Giselle, and her problems

by Alastair Macaulay

<written privately for my London Studio Centre students in 2002; not published until this website in 2020>

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When the ballet Giselle is boring – and I have often found it so – this is roughly how it goes. In Act One, Giselle is a trusting, wilting, good girl who falls in love with a deceitful shit. When she finds out he’s been double-timing her (he’s engaged to another woman and he turns out to be a toff who can’t marry beneath his class), she goes bonkers and dies. In Act Two, she’s not only dead but, worse, saintly. The shit (Albrecht) repents. He visits her grave. He thinks he sees her ghost. It is her ghost. Spirit though she be, she dances with the guy. It’s clear that She Has Forgiven All. The vicious wilis catch him, however, and they try to make him dance to death. Suddenly, Giselle seems, for one surprising moment, to defy her wili queen Myrtha - in much the same way that, in Act One, she briefly defied Albrecht’s fiancée Bathilde: “Hands off – he’s mine”. This time around, she sends the dude to the cross on her grave. Sanctuary! Giselle and he stand proud before the cross! The bitch queen Myrtha is foiled! Her wand breaks! Grrrr! But no matter: this impressive little display of assertiveness on Giselle’s part proves to have been merely a temporary aberration. She becomes all droopy and saintly again, leaves the cross, and, for no apparent reason, starts to dance centre-stage. Next, Albrecht becomes a ballet-boy again, forgets all about his sanctuary, and partners her. And now the wilis start to make him dance himself to death again except that it becomes vaguely apparent that Giselle Is Sharing His Burden, to try to Save Him From Death. What follows falls more or less into conventional categories: her solos, his solos, their pas de deux, etc. etc., with the corps de ballet sometimes egging them on to greater exertion but sometimes filling in while they have a breather. Once Giselle tries again to placate Myrtha with a big plea – this is particularly fun in those Russian productions where she comes running in with a fresh armful of lilies – which Myrtha rejects. (Now we know for sure Myrtha’s a monster: a ballerina who doesn’t want flowers!) Such few moments apart, Giselle is demure, self-sacrificing, self-effacing, irritatingly pious, and wretchedly passive: she obeys Myrtha on the one hand and she saves Albrecht on the other. The bell strikes four; dawn arrives. Goodie-two-shoes Giselle behaves as if her Mission has been Accomplished; she says an elongated goodbye to Albrecht; she fades away.[1] Our Boy Albrecht is left alive and alone and drained: I lost the gal (again), but hey! I guess it’s good to be alive and free of those creepy wilis. Curtain.

  The whole story can seem like a thousand old Hollywood women’s movies: yet another ballet about Adultery Punished. If only Giselle had married honest, plain Hilarion! If only Albrecht were true to snooty smart Bathilde! And, eventually, damn it, he will be. The original 1841 Giselle actually had Bathilde, at the end, coming onto the stage at dawn with a whole retinue; and Giselle, before returning to the grave, nobly returned Albrecht to her rival, his true fiancée. (The Royal Ballet briefly tried reviving this ending in 1960.)[2] All this remotely recalls such movies as Now, Voyager, where Bette Davis transforms herself from a Mother’s Girl into a free spirit who finds True Love – with the snag that he’s already married and she’s too good to break up his home… so building up to her famous last line “Don’t let’s ask for the moon, Jerry; we already have the stars.” Or Gone with the Wind, where Scarlett O’Hara spends the whole story in love with the wrong man (who marries – and loves - someone else anyway), even when the right man is there all along. Or Casablanca, where Ingrid Bergman meets again her true love (Humphrey Bogart) and nearly forsakes her higher calling (resistance to the Nazis etc.) but – yes - finally departs with her virtuous husband and leaves her true-love, Bogart, behind forever. The point of these stories – there are thousands of them, several yet more obviously akin to Giselle in one respect or another – is that if a woman, even in innocence, threatens a man’s marriage (or her own), she eventually loses out and learns that Some Things Matter More Than True Love. Giselle is one of the great losers: she loses Albrecht when he’s a cheat in Act One, and she loses him when he’s honest in Act Two. The bottom line is always: He’s Betrothed to Bathilde. And, even though Giselle’s love can transcend death and defeat the wilis (imagine what a movie might make of this story), she still has to say: Sorry, Bathilde, he belongs to you, and I am content to relinquish him.

   As I write all this, I’m aware that many ballet-goers will recoil in horror. To them, Giselle is a Romantic ballet – virtually the Romantic ballet – and is not to be compared with any mere movie. (Serge Lifar’s 1942 book Giselle is subtitled Apothéose du ballet romantique.) But what do such ballet-goers mean by Romantic? All too often, they mean (a) droopy (b) insipid (c) horrendously noble. As for their idea of “Romantic” ballet style, this has much to do with long, gauzy dresses in which the ballerinas can hide her knees (and not straighten them so tight) and in which she need not be so rigorous about correct placement of the pelvis. Ballet-goers tend to think this is the style shown in ballet lithographs from the 1840s, and so they think it is authentic to Giselle.  For yes: lots of people like to think that most of the current Giselle was actually choreographed in 1841, and that therefore it’s chronologically a work of the High Romantic era. And there have been several major efforts to make it look very 1841 indeed - notably Marie Rambert’s 1946 production, which all the British critics took very seriously at the time (it bombed in America), and Mary Skeaping’s 1975 London Festival Ballet production (which again was treated with near-reverence even though much of it was boring and/or silly – and also plainly inauthentic). Ballet-goers love the Romantic dualism of Giselle, with the real world of Act One opposed by the other world of Act Two, even though the real world here – an idyllic little village with dancing grape-harvesters – is scarcely real to anyone in the audience. The droopy look seems a welcome break from the academicism of classical ballet. Ballerinas catch what Balanchine used to call “Gisellitis”, and all too often the malady, in artistic terms, has proved terminal. The Russians used even to coach their Giselle to carry their heads in a particular way – forward, the neck elongated: the lamb-to-the-altar, “victim”, look.

      Does all this make it sound as if I hate Giselle? I think there are many Giselles worth hating. When I saw the Kirov do it in 1997, I walked out after Act One: I remember saying “It’s the first Giselle I’ve seen where Albrecht and Hilarion have just been to the same hairdresser before going to call on Giselle – and, what’s more, have had the same facial and the same maquillage.” Another piece of modern Giselle nonsense is the way that, in Act Two, Russian Albrechts now wear here, beneath their long trailing cloaks, mauve/purple lycra tights. (The colour is meant to indicate royalty. Or mourning. I forget which. One wonders: But what is the lycra meant to indicate?) I adore the account of one of Lifar’s later performances as Albrecht written in 1950 by Edwin Denby (who had loved Lifar’s Albrecht in the 1930s):

There was a piece of business in Lifar’s Giselle, Act Two, which was new to me. Mourning at her tomb, he seemed for some time unwilling to part with the flowers he had brought. He held them out, snatched them back, looked at them appreciatively. Mastering his emotion, he sacrificed them and fainted. But Giselle, dead as she was, rushed out the wings with a much bigger bunch and pelted him with it headlong. So prompt, so sweet of her, so fitting. He lay drowned in flowers. If only the audience had given way to its impulse, had leapt its feet in rapture and tossed hundred of bouquets more, aiming them from all over the house, what a perfect moment of art it would have been for all of us to share with him! [3]

But I also remember fondly, from the 1980s, the very different Royal Ballet Albrecht who, tidy-minded to the last, folded his cloak into a neat little bundle beside the cross before proceeding to flee from the wilis.

