I - The Dance - 34

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.