions, one quick passage across the stage, the tips
of the toes scarcely brushing the dust of the carpet, the dancer may
make the impression of the grace of a bird’s flight. But if this trick
is displayed constantly during a performance the effect is lost in the
ugliness of the effort.
Bournoville was also dissatisfied with the ballet compositions and
plots. He remodelled many French ballets and wrote some himself. In
many things Bournoville coöperated with Pierre J. Larcher. The most
conspicuous of their works was _Valdemar_, which was first performed
in 1835, with music by Froehlich. Not less successful was the _Festen
i Albano_, an idyllic ballet in one act with music by Froehlich. This
was first performed in 1839. A very popular ballet that Bournoville
arranged to the music of Hartmann was _Olaf den Hellige_.
The most conspicuous pupil of Bournoville and the foremost of his prima
_ballerinas_ was Lucile Grahn, a girl of outspoken individuality,
temperament and dramatic force. She was a rival of Taglioni and
Elssler, not only in Denmark, but in France, England and in other
European countries. Grahn’s favored ballet was _La Sylphide_, though
she danced superbly in the _Fiorella_, and _Brahma und Bayaderen_. The
Danish critics wrote that the Copenhagen audience fairly went wild over
her dancing in the _Robert af Normandie_. Grahn differed from Taglioni
in her individual style, which was more romantic and lofty, and in her
dramatic talent. Besides being a great dancer she was an excellent
actress. The London and Petrograd audiences were particularly fond
of her _divertissement_ numbers, mostly written by Danish composers.
She was born in 1819 and died in Munich in 1875, after having lived
nineteen years of happy married life with Friedrich Young, a celebrated
opera singer of that time.
Next to Lucile Grahn in the Danish ballet stands Augusta Nielsen, born
in 1823 in Copenhagen. As a girl of fifteen, she danced in _Valdemar_.
But her real career began with _Toreadoren_, in which she danced for
the first time in 1840. Nielsen’s tendency in dancing was to be natural
rather than acrobatic. Her mimic and rhythmic talent surpassed by far
that of Grahn, Taglioni and Elssler. But since she strove less for
gymnastic effects than her celebrated contemporaries, she failed to
arouse the enthusiasm that greeted the others. She came close to the
modern natural dancers, since dancing was for her an individual art
like singing, in which each artist should express only the best of his
inner self. Like many other Danish dancers, Nielsen was a born actress
and emphasized the dramatic features as the most important ones in the
ballet.
Among Danish ballet dancers the most conspicuous figures are Adolph
F. Stramboe, Johann Ferdinand Hoppe, Waldemar Price and Hans Beck.
They all follow the footsteps of Bournoville, whose reforms in Danish
dancing are equal to those of Noverre in France, or Petipa in Russia.
Bournoville’s main efforts were to make dancing a serious dramatic
art. In this he succeeded. The influence of the Danish ballet upon
the Russian is of far-reaching extent. Didelot, having been a
ballet-master in Stockholm, was inspired by Bournoville’s attempts,
and followed his example after becoming a ballet director in Russia.
But the art of dancing has its period of youth, maturity, decay and
rebirth. The Danish ballet stopped its evolution after Bournoville. It
has remained what it was half a century ago. It is sound, classic, and
noble in its spirit, but it lacks the fire and soul of youth.
II
The writer has a record of the young living solo dancer of the
Danish Royal Ballet, Mrs. Elna Jörgen-Jensen, whose exquisite
delicate plastic art in Strindberg’s _Brott och Brott_, and Gabriele
d’Annunzio’s _Gioconda_ aroused stormy enthusiasm among Copenhagen’s
audiences. Haagen Falkenfleth, the celebrated ballet critic of
the _Nationaltidende of Copenhagen_, writes of her; ‘Mrs. Elna
Jörgen-Jensen, the _prima ballerina_ of the Danish Royal Ballet,
entered the Copenhagen Ballet School as a child, as the result of
an episode that is still little known. Her parents knew that little
Elna was passionately fond of dancing, but their surprise was great
when one day she disappeared from her home. It appeared that she had
run after a street organ-grinder to whose screaming tune she was
dancing in the middle of the street to the surprise of the occasional
spectators. At the age of seven she became a pupil of the Royal Ballet
School in Copenhagen, where the children are taught not only dancing
and _calisthenics_, but also the general school subjects, in the same
way as the dancers are educated in the Russian Imperial Ballet School
in Petrograd. As a pupil she was favored with small dancing parts in
certain ballets. She was excellent for little fairy rôles. In this way
she received a gradual training for the stage and had already mastered
her routine when she made her real début in Drigo’s “Harlequin’s
Millions.” She had personified Sylvia’s child in d’Annunzio’s
_Gioconda_ and the page in Schiller’s _Don Carlos_. Her dancing was so
sure, her movements so graceful and her mimicry so true to life that
her reputation was instantly established; but how versatile she was
became known only later.
‘No one who saw her during her début in the rôle of the gay Pierrette,
with frolic-humorous eyes and graceful juvenile steps, could imagine
that on the next occasion she would be so easily transformed into a
tragedienne in Schnitzler’s and Dohnányi’s “Veil of Pierrette.” She
practically created her rôle. Her romantic eyes, so full of sorrow and
despair, added a magic gloom to her dramatic dance, in which she stands
so high above her many contemporaries. She is realistically gripping.