   How dated is Giselle? They certainly don’t make women’s movies like it these days. Today’s film counterpart to Giselle would have at least one illegitimate kid by Albrecht, would go on to have a successful career without him, and finally would threaten his damnable security. She might even end up like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction - boiling Bathilde’s bunny. Any modern choreographer since Antony Tudor would surely at least (a) have shown Giselle and Albrecht having sex (b) have given her a genuinely disturbing psychosis (c) have made much of how she re-makes herself in Act Two – neither as a victim nor as a wili, though probably with a women’s group of some ilk. And there have been feminist dance revisions of Giselle, focusing on female rage. (The British production I, Giselle, created in 1980 by Jacky Lansley and Fergus Early, seems to have been way ahead of its time). A recent Irish Giselle (with none of the old choreography, almost none of the original score, and extensive use of the spoken word – chiefly the f-word) re-told the old ballet as a bizarre soap-opera where Giselle was the only female role played by a woman and where Albrecht was a bisexual line-dancing teacher from Bratislava. (When Giselle spots him buggering Hilarion in a back alley, she has an asthma attack and dies.) By comparison to all these, Giselle the ballet seems a pretty historical romance (such lovely frocks, all that picturesque scenery), and harmless. But is it just another of ballet’s Barbara Cartland essays in saccharine soppiness?

   Well, certainly Act One can seem very much more coherent than the one I walked out of. Indeed, it can prove the stronger of the ballet’s two acts. There’s its class element: Giselle and Hilarion and the villagers are open, in the way that even Bathilde isn’t. Albrecht is involved in cheating from the first; but we can’t help feeling that, by disguising himself as a peasant and pursuing Giselle, he is in fact trying to open himself up to something true. He wants to partake of her innocence: the steps they share have a dewy simplicity not to be found in any of ballet’s other couples. And a strong Hilarion can make Giselle’s choice between him and Albrecht the stuff of serious drama. (My mind flies straight back to Stephen Jefferies’s superlative Hilarion in the early 1980s with the Royal Ballet, but the role has had other fine interpreters too.) And for years, chiefly when watching British ballet companies in the 1970s and early 1980s, Act One was the act I preferred. The living Giselle can seem the most heart-catchingly radiant of ballet heroines: you love her simple love of dance itself, you love her love of the hero (he may be logically wrong for her, but romantically – instinctively – he’s right, as Hilarion can never be), you love her whole village life with her mother, her friends, her neighbours. (“I know Giselle very well;” said Margot Fonteyn once: “her friends; where she lives, the trees with the sun shining through the branches.”[4] And, as a member of the audience, I feel I do too.) You even love Giselle’s beautiful, trusting manners in the mime scene with Bathilde. This is one of those mime scenes that really does work for just about the whole audience, and the open-hearted girl-talk between the peasant Giselle and the aristocratic Bathilde comes tumbling out with real spontaneity.[5] “You like the fabric of my dress – why?” “Oh, we village girls sew our own clothes.” “Tell me about yourself.” “I love to dance!” “Yes, I see you do. (How lovely she is.) Tell me, do you have a sweetheart?” “Well, I must admit I do.” “And so do I!” Etc. etc. Act One of Giselle is an idyll – even Bathilde wants a piece of it – threatened only by the weakness of Giselle’s heart, her excessive devotion to dance, and, crucially, her boyfriend’s duplicity.

    Then – another scene that always works – there’s the Mad Scene. This, admittedly, has been overrated. Whereas the Mad Scenes of opera allow soprano heroines to sing and sing (dramatic recitative, then slow aria with cadenza, finally high-voltage cabaletta) and thereby to reach a new kind of exalted expressive expansiveness, Giselle’s mad scene – apart from a few broken step quotations – is all mime, nothing to do with the lyrical love of dance that has characterised Giselle from the first.[6]      

   Giselle’s mad scene wasn’t the first mad scene in ballet. The heroine’s madness had been central to Nina, ou la folle d’amour, an 1813 ballet that had been revived at the Paris Opera just the year before the premiere of Giselle, for the farewell benefit of the great dramatic ballerina Fanny Elssler. Théophile Gautier (with whom the idea of Giselle began) had written of Elssler’s Nina, “In her hands, the mad girl of the comic opera has become Shakespearian, a worthy sister to Ophelia…”[7] When the Parisians discovered Hamlet in 1827, Ophelia’s madness made a great stir. But neither Nina – itself, as Gautier’s review indicates, a ballet version of an opera – nor Hamlet was a dance drama; Giselle is. If Giselle expresses her mimed madness too vividly, she can unbalance the ballet, tipping it away from the dance idiom that elsewhere is her main medium and into acting naturalism. Still, the scene is invariably effective. And a good actress can make Giselle’s madness very powerful indeed – I’ve cried at its pathos, and so have thousands.

   By the way, there are several grey areas of Giselle, where one production differs significantly from another. Sections of music come up in radically different arrangements; some dances are eliminated or added or given markedly different textual details; sections occur in different sequence. And the greyest area is this: How does Giselle die? Yes, Giselle: The Coroner’s Report: you can waste many hours over this one. And many have. To Alicia Markova (maybe the most celebrated Giselle of the twentieth century), it was – is - essential that Giselle die of shock and a broken heart: she toys with Albrecht’s sword, but doesn’t stab herself. To Lynn Seymour (maybe the greatest dramatic ballerina of the same century, and my own first Giselle), it was important that Giselle does commit suicide, plunging the sword right in. Logically, you can work backwards from Act Two and argue that, since Giselle is buried in unconsecrated ground, she must be a suicide. On the other hand, you can’t help noticing during the Mad Scene that the sword doesn’t immediately cripple her; she does quite a lot of rushing around after it. We do know in Act One that Giselle has a weak heart, and some versions include mime where Giselle’s mother Berthe seems to tell her daughter that All This Dancing Will Be The Death Of You. (E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1818 tale Rath Krespel – which becomes the Antonia act in Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann – had created a singer who, despite her father’s prohibition, sings on – and finally sings herself to death.[8] And Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Red Shoes relates how a girl’s shoes dance her to death.[9] ) But Berthe’s warning to her daughter is actually a red herring. Dance isn’t what kills Giselle; nor is it what drives her mad; and, in the mad scene at the end of which she dies, she hardly dances a step. The ballet’s 1841 scenario (reprinted in Beaumont’s The Ballet Called Giselle) certainly says that the sword pierces her breast; but it suggests that this is only one of several factors that actually cause her death. You could argue that dance helps to weaken her heart, and that Albrecht’s perfidy then proves fatal, along possibly with the sword. But Giselle, after some faintness early on, has actually come through a big solo with no further heart flutters – indeed, with flying colours.[10]

   However, though all this matters to individual Giselles by way of characterisation and conviction, the precise cause of Giselle’s death is not something that is really of much consequence to Giselle as overall drama. She dies an untimely death at the end of Act One; she rises again in Act Two; and that’s that. Gautier, after beginning work on the libretto of Giselle (chiefly Act Two), simply handed over Act One to someone else, the playwright and librettist Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges; he asked merely that Giselle should have a “pretty death”.[11] If you think that Giselle is a tragic ballet because it leads to her death, then the whole of Act Two will be an anti-climax. Which is what I often used to find it.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

   But Giselle is a ballet that grows in the mind, particularly after varied experience of it in the theatre. Your grasp of it grows as you put together this aspect of the Kirov production with that aspect of the Royal’s, that part of Natalia Makarova’s performance with this of Galina Ulanova’s (on film)… and so on.

