“Flora et Zephire,” was the most popular, and was frequently revived even as late as the ’thirties, when Marie Taglioni made her début in it at King’s Theatre, for Laporte’s benefit, on June 3rd, 1830.
Both in Paris and London, however, during the first two decades of the nineteenth century Ballet was comparatively undistinguished and it was not really until the ’thirties that it began to assume new interest. True, there were in Paris, some remarkable exponents of advanced technique as regards dancing, but in the glamour of technical achievement the greater idea of the art of Ballet was somewhat obscured.
At the Paris Opera the dieux de la danse were MM. Albert Paul and Ferdinand, all of whom visited London from time to time and the second of whom was known as l’aérien, a descriptive nickname emphasised by the quaint criticism of a contemporary who wrote: “Paul used to spring and bound upwards, and was continually in the clouds; his foot scarcely touched the earth or rather the stage; he darted up from the ground and came down perpendicularly, after travelling a quarter of an hour in the air!”
M. Paul, by the way, later became a celebrated dancing-master at Brighton, in good Queen Victoria’s early days.
Then, too, there was Paul’s sister who became Madame Montessu, hardly less celebrated than her brilliant brother. Then, too, Mlle. Brocard, who so won Queen Victoria’s girlish admiration that some of her dolls were dressed to represent the pretty dancer in character. Brocard, however, was more remarkable for her beauty than for her dancing.
Another famous artist of the period was M. Coulon, to whose careful tuition the graceful, and élégante Pauline Duvernay owed much of her success, as did also the sisters Noblet—Lise and Alexandrine, the latter of whom forsook the dance to become an actress.
Of Lise Noblet a contemporary chronicler wrote in 1821: “Encore un phénix! Une danseuse qui ne fait jamais de faux pas, qui préfère le cercle d’amis à la foule des amants, qui vient au théâtre à pied, et qui retourne de même!” In 1828, she created, with immense success, the rôle of Fenella, in La Muette de Portici, and was described as “le dernier produit de l’école française aux poses géométriques et aux écarts à angle droit”; the same critic drawing an interesting comparison between the old school and the rising new one, in adding: “Déjà, Marie Taglioni s’avancait sur la pointe du pied—blanche vapeur baignée de mousselines transparentes—poétique, nébuleuse, immatérielle comme ces fées dont parle Walter Scott, qui errent la nuit près des fontaines et portent en guise de ceinture un collier de perles de rosée!... Lise Noblet se résolut non sans combat—à prouver qu’il y a au monde quelque chose de plus agréable qu’une femme qui tourne sur l’ongle de l’orteil avec une jambe parallèle à l’horizon, dans l’attitude d’un compas farée. Elle céda, à Fanny Elssler, ‘Fenella’ de La Muette qu’elle avait créée, et lui prit en échange—‘El Jales de Jérès.’ ‘Las Boleros de Cadiz’ ‘La Madrileña,’ et toutes sortes d’autres cachuchas et fandangos. Grâce à ces concessions, Mdlle. Noblet resta jusqu’en 1840, attachée à l’ Opéra.”
These references to contrast of styles, to Scott, and to Spanish dances are particularly interesting as illuminating the change which was coming over the Ballet about 1820-1830. Mere technique as the chief aim of Ballet was beginning to fail. It had become too academic and needed the infusion of a new spirit of grace and freedom. It came in a sudden craze for national dances, particularly Slav and Spanish, and in the craze for Scott and all his works, which undoubtedly became an influence on Opera and Ballet, as they did on the forces which led to the growth of the great Romantic movement, of which Hugo was to be hailed as leader and of which the effects passing on through the Art and Literature of the ’fifties, ’sixties, and ’seventies, can still perhaps be traced to-day.
Much of the popularity of the Spanish and Slav dances during the early part of the nineteenth century was due to their frequent performance by Pauline Duvernay, Pauline Leroux and the Elsslers. There were two Elsslers, sisters, the elder of whom, Thérèse, was born in 1808, and Fanny in 1810, both at Vienna.
Thérèse was less brilliant a dancer than her sister—whom she “mothered” always—but had a charming personality. She eventually gave up the stage to marry, morganatically, Prince Adalbert of Prussia, and was afterwards ennobled.