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