  Before I move onto Act Two, I want to consider another mime scene in Act One – this time, ironically, one that always fails (and that’s cut from most productions). This - if you can make sense of it - is the big mime speech where Giselle’s mother Berthe stops Giselle and says: “Oh, you’re dancing too much – don’t you know what this could lead to? – Death! And then to resurrection as a wili! Don’t you know of the wilis? In the forest, at night, they rise from their graves. They have wings, they dance. A man may stride confidently into the forest, but, if he meets the wilis, he is lost. The wilis command him: Dance – and die. He may plead with them. But they know no pity. He has met his end.”

   In St Petersburg, Berthe’s mime scene must have had great force: the role used to be played en travesti by Enrico Cecchetti, for many years a vivid dance actor. Tamara Karsavina, herself a superb mime by all accounts (and Diaghilev’s Giselle in 1910), remembered the scene and, in 1960, taught it to the Royal Ballet. Though the Royal then dropped it for a period, the company restored it in 1980 - since when it has remained in the Covent Garden text of Giselle.[12] I’ve given up hope that anyone will ever make most of the audience understand this scene (the mime for “forest-with-overhanging-trees” and “man-with-plumed-hat, striding” can be hilariously misunderstood)… and yet, if you think about it, how much dramatic texture this scene for Berthe lends to Giselle or at least to the idea of Giselle that keeps building in one’s mind.[13] (Even though she is wrong about dancing killing Giselle.) This “speech” not only tells Giselle her fate in Act Two; it tells Albrecht his. And it makes one wonder: When Albrecht enters the forest, bearing lilies, is he already aware of the risk he is running here? - that he may encounter the wilis?

  Albrecht’s entrance in Act Two has become, alas, one of the ponderous rituals of Giselle, and faintly ridiculous, if not very. Often Albrecht seems absurdly precious here: overpoweringly in love with his floral arrangement. “Oh the smell of these lilies! Oh this dark forest! Oh my emotion of beholding the grave of my beloved! Oh my remorse! Oh my nobility!” On a bad night, it seems to last forever.

   Yet there’s a reason why Albrecht’s entrance does nonetheless make an effect. Largely it’s to do with the music. A slow legato melody over a lusciously textured accompaniment, it sounds different in various productions – an oboe here, a viola there. But, especially with oboe (which is the composer Adolphe Adam’s original instrumentation, and which the Kirov still employs), it can resemble - as Arlene Croce once observed - the music Gluck wrote for Orpheus in the underworld, the aria “Che puro ciel” or “Quel nouveau ciel”. When Orpheus/Orfeo/Orphée sings this, he’s contemplating the beauty of the blessed Elysian fields; but he continues to express calm discontent as long as he remains without his beloved Eurydice.[14]  (Adam’s solo instrumental voice also has a slight echo of another famous passage earlier in that same scene of Gluck’s opera – the flute melody for the Dance of the Blest Spirit.)

   The Giselle/Orpheus connection may be no accident: Alexandre Benois, who began to watch Giselle in the 1880s, refers to it.[15] Ballet scores in the early nineteenth century had generally made overt quotations from operas and other works; they made part of their narrative effect (as still occurs in Act One of Bournonville’s 1842 ballet Napoli) by pressing musical buttons in the audience’s collective ear. In fact, Giselle is unusual, making no such overt musical quotations that I know of - but certainly Adam, its composer, knew that he was copying certain operatic models.[16] Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice (Orphée et Eurydice) had been in the repertory of the Paris Opera throughout the era leading up to the creation of Giselle; the tenor Adolphe Nourrit, creator of the 1832 La Sylphide scenario, had been a famous Orphée at the Paris Opera in the 1820s and 1830s; and the score for the 1832 Sylphide, at the very moment the Sylphide died, made an explicit quotation from Orphée’s other famous aria, “J’ai perdu mon Eurydice.”[17]

   But the effect made by Albrecht’s entrance has also to do with the use of the stage. He just walks – slowly, sadly - on a straight diagonal from one corner of the stage towards another. And his lilies are like Orpheus’s lyre (also carried across the chest). He seems called by destiny into this dark and fatal realm. (Hilarion’s entrance into the same wood had much less fateful music and much less fateful geometry.)

   Albrecht does not know what we know. That diagonal path (minimised in some modern productions, unfortunately) has already been traced by another character, one who soon will start to command him, she who rules the realm into which he has entered.[18] 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

    So let’s go further back within Act Two, nearer its start. Maybe Albrecht has heard of the wilis - but, by the time of his entrance, we’ve seen them. In Paris, the ballet was called Giselle: ou les wilis (Giselle, or The Wilis), and Théophile Gautier, in whose head Giselle began, had set out with the idea of calling it Les Wilis. He was inspired by Heinrich Heine’s De l’Allemagne (1835) and, in particular, by its tale of supernatural wilis and their pitiless dances.[19] And, despite all the excitement and emotion that Act One can genuinely have, I believe that, when Giselle is great, it is with the wilis that its greatness starts. With the first wili above all: Myrtha, the Queen.

   It may be tempting to think of Myrtha just as a female Dracula, a cold-hearted villainness, a vindictive killer. But the ballet shows us a Myrtha far more complex than that. Giselle was conceived in 1841; and the episode in which Myrtha rouses the wilis from their forest graves (and much of the rest of the act) takes its shape from a scene in an opera that had its premiere in the same theatre just ten years before – the 1831 Meyerbeer opera Robert le Diable. In Act Three of Robert, by moonlight, the devil Bertram enters the ruined cloister of Saint Rosalie; he stands; and he sings a famous aria: “Nonnes, qui reposez sous cette froide pierre.” (“Nuns, who rest beneath these cold stones, arise!”) The nuns who now emerge from their tombs are naughty nuns, damned nuns, the pale/dark, floating/heavy ghosts of nuns who sinned in their lives: now, when Robert comes to their cloisters, they’re led by their sinful Mother Superior Helena to lure him, with wine, with dice, with dancing, and with sexual allure. (He even kisses Helena at a climactic moment.)[20]

    Nonetheless, we can be pretty sure that little if any of the wilis’ choreography comes from 1841. All of the Giselle we know today passed through the revisionist hands of Marius Petipa in Russia. He may not have been acquainted with the original Giselle in Paris[21]; but his brother Lucien had been the original Albrecht; and the Giselle text that he would inherit in Russia, as ballet-master, had been danced there by Carlotta Grisi and had been shaped or re-shaped there by Jules Perrot, both key artists in the 1841 creation of Giselle.[22] It may be no accident that the original Giselle survived less than thirty years in Paris, and fewer elsewhere. (Doug Fullington, Marion Smith and Alexei Ratmansky are among the scholars who are deeply impressed by Henri Justamant’s detailed and notated account of his production of Giselle c.1860; Ratmansky in particular believes that Justamant was probably recording Jean Coralli’s dances for the wilis in the 1841 premiere.)

   Only in Russia was Giselle kept alive between 1870 and 1910 - and it lasted there because Marius Petipa and others rebuilt it. They cut some parts of Adam’s original score (removing lots of mime) and added others (some more dances). My own guess is that, in most respects, they considerably improved upon the original. Though it’s well known that the Act One peasant pas de deux is to music by Fredrich Burgmüller, it’s less generally recognised that two of Giselle’s solos are also by a third composer (possibly a third and a fourth). Her spectacular Act One solo was probably added in 1867, and may well be the work of Ludwig Minkus; her final solo in Act Two, also probably by Minkus, seems to have been added in 1866.[23] Starting as early as 1850 (according to Natalia Roslavleva), Petipa and his associates heightened Giselle’s central dance-drama; and eliminated inessentials. One of the last tasks of his long career was to coach the young Anna Pavlova (the first great Giselle of the twentieth century) in the title role. But he had already achieved his most important task of Giselle revisionism. In 1884, he revised the first scene for Myrtha and her wili recruits - the grand pas des wilis.[24]

    How does Myrtha makes her first appearance? This, too, differs between one production and another. On the Kirov 1982 video, for example, an open tomb at the back of the stage slowly upends itself until there she is, standing upright within it, rising like Dracula. In the far preferable pre-1985 Royal Ballet version[25] , Myrtha makes her first entrance along the same diagonal as, later, Albrecht.

   We don’t even know who she is. A veil (a shroud) covers her face and upper body. The only part of her that seems to move is her feet. She enters bourréeing; she crosses the stage along that diagonal path, bourreéeing; and then – in the right production – she exits, bourréeing.[26] Those bourrées, the music that accompanies them: feminine, delicate, alluring, deeply mysterious. If you’re new to Giselle and if Myrtha’s wearing that veil when first you see her, you actually wonder: Who is this? Is this Giselle? She’s just (so far) a Woman in White, a dame blanche, one of those mysterious spectral feminine apparitions who haunt Romanticism with their mystery and their allure. And she bears more than a dim resemblance to a famous character whom Charles Dickens created almost two decades later, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations: (“…the strangest lady I have ever seen, or shall ever see”)

    “She was dressed in rich materials – satins, and lace, and silk – all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, and her hair was white….

   “‘Look at me,’ said Miss Havisham. ‘You are not afraid of a woman who has never seen the sun since you were born?’

   “I regret to say that I was not afraid of telling the enormous lie comprehended in the answer ‘No’.

   “‘Do you know what I touch here?’ she said, laying her hands, one upon the other, on her left side.

   “‘Yes, ma’am.’…

   “‘What do I touch?’

   “‘Your heart.’

   “‘Broken!’”[27]  

   Myrtha’s arms are crossed (diagonally) over her breast. The tinier her bourrées - and the more we feel them to be like a string of pearls (that classic simile for this step) - the better for Giselle.

  And then she’s gone! Suddenly, she re-enters from another point of the stage.[28] Finally, she arrives centre-stage. She stops. And in some (the best, the best) productions it is only now that she removes her veil, in a single imperious gesture. By now, we should have felt much of her mystery.[29]

   It’s worth getting to know the opera Robert le Diable a bit: it gave Act Two of Giselle so much of its material and spirit. You see how Myrtha is related to two of its characters: related both to the demon Bertram (she summons her girls from their graves) and to the spectral Mother Superior Helena (she too is a beauty). She has Bertram’s melancholy, and Helena’s allure. The Ballet of the Nuns in Robert le Diable was the prototype of all ballets blancs. The original Robert was the tenor Nourrit; the original Helena was the ballerina Marie Taglioni; and, while Robert was still in rehearsal, Nourrit conceived, as a vehicle for Taglioni, the scenario for La Sylphide, which at once became the most influential of all Romantic ballets.

   The influence of La Sylphide upon Giselle is both obvious and many-stranded. It includes dualism between the real rural world and the fantastic forest, dualism between the duplicitous hero (James/Albrecht) whom the mortal heroine (Effie/Giselle) loves and the devoted local admirer (Gurn/Hilarion) whom she does not love in return, dualism between humans and supernatural beings: dualism that’s at its strongest in Act Two of either ballet, where the mortal hero strives in vain to be joined with the now ethereal and unpossessable heroine. In La Sylphide, the title heroine has stolen in Act One the wedding-ring James was about to give Effie, but now, making a last-minute effort at social virtue with her dying breath, gives it back to him - with the clear intention that he should return to Effie after all. Likewise, in the original Giselle, the title heroine’s final action was to ensure that Albrecht will return to his fiancée Bathilde. (From the original 1841 libretto for the final scene: “<Giselle> points Albrecht toward the trembling Bathilde, on her knees a few steps away and stretching out her hand in a gesture of entreaty. Giselle seems to tell her lover to give his love and soul to this sweet girl… it’s her sole wish, her last prayer, from her who can no longer live in this world.”[30])

 The differences between the two ballets are nonetheless important. In fact, La Sylphide (at least in its 1836 Bournonville version with Løwenskiold music) can often seem a more satisfying ballet than Giselle. Dualism becomes a matter of serious and tragic choice for James: the Sylphide or Effie? this world or that? And his tragedy becomes complete when, having lost the Sylphide, he finds that he has lost Effie too.

    But La Sylphide, for all its loveliness and its force, is a simpler drama than Giselle, with simpler characters. The ambiguities of Giselle are what make it the more haunting work; and they are too seldom appreciated even by its admirers, for whom the drama of Giselle is very often as clear-cut as a woman’s movie, or more so.

   The wilis are central to these ambiguities. They inhabit the air. (Some Giselle stagings – see the Kirov’s 1982 video - make great use of both Myrtha and Giselle flying through the air, appearing halfway up trees, etc..) But they also rise from the graves, and most of Petipa’s dances for them are weighted: dances that seem to be addressing the earth, and death. Arlene Croce, to whose several writings on Giselle I owe a great deal, writes: “These women are the undead – creatures of the earth, not sylphs of the air.”[31] I, however, would say that they are both. They use gravity and they defy it; and Giselle herself is often most wili-like when her steps take her shimming into the air. In the most traditional version, they wear veils throughout their first dance. Some of their music has a dark, implacable, pulse; but much of it is radiant, dreamy, dulcet. They’re belles dames sans merci who dance men to death, but they themselves are also spirits who take pleasure in dancing for dance’s own sake.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

   In 1835, in his famous preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, Gautier had proposed l’art pour l’art – art for art’s sake, art that defied or transcended conventional morality. With Giselle and the wilis, he conceived a ballet about la danse pour la danse. Gautier dreamed up Giselle as the first and greatest act of his lifelong love of Carlotta Grisi: seeming to dance for dance’s sake was a hallmark of her dancing.

   No, Giselle wasn’t the first ballet d’action that had had dance itself as a pivotal narrative element. (The title of Pierre Gardel’s 1800 ballet La dansomanie, which had been a successful repertory ballet in Paris, speaks for itself.) Later, La Esmeralda (1844) and La Bayadère (1877) would also be dramas about dancing. But the spell of Giselle falls upon you when you see that Giselle’s sisters in death are her co-devotees in dance. Giselle is not Giselle unless you feel the wilis’ siren beauty, their tragic delight, their irresistible, inexorable dance charm; and unless you recognise the extent to which Giselle herself becomes a wili.

  It’s Myrtha, alone among the characters in Giselle, who is given the dance equivalent of a Romantic operatic character’s grand solo: dramatic recitative (starting with the bourrées), a slow aria, and then a cabaletta. And during the course of all this, she introduces certain steps that become thematic material for all the wilis – and for the wili Giselle. (How characteristic of Marius Petipa’s choreography this is! Like Balanchine, Petipa adored the theme-and-variations method of dance composition, and often turned it to great dramatic effect.) One example is the “plucked” pas de bourree, in which the weight is transferred from foot to foot while stepping through retiré: this step, however simple, acquires here the peculiar stress of formal ritual, especially when all the wilis take it up.[32] Another is the demi-fouetté sauté, a jump that (differently in different productions) switches position but reaches its climax, while still in the air, in arabesque. Then there are a tick-tock alternation of leaning-forward and leaning-backward positions (the body always tipping in opposition to the working leg), certain beaten steps, sauts de basque, and grand jetés: all motifs that will become the building blocks of the dances for all the wilis.

   If there is one step above others, after Myrtha’s bourrées, that makes the wilis haunting, it is arabesque voyagée. Myrtha does it first (at the start of her “aria”). Then, when the wilis take it up, it gradually becomes one of the most momentous events in the entire ballet. A whole corps de ballet hopping in any one arabesque will make a powerful dance effect, but here’s what used to make these wili voyagées so strange and wonderful: the wilis, would dance them in arabesque allongée, one arm stretched ahead, the other stretched back just above the raised leg, but, above all, with heads down, addressing the graves from which first the wilis, then Giselle, will rise.[33] This can look silly, it’s true (you may think: Why don’t these hopping wilis look where they’re going?) – especially in the climactic moment of the grand pas when the two teams of wilis hop towards and through each other in voyagée (the step is often called the “cow-hop”). Prosaically, you may well wonder: will one wili bump into another in mid-hop? This choral arabesque hop is plainly not something that occurred in the 1841 original. Mary Skeaping, when she staged Giselle for London Festival Ballet in 1975, decided that it was a problem, and that the problem lay in the line of their arabesque. So, ruinously, she changed the wilis’ arms to a soft “third-arabesque” position (very soft elbows and wrists, heads sweetly tilted to one side), so that their upper body deportment seemed to be gently Taglioni-like, even though the hop itself is plainly emphatic and un-gentle and un-sylphlike. At some earlier point of the twentieth century, the Soviet Russian ballet companies came up with a better upper-body adjustment here: and the way the great Kirov or Bolshoi corps de ballet hop proudly here, very much looking where they’re going as they advance in fully-stretched first arabesque, has, for decades, been a great theatre event, earning applause around the world.

   In 1986, the ballet producer Peter Wright (who had already staged Giselle several times for British and other ballet companies) decided to follow the Soviet suit: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. So he made the Royal Ballet wilis at Covent Garden do those arabesque voyagées with their heads and shoulders raised, like the Russians, eyes looking ahead. This has now been the Covent Garden text for over thirty-three years. A mistake. Apart from the fact that, anyway, the British can’t hop as thrillingly in first arabesque as the Russians can (those Russians backs are what win applause), Wright eliminated a key element of Giselle, an element that the old touring Russian ballet companies used to keep: the morbid attention of those arabesques allongées upon the floor, upon the grave, upon death. The wilis, in their first ensemble, have already harped upon downward-facing arabesques allongée; they ceremoniously return to it. And when those hops occurs in that floor-facing position, they turn the expressive power of those arabesques into a sweeping symphonic statement. By looking down, by addressing their whole upper bodies down, those wilis, as they hopped forwards, used to darken the central drama of Giselle.

     At first it feels as if this nocturnal ritual, this grand pas des wilis  occurs here every night. As long as there are men who may enter the forest, Myrtha and her girls will rise and lure them into the dance of death. We discover, however, the grand pas has a specific purpose: to prepare the initiation of a new member. The sepulchral emphasis of those arabesques suggest that the wilis are contemplating the death to which any male interloper must come – and the soil from which Giselle must rise. And it is the obsessive, hypnotic Myrtha who presides: her command over Giselle will be central to what follows.

    In Footfalls (1976), one of the most radical plays of the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett has only one character visible onstage: May, a Miss Havisham type (“dishevelled grey hair, worn grey wrap hiding feet, trailing”). A single chime suggests that the play occurs at night. She crosses the stage from right  to left, left to right, again and again, in rhythmic steps. She pauses to address another sepulchral female voice, emanating unseen from the dark.

   May: Were you asleep?

   Woman’s Voice: Deep asleep. (Pause.) I heard you in my deep sleep. (Pause.) There is no sleep so deep I would not hear you there. (Pause. May resumes pacing. After first length, synchronous with steps.) One two three four five six seven eight nine wheel one two three four five six seven eight nine wheel. (Free.) Will you not try to snatch a little sleep?

And later:

Woman’s Voice: Will you never have done? (Pause.) Will you never have done… revolving it all?

May: It?

Woman’s Voice: It all. (Pause.) In your poor mind. (Pause.) It all. (Pause.) It all.

(May resumes pacing…)[34]

May is afflicted by a problem unlike the wilis: she’s an advanced case-study in the psychopathology of religion. Nonetheless, I’ve often wondered if Beckett (who went to some ballet in the 1930s, and was much struck by Petrushka, to which he seems to refer in Film) had not seen Act Two of Giselle: Footfalls feels like a repurposing of the wilis’ world. May’s body-language, her crossings and re-crossing of the stage, and her focus on death, religion, and the past remind me of Giselle each time I see the play – remind me of Giselle, of Myrtha, and the wilis.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

   Giselle materialises. In a simple but crucial passage, Myrtha leads her from her tomb (with its cross) to the centre of the stage. Myrtha pauses at the end of each step in tendu back; Giselle obediently pauses too.[35] In the traditional version, Giselle is still covered by a veil at this point, as Myrtha and the wilis had been on their first appearance. She bows to her new queen; Myrtha whips the veil off her; and, in the most traditional version of all (seldom if ever seen today), wings would now suddenly sprout from Giselle’s back.

   Myrtha now commands her: Dance! Which Giselle does. Not morbid at all, but whirling and brilliant, she seems to express her relief from the confinement of the tomb, spinning on the spot in low arabesque and then taking to the air in a crescendo of grands jetés: veiled corpse chrysalis translated into winged dance butterfly.

