In lute-music the dance takes the form of ceaseless corantos and sarabands; on the stage it supplies the framework for the love-representations of the time. In 1671 appeared Pomona, Perrin and Cambert’s first French public opera. In it, cattle drivers and agricultural labourers ply their dances. The great Lully, most fertile composer of the nobly tedious French national operas, is inconceivable apart from the school of the dance. His tunes, at every possible opportunity, run off into the beloved dances of three or four strains, now inserted in airs and prologues, now as episodic dances. By this means the flexibility of the voice parts increases year by year; and since Lully is a composer for the clavier, many of his dances easily adapt themselves to clavier-arrangements, to which indeed they are very early subjected. Lully is the most vigorous teacher in the rehearsal of opera-dances. The style and the school of dances reach such a height in Paris, that they give the law to the whole world just as their social etiquette does. “France,” writes Mattheson, “is and remains the true school of dancing.”
After the time of Lully, who had done so much for the development of the characteristic dance, the art advances with rapid strides. The Pantomime was invented by the Duchess of Maine: it was in 1708, at her famous festivals, “les Nuits de Sceaux,” that the last scene of the fourth act of Corneille’s “Horace,” was pantomimically represented with musical accompaniment.
Le Maître de Musique.
Painting by Jan Steen (1626-1679), in the National Gallery, London.
Of old the parts of women in the dance had been taken by men. Lully ventured to introduce female dancers. Here begins the epoch of famous “danseuses” who, in accordance with a natural law, become the centre of public interest. We owe to Castil Blaze a list of those grandes dames who took up the profession. Henceforward the art of song and that of dancing divided equally the popular affection, for the two were not always separate callings. La Prévost was the first to essay a solo dance, which she set to a violin solo of Rebel. La Pélissier inaugurated costume-dances. She had purchased the whole wardrobe of Adrienne Lecouvreur, lately deceased, and was thus able to appear in the ballet “Le Carneval et la Folie,” in the characters of Jocasta, Mariamne, Zenobia, Chimène, Roxana, Paulina, Célimène, Agatha, and Elvira. Next we see rising the star of La Camargo, who from her début in the ballet “Caractères de la Danse,” was the amazement of the world, the discoverer of operatic airs set to the dance, the glass of fashion, the arbitress of mode, against whose decisions there was no appeal. But, as Castil Blaze tells us in his history of the French theatre, all were surpassed by La Sallé, with her noble figure, her lovely form, her perfect grace, her dancing so full of expression and voluptuous languor. Not only does she dance; she writes dances. She invents a Pygmalion, in which the divine statue assumes life, and engages in a long pantomime with the sculptor, who teaches her to assume her humanity by means of the measured motions of the dance. La Sallé brought this ballet on the stage in London first and then in Paris; and the London correspondent of the Mercure de France writes to his paper of the extraordinary furore created by the new art. For Sallé had at last rejected the lingering relics of the old ballet—the anachronisms of costume—in order to be able to give full expression to the spirit of the dance. “She ventured,” says the correspondent, “to appear without skirt or bodice, with loose hair, and absolutely unadorned. Over corset and undergarments she had only a simple muslin dress, and seemed the very image of a Greek statue.” Sallé appears to have practised her dances without virtuosity, as a mere artistic representation. She essayed no acrobatic leaps, no entrechats, no pirouettes. Contrasting her with Camargo, Voltaire exclaimed:—
“Ah, Camargo, que vous êtes brillante!
Mais que Sallé, grands dieux, est ravissante!
Que vos pas sont légers, et que les siens sont doux!
Elle est inimitable, et vous êtes nouvelle: