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.