   In the famous movie of The Red Shoes, the impresario Lermontov asks the wannabe young ballerina Victoria (Vicky) Page (Moira Shearer): “Why do you want to dance?” Vicky replies: “Why do you want to live?” Lermontov: “I don’t know exactly why – but I must.” Vicky: “That’s my answer too.” Giselle is made of the same stuff Think of her first entrance in Act One. She takes only a moment to establish that she can’t see whoever knocked on her door, whereupon she knows what she really needs to do: “I’ll dance!” When Bathilde asks her about herself, Giselle replies by telling her about her love of dancing: it’s her defining characteristic. Dance was her destiny in life. It is her destiny in death.

    One Giselle’s dance as a debutante wili is done, Myrthe sends the wilis off to hunt for men. And it’s now that Albrecht makes his entrance, to the music that evokes Gluck’s Orpheus entering the Elysian Fields.

   The pas de deux that follows - sometimes so slow that it might be being danced under water - can be another of the duller rituals of Giselle in performance. Yet don’t write it off: it has beauties that can prove the stuff of poetic drama, changing and tightening the narrative. The live hero prays to see again the dead heroine; she appears, first slowly circuiting him like a guardian angel, both an answer to his prayer and an apparition in whom he cannot at first believe; he’s afflicted by remorse; she’s forgiving; he pursues her; they both return to ultra-simple dance language not unlike that of their Act One duet, but now not arm-in-arm but refracted, mirror-fashion, criss-crossing the stage; they strain to come together against the laws of nature and death; she’s pulled out of his reach as by the magnetic force of her supernatural condition: all these meanings come through the dance, with only slight threads of mime to spell things out more clearly.

   In Act Four of The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare tells a tale not unlike that of Giselle’s first act. Prince Florizel - disguised as a humble swain – is in love with the shepherdess Perdita. He tells her “When you do dance, I wish you

A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do

Nothing but that, move still, still so,

And own no other function.”[36] In Act Two of Giselle, it is as if Florizel/Albrecht’s wish had come bizarrely true: dance is now Giselle the wili’s natural element, and he can no more hold her or control her than he could a wave. Like Lyra and Will at the end of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, Giselle and Albrecht are lovers from different worlds, thinking of each other fixedly even while physics keeps them sundered.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

   At the end of this pas de deux, her pardon and his devotion should be fully apparent. So should her tender protectiveness over this now endangered mortal. She now warns him: Beat it! This forest is haunted! Albrecht obediently follows her offstage.

   Sure enough, the rest of the wilis promptly return to the stage now - with their first catch of the night: Hilarion. Dancing this non-dancer to death is a simple enough affair; but it establishes one of the piercing images of Giselle, the diagonal line of wilis that leads to Queen Myrtha, who deals out her ruthless commands: Dance! Die! No! The wilis’ diagonal goes from upstage right to downstage left: geometrically the opposite diagonal to that of Myrtha’s and Albrecht’s first entries.[37]

   Moyna and Zulma, the two wili lieutenants, dispose of Hilarion’s exhausted body. The diagonal line of wilis recollects itself with new épaulement. Myrtha leads the wilis off again, in little hunting posses.

   This time, the girls catch their man almost at once: Albrecht. The diagonal line of wilis quickly coalesces again as if to say to Myrthe: We’ve found another! And here he is! (The Kirov diagonal line used to be especially expressive here.) Myrtha is about to start issuing her orders again, when the corps de ballet shifts its épaulement as if to say: But who comes here? It’s Giselle!

   And now the Kirov corps de ballet shifts position yet again. Giselle interposes herself between her queen and her lover, and issues her trump card to Albrecht: “Go to the sanctuary of the cross!”[38]

   Here’s how the 1841 libretto for Giselle relates this:

   Flee, says Giselle to the one she loves, flee, or you will die, as Hilarion has, she adds, pointing to the lake.

Albrecht is frozen with terror for an instant at the idea of sharing the frightful fate of his gamekeeper. Giselle profits from this moment of indecision to seize Albrecht’s hand; they glide by the force of a magical power towards the marble cross, she indicates this sacred symbol as his only salvation!…[39]

   With this scene at the cross, the climax of Giselle commences. Albrecht runs to its shelter. Giselle follows. She stands in front of him - like his shield. The 1841 libretto continues:

The queen and all the Wilis chase him up to the tomb; but Albrecht, ever protected by Giselle, arrives at the cross, which he embraces; and at the moment when Myrtha is about to touch him with her scepter, the enchanted branch breaks in the hand of the queen, who stops short, as do all the Wilis, struck with surprise and dismay.

Furious at thus having their cruel hopes dashed, the Wilis encircle Albrecht, and frequently dart toward him, each time repelled by a power greater than their own.”

(This is the action that accompanied the fugue in Adam’s original score here, usually cut from most productions, though restored in Mary Skeaping’s LFB one.)[40]

   In the original 1841 production, Adam wrote a fugue here – an unusual effect in ballet music. The most interesting device of Skeaping’s London Festival Ballet production was her effort to make this work dramatically, with Myrtha sending the wilis to assail the cross in waves – albeit to no avail.[41] Myrtha also advances herself upon the cross, determined to command Albrecht to dance. But its power is greater than hers. Her wand breaks. (In productions where she has no wand, she recoils in dread from the cross.)

   What follows is seldom clear enough for audiences – seldom as clear as other parts of Giselle. It sometimes looks as if Giselle volunteers to dance for no good reason, and Albrecht to join her. There is, however, a reason.

   Myrtha’s role here is decisive. (Again, she’s not unlike Miss Havisham, who says “I sometimes have sick fancies…. And I have a sick fancy that I want to see some play.” To Estella, she declares: “Let me see you play cards with this boy…. You can break his heart.”[42]) Though Myrtha cannot command Albrecht now that he’s protected by the cross, she can still compel Giselle – who is her wili subject. So Giselle must follow Myrtha away from the cross now, just as she did earlier. Again, we see – or should see – the same walk for Myrtha and Giselle alike, the same pauses in tendu-back. We should also see – often we do not – Giselle’s gesture of regret back to Albrecht; maybe even her deep révérence as subject to her monarch; and Myrtha’s regal command to her: “Dance.”

   Here’s the way Gautier retold the tale, just a week after the premiere of Giselle:

Giselle draws her lover towards the tomb from which she has emerged, telling him to clasp the cross and not leave it, come what may. Myrtha resorts to a diabolically feminine ruse. She commands Giselle, who as her subject cannot disobey, to execute the most alluring and graceful poses.[43]

   The term “diabolically feminine” demonstrates the element of misogyny in the conception of the wilis. For all their bizarrerie, however, Myrtha and Miss Havisham are brilliantly imaginative creations.

   The ballet’s climax is still only beginning. Giselle’s solo here – the slow opposite of her earlier rapid one – is one of the drama’s crucial ambiguities, and one of its greatest ironies. With its first legato grand développé à la seconde, we feel, on the one hand, in its slowness, her reluctance. On the other, in its grand expansiveness, we sense her hypnotic allure. She whose death he caused must now cause his. She who has forgiven him now must betray him. Thus dances the wili, luring the male to his doom. The 1841 libretto:

The queen, then, wishing to avenge herself on the one who robbed her of her prey, extends her hand toward Giselle, whose wings soon open, and who begins dancing with strangest, most graceful ardour, as though transported by an involuntary delirium.[44]

   Does Albrecht choose to leave the cross? We hardly feel it as a choice on his part. There’s no “to leave or not to leave” mime deliberation. No. Simply, he has been standing there in the cross’s sanctuary. Steadily, he now leaves that sanctuary.

