Supreme above all other writers on the dance and ballet is Jean Georges Noverre, whose genius has been praised by Diderot, Voltaire, by D’Alembert, Dorat, and by David Garrick, the last of whom described him as “the Shakespeare” of the dance.
Born at Paris in April, 1727, he was the son of a distinguished Swiss soldier, who had served as an adjutant in the army of Charles XII, and intended his son for a military career.
Jean, however, early developed a passion for the stage, and especially for dancing, so was apprenticed by his father to the famous Parisian dancer and maître de ballet, Dupré.
In August, 1743, young Noverre made his début at the Court of Louis-Quinze in a fête at Fontainebleau, but with only moderate success. Not discouraged, however, he went a little later to the Court of Berlin, where he became a favourite with Frederick the Great and his brother, Prince Henry of Prussia.
He returned to France in 1747, and two years later obtained the post of maître de ballet at the Opéra Comique, where the success of his “Ballet Chinois” aroused considerable jealousy among his colleagues and brought him some distinction in the art world. But the success was not great enough for his ambitious spirit, and he again travelled, and did not return to Paris for nearly twenty years. Noverre and such are seldom recognised as prophets in their own country, until their genius has received recognition abroad. As Castil-Blaze, the historian of opera in France, has neatly expressed it: “Noverre and the two Gardels effected in the dance the same revolution that Gluck and Sacchini achieved some years later in French music.” But Noverre was unable to do this as a young man in Paris fighting against the sheer dead weight of convention and hide-bound authority. He was unable to do it until he had won his laurels abroad.
Sallé, one of the most exquisite and “intellectual” of danseuses, had left Paris for a more appreciative audience in London because the Paris Opera disliked her attempts to discard the ridiculous conventions of stage costumes then ruling and to “reform it altogether” in favour of something more congruous.
Noverre visioned to himself a theatre devoted to a kind of ballet as different from that he saw in Paris, as the Russian ballet we have seen to-day differs from that which London had seen in the ’thirties of last century; a ballet that should be informed by a technique so perfect as to be unobtrusive, and combining the arts of dance, pantomime, music and poesy into a new, subtle, resourceful and comprehensive means of artistic expression.
He wanted to see swept away all the mechanical rules of ballet composition, the stereotyped and unimaginative story, the conventional arrangement of stage groups, the stilted “heroic” style of the dancers, the formal sequence of their entrées, and above all, the bizarrerie of their masks, their panniers and helmets with waving, funereal plumes. He wanted to infuse a new spirit of art and efficiency into what he found about him and—he had to go elsewhere! An invitation from the Duke of Würtemberg to become maître de ballet at the luxurious Court of Stuttgart gave him his chance, and he founded here the school which was to influence European Ballet in that and the successive generation, as the school of Petrograd seemed like to do to-day.
The publication of his Lettres sur la Danse et sur les Ballets, in 1760, dedicated by permission to this same Duke of Würtemberg and Teck, caused a sensation among dancers in Paris and other capitals, and having produced ballets in Berlin, London (1755), Lyons (1758), and Stuttgart, he was reintroduced to Paris by Vestris (who had been in the habit of visiting Stuttgart every year to dance during his vacations) in 1765, when he achieved a success with his tragic ballet of “Medea.”
Later he was to visit Vienna, to superintend the fêtes on the occasion of the marriage of the Archduchess Caroline (Queen of Naples), produce there a dozen ballets, and become appointed Director of Court fêtes and Maître de Danse to the Empress Maria Theresa and Imperial Family, the Empress heaping favours upon him and granting a lieutenancy to his son.