Noverre and his contemporaries

The French dancer-choreographer-teacher Jean-Georges Noverre (1727–1810) was the first major reformer of ballet. He defined his artistic positions in Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets (Letters on Dancing and Ballets), published in 1760 and continuously reprinted ever since. He worked in Paris, London, Stuttgart, and Vienna, and his influence spread as far as St. Petersburg. He preached the dignity of the ballet and tried to purge it of its excessive artificialities and conventions. He choreographed subjects of mythology and history in highly dramatic narrative forms. He collaborated with some of the major composers of the period, including Mozart, on his ballets.

Noverre was not alone, and the others around him were full of the same zest to give a new meaning to ballet. In Vienna he had a feud with the Italian choreographer Gasparo Angiolini (1731–1803) over Noverre’s reforms of the ballet d’action. Angiolini claimed these for his teacher, the Austrian choreographer Franz Hilverding (1710–68). In Bordeaux, Noverre’s pupil Jean Dauberval premiered in 1789 La Fille mal gardée (The Ill-Guarded Maiden), usually called Vain Precautions in English, which became the first durable ballet comedy. It introduced the demi-caractère dance, which featured what were considered to be “true-to-life” characters. In London, still another pupil, Charles Didelot, created in 1796 Flore et Zéphyre. This was the first attempt to bestow on the individual dances within the ballet a certain period and local coloration, and to break the uniformity of step and movement of the corps de ballet by assigning individual tasks to its various members. Later, Didelot thoroughly reformed the ballet school in St. Petersburg, which had existed since 1738. There he also created the first ballets of the Russian national repertory. Among these were the first ballets to be based on the works of the Russian writer Alexandr Pushkin (1799–1837), whose stories continued to be used as ballet libretti for many decades.

In Milan, Salvatore Viganò, who had worked under Dauberval and Didelot and who had choreographed in 1801 the first performance of Beethoven’s Creatures of Prometheus, was praised by the French writer Stendhal for his thrilling ballets based, among other subjects, on Shakespeare’s Othello and Coriolanus. He was followed by Carlo Blasis, who was more noted as a teacher and theoretician. His Traité élémentaire, théorique, et pratique de l’art de la danse (1820; Elementary Treatise upon the Theory and Practice of the Art of Dancing) became the standard work of ballet teaching for the 19th century. In 1837 he founded the Imperial Ballet Academy, through which Milan became, with Paris and St. Petersburg, a third ballet centre of world renown.

The Romantic ballet

During the 1830s and ’40s the Romantic movement flooded ballet stages with nature spirits, fairies, and sylphids. The cult of the ballerina replaced that of the male dancer, whose last and greatest representative had been the Italian-born French dancer Gaétan Vestris (1729–1808). The techniques of female dancing were greatly improved. Skirts were shortened further, and blocked shoes permitted toe dancing. Choreographers strove for a more expressive vocabulary and highlighted the individual qualities of their dancers.

La Sylphide (1836) stated a main subject of the Romantic ballet, the fight between the real world and the spiritual world. This theme was enhanced and expanded in Giselle (1841) and Ondine (1843). Paris and London were the taste setters, and it was London that in 1845 witnessed the Pas de quatre, for which the French choreographer Jules Perrot brought together, for four performances, four of the greatest ballerinas of the day, the Italians Marie Taglioni (1804–84), Carlotta Grisi (1819–99), and Fanny Cerrito (1817–1909), and Lucile Grahn (1819–1907). After this the decline of Romantic ballet was rapid, at least in these cities. It continued to flourish into the early 1860s, however, in Copenhagen under the choreographer Auguste Bournonville, whose repertoire was kept alive by the Royal Danish Ballet into the second half of the 20th century. Russia, under the French-born Marius Petipa (1819–1910) and his Russian aide Lev Ivanov (1834–1901), built a world-famous ballet culture of its own. Linked at first with Paris, it gradually developed its own balletic idiom from native as well as imported sources. The high point of the classical ballet under the tsars was reached with the St. Petersburg productions of The Sleeping Beauty (1890), The Nutcracker (1892), and Swan Lake (1895), all with music composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Raymonda (1898), composed by Aleksandr Glazunov (1865–1936). While the ballet prospered in St. Petersburg and Moscow, it waned in Paris. Its ballerinas even appeared in male roles, as in Coppélia (1870). In Milan the extravaganzas of Luigi Manzotti (1838–1905) offered anything but dancing while glorifying the progress of mankind through material discoveries and inventions. The 19th century also saw an unprecedented increase in travel and in cross-cultural influences. Many seemingly exotic dance styles arrived on the Western scene. Troupes from as far as India and Japan appeared at expositions in Paris and London, starting a lively interest in folk and ethnic dancing. Ballerinas of the Romantic ballet travelled from one European city to another, from Milan to London to Moscow. The Austrian dancer Fanny Elssler toured the Americas in the early 1840s for two years, visiting Havana twice. The great choreographers, too, went from city to city. The language of dance became a medium of international communication without regard for difference in geography or spoken language.