   In a great performance, his walk away from the cross and towards Giselle will tell us, not of the dilemma he has passed through before leaving the cross, but of the tragic, heroic, deeply Romantic, unquestioning nature of his decision. In joining the wili Giselle, he has elected to join in love, in dance, and in death.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

    Giselle is a romance set in the very late Middle Ages or a little later. The wilis represent one mediaeval myth: the totentanz, the Dance of Death. (In 1913, Stravinsky would take this to a modernist extreme in The Rite of Spring, where, for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, he dreamed up a Chosen Maiden dancing herself to death in an primitive annual ritual. It is quite possible that Diaghilev’s 1910 production of Giselle may have helped to prompt his dream.)

   Albrecht’s desire to be reunited with the dead Giselle, however, shows his hope for another great Romantic goal – liebestod, love-in-death. He loved her in her lifetime; he has now expressed contrition for her death; he has received her forgiveness; but still he desires to join her. The word liebestod is especially connected with one Romantic work of art, Wagner’s 1865 opera Tristan und Isolde, in which both Tristan and Isolde realise that death alone will bring them complete union, that death in fact is the goal of all their amorous yearning, and that with death they will find transcendent bliss. But the Tristan myth was mediaeval, and its chivalrous love-death meanings had been there all along.

   What’s more, the Romantic era before Giselle had already seen a cult of lovelorn suicide, even of double suicide. Nothing that the German writer Heinrich von Kleist did in his lifetime was more famous than the double suicide with which, in 1811, he and his friend Henriette Vogel chose to end it. In the opera Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), the heroine dies of a combination of madness and heartbreak, whereupon Edgardo, her lover, plunges his dagger into his heart so that he may join her soul in heaven. In 1886, the leading couple of Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm (1886) solve the dilemma of their lives, and of their mutual love, by another double suicide: they jump together into the millstream. Three years after that, Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria was said to have repeated Kleist’s act when he and his mistress committed double suicide at Mayerling. The original Swan Lake (1877) ended in a double death and drowning; the definitive 1895 St Petersburg version ends with, first, Odette and then Siegfried leaping into the lake to find both death and love.

   But to die in love and dance: no Romantic work of art catches this triple nexus like Giselle. I’m not being fanciful about this. Here’s Gautier’s description, written a week after the ballet’s premiere:

At first Giselle dances timidly and with reluctance, but then she finds herself carried away by her instinct both as a woman and as a wili, and she lightly springs forward and dances with such sensuous grace and overpowering fascination that the heedless Albrecht leaves the protection of the cross and goes towards her with arms outstretched and eyes shining with desire and love.[45]

 The 1841 libretto:

Albrecht, motionless, watches her, overwhelmed and astounded at this bizarre scene!!! but soon the Wili’s graces and ravishing poses attract him despite himself; this is what the queen wanted: he leaves the holy cross that protects him from death, and approaches Giselle, who pauses with dismay, and begs him to go back to the sacred talisman. But the Queen touches her anew, forces her to continue her seductive dance. This scene is replayed several times until finally, ceding to the passion that consumes him, Albrecht abandons the cross and rushes toward Giselle... He seizes the enchanted branch and wishes to die, so that he can rejoin the Wili and never again be separated from her!!!…

Albrecht seems to have wings, he skims the ground and leaps about the Wili, who from time to time tries to restrain him.[46]  

    It would seem that, once Albrecht has joined Giselle, his fate is sealed. (I like it when, in some productions, the wilis now change position, with a pas de bourrée on the spot, shifting their weight with laborious elegance from one tendu back to another: they seem to acknowledge the change of atmosphere.) Neither he nor Giselle is yet happy about his fate: they each address the wilis on either side (sometimes with a clear pleading gesture), and each row of wilis (like the relentless Damned Spirits rejecting the pleas of Orpheus in Gluck’s opera) replies firmly: “No!”

   Now, as he and Giselle start the supported adagio that seems to resume the psychic bond they formed earlier in the act, two pairs of wilis try to separate them – in order, one assumes, that the wilis may cast their full dancing spell upon Albrecht. But here the love of Giselle and Albrecht defeats the wilis. The lovers come together again centre-stage, and continue their adagio, now physically more joined in partnering than in their earlier pas de deux alone.

    I speak of Giselle as drama; but I don’t mean that the dramatic situation is always clear – or that each aspect of it should be clearly acted out. In dramatic authors from Shakespeare to Beckett, the most powerful situations are often those where we are unsure of quite which feeling is uppermost in a character’s mind. This dramatic climax of Giselle would be neater to us all if only Giselle spelt out – either with facial expressions or with mime – her torn feelings about being compelled, as a wili, to lure Albrecht from the cross, and it would be neater if Albrecht spelt out why he has decided to join her.

   Neater, but cheaper. It would, in fact, become a mere melodrama – the dance equivalent of one of those Joan Crawford movies where she suffers with heroic masochism. What makes Giselle absorbing is the opposite: the mysterious sense that Giselle and Albrecht are so absorbed in their own very complex webs of different feelings – and in their dance - that we outside observers cannot always be sure what motives are currently guiding them. True, it is this that has led to the simplification of Giselle. Even in performances where Act Two reaches extraordinary complexities of changing dynamics, many in the audience see only Albrecht’s ordeal (“I want to live!”) and Giselle’s self-sacrifice (“I want to save him!”). And, for many interpreters, those two elements are almost all that the climax of Act Two contains.

      This climax of Giselle is long; and what’s remarkable is how little of it is expressed in mime, how much in dance. Giselle doesn’t mime her conflicted feelings about dancing as a wili. She just dances – and we feel not a conflict within her but a multiplicity of feeling. Albrecht doesn’t mime his decision. He just proceeds into the dance, and we feel his complexity of feeling too. Even that little episode when the four wilis start to pull Giselle and Albrecht apart is performed with a fluency that doesn’t really break the continuity of the dance. (In fact, it adds to the dramatic expression of the scene: it’s as if the wilis are defeated by the powerful legato phrasing of the pas de deux.) The dance continues. Neither here nor later is there any one moment when Giselle announces: “I will disobey my queen and defy my own wili nature to save him from death.” We just see her do it – we just see her dance it.