Already at the age of nineteen she was an accomplished mute actress of
the modern type, and a great solo dancer. Dohnányi, who attended the
performance, told me that he had not supposed she could possibly add
such a tragic fire to the rôle that he wrote for untrained theatrical
dancers. Mrs. Jörgen-Jensen proved in this rôle that she had broken
loose from all the traditions of the Bournoville school in which she
was trained. You could not see a line of the conventional ballet style.
‘Bournoville, the reformer of the Danish ballet, introduced a
strong dramatic element into the national art. Yet his tendency was
outspokenly romantic. In this he aimed to be classic and strictly
choreographic. In many of his ballets the romantic and the realistic
issues are closely interwoven. In these Mrs. Jörgen-Jensen sometimes
has gone against the Bournoville principles and used her own judgment.
She has figured as the principal dancer in the “Flower Festival
at Genzano,” _La Ventana_, “Far from Danemark,” _Coppélia_ and
_Swanhilde_. But in “The Little Mermaid,” a ballet based on Hans
Andersen’s fairy-tale, she is best of all. While dancing in the rôle
of the Mermaid, she makes the impression of a magic creature of a
different world, with grace and charms that we have never known, yet
which cast a spell upon us. Mrs. Jörgen-Jensen’s repertoire is large,
but still larger is the range of her dramatic personifications. The
Copenhagen audiences are sorry to see her so little, but the stage of
our National Theatre is more adapted to the opera and drama than to the
ballet.’
Perhaps the best known of the living Danish dancers is Adeline Genée,
whose name has figured during the past twenty years in the ballet
repertoires of all the more or less known opera houses. She has been
a special favorite of the London public, where she made her début in
_Monte Cristo_ in November, 1897. She has shown her best in Delibes’
_Coppélia_, though some critics maintain that her triumph in the
_Dryad_ is even greater. But what _La Sylphide_ was to Taglioni,
_Ghiselle_ to Grisi and _Éoline_ to Lucile Grahn, that is _Coppélia_
to Genée. She is a true exponent of the Bournoville school of ballet,
though she claims that she owes her brilliant technique to some
other sources. Though she studied dancing with her uncle in Denmark,
yet the method, style and technique originate from Bournoville. Max
Beerbohm has given a pretty characteristic account of her appearance
in _Coppélia_ in London. ‘No monstrous automaton is that young lady.
Perfect though she be in the _haute école_, she has by some miracle
preserved her own self. She was born a comedian and a comedian she
remains, light as foam. A mermaid were not a more surprising creature
than she--she of whom one half is that of an authentic _ballerina_,
whilst the other is that of a most intelligent, most delightful human
actress. A mermaid were, indeed, less marvellous in our eyes. She
would not be able to diffuse any semblance of humanity into her tail.
Madame Genée’s intelligence seems to vibrate in her very toes. Her
dancing, strictly classical though it is, is a part of her acting. And
her acting, moreover, is of so fine a quality, that she makes the old
ineloquent conventions of gesture tell meanings to me, and tell them so
exquisitely that I quite forget my craving for words.--Taglioni in _Les
Arabesques_? I suspect in my heart of hearts, she was no better than
a doll. Grisi in _Ghiselle_? She may or may not have been passable.
Genée! It is a name our grandchildren will cherish, even as we cherish
now the names of those bygone dancers. And alas! our grandchildren will
never believe, will never be able to imagine, what Genée was.’
The writer has attended a number of Genée’s performances in Europe and
in America, and does not agree entirely with Mr. Beerbohm’s eulogy. As
already explained above, Bournoville’s method was a great improvement
over the French-Italian schools of dancing, in that it emphasized
the dramatic issues and individual traits in the ballet, which Genée
has exactly followed; but unfortunately the evolution of the Danish
ballet stopped with Bournoville. The art remained in its preliminary
state of development and ended with the Dresden-china steps. It is
this very style that makes Genée an attractive museum figure. In this
she stands unrivalled. She exhibits an art of the past, with every
detail sedulously studied. You can see how mathematically exact is the
position of the fingers, the attitude of the head, the lines of the
arms and limbs, and so on. ‘Every step has its name, every gesture
belongs to its code; there is only one way and no other of executing
them rightly, and that way is Madame Genée’s,’ writes one of her
admirers. But the dance is more than an exhibition of mathematical
figures. The studied smile and sorrow fail to arouse the emotions of
the audience. The Dresden-china step is a fossilized thing of bygone
centuries. It somehow does not belong to the stage.
The significance of the Danish ballet, and its influence upon the
evolution of the art of dancing is greater than it is universally
admitted. The Danes introduced the element of drama into the ballet in
order to make the dancing a kind of mute acting. They were the first
to revolt against many time-worn rules of the old schools. They were
the first to advocate the imitation of nature to a certain extent.
Bournoville said ‘as nature moves in curves and gradations rather than
by leaps and turns, dancing should take that into consideration.’ The
Russian ballet was influenced through the Danish and Swedish. The
Danish ballet was a stepping-stone between the academic French-Italian
and ethno-dramatic Russian schools. It has accomplished a great task
in the evolution of the art of dancing by making the ballet a dramatic
expression on academic lines.