This referred to a Cachucha that she had brought from Spain; a dance whose steps have been recomposed under other names, its original name forgotten except in association with the name and the art of Ellsler. It was a perfect vehicle for the exploitation of the ardent qualities that the little Austrian was made of, and on her rendering of it was based a great part of her fame.
Taglioni, in contrast, was a being of spirit, innocent of mortal experience, free from ties of the earth. Her training was strictly within the bounds of the classic ballet; during her career she greatly amplified its range, yet she always kept within its premise. Though born in Stockholm, her father was an Italian ballet-master, and two of her aunts were dancers of reputation. Her achievements represented a triumph of choreographic inheritance and training over an ill-formed body; in childhood she is said to have been a hunchback. With training her figure became normal in strength, and attained a quality of form in keeping with her selected rôles. But overstrong features deprived her of the dancer’s adventitious aid of facial beauty. Her triumphs were achieved by art alone.
Vienna she conquered at the age of twenty, in 1822, the year of her début. Paris was not so readily moved; but a success in that capital was a practical necessity to a great career, and Taglioni never rested until she secured its approval, expressed in terms that penetrated Europe. Business generalship was not the least of the attributes of the Taglioni, father and daughter; they recognised the propitious hour for an engagement in London. The contract included pensioning a number of their family, and £100 a performance. Results more than justified the terms; ticket sales for Taglioni’s nights usually were of the nature of riots. It is as fair to connect with this box-office success, as with any quality of the artist herself, the story of her “holding up” a performance until the management of the theatre should make a substantial payment on an account due. It is unlovable in an artist to keep an audience waiting, and put a manager to the necessity of making explanations. It is unlovable in a coal dealer to discontinue supplies until a debt is settled.
Taglioni paid as heavily for the excellence she put into her work as ever did miner or merchant for the goods he put on his scales. Her training began in early childhood, and covered probably twelve years before her début. Her professional career, with its inevitable anxieties, in no wise reduced the rigour of study, discipline, and precaution. Under her father’s eye she practiced hours daily. She went to the length of having installed in her London lodgings a stage built to duplicate the slope of the stage in the theatre.
Apart from the possession of ideals of sheer execution that undoubtedly were higher than any that her predecessors had dreamed of, and whose attainment involved almost superhuman effort and patience, Taglioni was a productive inventor of new steps. Flying brisés and other aërial work make their first appearance in her work, according to Mme. Genée’s historical programme of ballet evolution. We infer that her effort was directed toward the illusion of flight; a writer of the period refers to an arabesque that conveyed that sensation with striking reality. The great addition she made to elevation may naturally be attributed not to any interest in that property for its own sake, but rather to an endless search for lightness. And that, above all others, was the quality she made her own. La Sylphide (not the composition recently popularised by the Russians) was the part with which she was most unified in the minds of the public. Her work appears always to have had the creation of fairy fantasy as a definite purpose. In pantomime she was limited. She had none of the stage artist’s familiar tricks devised to capture the audience, nor did she avail herself of any vivid contrasts in her costume. She dressed her hair in Madonna fashion, surrounded by a wreath of little roses; further adornment she deliberately avoided.
Ellsler was six years the younger; and, at some sacrifice of time in the acquisition of fame, she reserved Paris as the last of the great cities in which to appear. Taglioni therefore was well established when her destined rival first showed her steps to the Parisians. In fact, she occupied a box at Ellsler’s first Paris performance, where it is said she silently wept before the end of the other’s first number.
The Swede had succeeded almost in spite of circumstances; Ellsler’s natural endowment contained almost everything the gods in a generous mood can give. The perfection of proportion of hands, feet, wrists and ankles were hers, as well as a Greek perfection of figure. Though her legs were of steel, and her strength in general that of an athlete, not a line suffered in sculptural grace nor a movement in freedom. Her face had a beauty that captivated an audience at the moment of her entrance on the stage, and a range of expression covering the moods of the human mind. Her training, like Taglioni’s, had begun early. Mozart, for whom Ellsler’s father worked as copyist and otherwise, had interested himself in her to the extent at least that her early years were not misspent. With her technical tuition—whatever it may have been—she absorbed stage experience almost from the days of infancy. She danced in a children’s ballet in Vienna when she was six years old. Before appearing in Paris she had succeeded in Naples, Berlin and London. The audience of l’Opéra therefore saw her first at the full maturity of her art and equipped with ample knowledge of how to present it to the best advantage.
Her success was not in doubt for a moment. The opening number was a riotous triumph, the morning papers were undivided in praise of the newcomer. Taglioni felt that Ellsler had been brought to Paris expressly to undermine her, and the appearances are that Ellsler lost no time in putting herself on a war footing.
London theatre-goers soon were in a position to question whether, after their elaborate provisions to get good dancers, they had not made a rather embarrassing misplay. Ellsler had danced at Her Majesty’s Theatre; the public had enjoyed her work, but, owing either to her lack of a great continental reputation or their own misgivings about the soundness of her work, had refrained from very hearty demonstration. On the first night of the engagement, the manager of l’Opéra—who was in London to form an estimate of the Austrian’s work—signed her for the following season.
Contrary to the metier of her rival, Ellsler’s art consisted of a romantic glorification of life’s physique. One gathers that she gave, instead of an ordered and consecutive poem, a thrill of delighted astonishment. She was of a newly forming romantic cult that worshipped the torrid, the savage, the violent. Her most pronounced success was on her rendering of the dances of Spain; she used her hips and her smile, and men—more than women—went into rhapsodies. Gautier, who had seen the best dancers in Spain, wrote that none of them equalled Ellsler. Which is credible, with reservations and conditions. If the sole aim of Spanish dancing is to express fire and temperament, to astonish and inflame, it is more likely to be realised by a clever Northerner than by a Spaniard. The headlong enthusiast is not bothered by delicate considerations of shading, development, and truth of form; seizing the salient and exotic, an exaggeration of these and the elimination of all else is sure to produce a startling result. Execution at an abnormally rapid tempo will conceal inaccuracies from all eyes but those trained to the dance, and backed by a knowledge of its true forms.