    * * * * * * * * * * * * *

   And if you observe this part of Giselle closely, you see – you feel it more easily than you see it – that the impulses and desire that drive Giselle and Albrecht do keep changing. Gautier’s account continues thus:

The fatal delirium takes hold of <Albrecht>, he pirouettes, jumps, and follows Giselle in her most daring bounds. In the grip of this frenzy, he is consumed with the secret desire to die with his mistress and follow his ‘beloved shade’ to the grave.[47]

   In a 1946 review, Denby wrote that “the ‘love death’ climax” of Giselle” had been at its best in Serge Lifar’s version (which he would have seen in 1938): “and his own rise in elevation toward the end, like an ecstatic possession, was magnificent.”[48] Arlene Croce has written that it’s the Russian interpreters who, since Nureyev, have simplified Albrecht and Giselle in Act Two, and in this essay I’ve been dismissing various aspects of thee Russian productions I have seen. I nonetheless testify that the most complex interpreters in my own experience have been Russian, and that the productions truest in dance essence to Giselle have been Russian too. My most extraordinary Albrecht – though no longer quite spontaneous, and somewhat mannered when I saw him in 1986 – was the Bolshoi danseur Vyacheslav Gordeyev: who at once brought Denby’s 1946 reference to Lifar to mind, and who made every changing feature of the second act incomparably vivid.[49]

   The more Giselle is given full dance value, the more its meanings grow. Albrecht certainly seems sad and reluctant at first - yet how gallantly he soon pours his energies forth. Although modern programme scenarios for Giselle sometimes suggest that both Giselle and Albrecht are trying to hang onto until dawn, everybody can see that’s not the spirit with which he dances his solos. He jumps, he turns; at times, he has surrendered fully to the wilis’ dance magic; he seems again the lover with whom Giselle in Act One shared her love of dance; he seems to be expending himself in a rising inspiration of dance glory. (With both Nureyev and Baryshnikov, though their conscious acting decision was that Albrecht wants to live, their heroic dance instinct said something else: Albrecht wants to dance, dance, dance.) But even this isn’t neat. For we see Giselle save him again and again – she dances instead of him, she dances with him – and, whenever she thus intervenes, we never sense that he doesn’t want to be saved. At these moments (and at others), he seems to want life and to resist the wilis. And Giselle herself keeps changing with her steps: the soubresauts of one solo, the entrechat-quatre of another are all key moments that catch our hearts and indicate aspects of her spirit beyond her sheer self-sacrificing gallantry.

   At the end of one big solo, near the back of the stage, Albrecht starts to flag. We and the wilis sense that their triumph over him is nearing its goal. In clunky performances, however, he then just stands there for a while – waiting, as if catching his breath. (See the 1982 Kirov video, for example.) In the best Giselles, by contrast, this very moment is when Giselle, without missing a beat, comes zooming out from the wings into his arms – carrying on the continuity of the dance, taking the strain from him, seeming to bear him along, merely requiring him to hold onto her as she dances. Even the music, which has been entering one of the score’s more demonic crescendi, suddenly lightens.

   Yet this dance too is one of Giselle’s striking ambiguities. Giselle, leaping into his arms to save him, seems to give him new energy. Or is she exhausting him further? It may look as if she flies effortlessly, while he merely has to hold onto her - but this does involve him lifting her in a brisk series of low lifts – the lifts that male partners often find (whether or not the audience realises) the most taxing. (In Dancing on my Grave, a best-selling autobiography packed with petty moans about Giselle, the ballerina Gelsey Kirkland relates the endless difficulties of performing these lifts with Mikhail Baryshnikov. The Kirkland-Baryshnikov partnership in Giselle was, nonetheless, enthralling.) In one of the most astounding Giselles of my experience, the young Altynai Assylmuratova, dancing with the Kirov in 1988, came charging forth from the wings into Albrecht’s arms here with extraordinary power. She certainly seemed to be generating all the force, and yet the sequence had a dark quality I had never felt before in Giselle. As she went on dancing, I realised that the darkness came from the steps themselves – steps that her intensity was magnifying. For what is the step with which Giselle here leaps into Albrecht’s arms? Arabesque voyage, the wilis’ signature step - here performed as a series of low lifts. So is Giselle here just saving him before his energies fail him? Or is she driving him onto yet further wili-powered dance feats? I can only say that Giselle is most powerful when one cannot provide any single answer to that question. Such dilemmas keep tightening the drama of Giselle.

    At the end of another of Albrecht’s solos, he lies there on the floor exhausted, near the front of the stage, whereupon Giselle, again, comes running in. This time, however, she does not immediately dance. She does not even come to him. It’s as if she now senses that she may not be able to save Albrecht in this tragic Dance of Death. So, for once, she reverts to mime, and addresses her queen. “Please! I beg you!” (As I have mentioned, the modern Russian productions have Giselle here employ an armful of lilies: Please take these. It may sound silly that lilies might placate the vengeful Myrtha, but we have already seen how much they have helped to forge a transcendent link between Giselle and Albrecht. Myrtha, however, stays implacable.)

    What’s interesting, however, is what follows. Myrtha doesn’t just tell Giselle, “No”. She commands her again as a subject. And again Giselle knows what her duty is. To dance! To dance, again, as a wili. Which she does. (This solo, be it noted, is a post-1841 addition. Its music, probably by Minkus, is marvellously integrated into Adam’s original: it’s an insidious waltz variation on the ballet’s Act One love theme.) Even with a minor Giselle, you should here feel again here how Giselle here again can’t help surrendering herself to the enchantment of dancing: the feathery petits ronds de jambe en l’air with which she embellishes a petit developpé à la seconde (it’s one of the first steps the whole corps de ballet of wilis did) are so irresistibly tied to the music. Everything here is so dancerly. If you have any dance instinct at all, you should feel Giselle’s delight - and her wili allure.

    In 1986, with the Bolshoi, Nadezhda Pavlova was startling here: between the mime plea and the dance response you felt a metamorphosis in her whole nature. In 1982, I saw one of the last Giselle performances by the great Kirov ballerina Irina Kolpakova: one of the many features of the choreography that she brought revealingly to life was this solo. Those ronds de jambe glistened; and then, as she did repeated relevés in croisé attitude front, I suddenly saw – in the shape of the attitude and in the circle of her arms, which gorgeously echoed the rise of each relevé – the image of a cauldron, as if for a moment Giselle the wili was conjuring some witch’s brew. (Does that sound too wishful as I describe it? Certainly one shouldn’t going ferreting out such images as one watches the pure forms of classical choreography. But pure forms have their generating images. Where those forms coalesce into an image in your mind that illumines the ballet, then you must let their meaning enter into the ballet too.)

   Giselle really is not just filling in here for Albrecht while he gets his breath up. Do you doubt it? Then watch what follows. She goes to him, and leans seductively, irresistibly, over him. For a moment you may think she is saying: “Rest, rest, while I dance on.” But no. Having reminded him of her allure, she then dances away from him, and in a series of pose steps retreating from him, she gestures to him: “Follow! Follow!”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

   And he does. He rises. (Gordeyev’s Albrecht began to rise as soon as his Giselle, Lyudmila Semenyaka, entered.) The wilis start to dance, as if revving up for his last great expenditure of energy. And then he dances.

   The choreography for his last solo varies a good deal from one production to another: Nureyev used to do thirty-two heroic entrechat-six here (as have many Albrechts following in his wake); the usual Kirov choreography involves two diagonals of brisés (which Baryshnikov, at the height of his powers in the 1970s, used to do, it seemed, several yards above the floor); Dowell and other Royal dancers have employed a more lyrically complex combination of turns, beats, and jumps. Whatever the steps, one should feel always that this is Albrecht’s supreme effort – not a wimpy labour-saving device to fill in until dawn arrives but a magnificent heroic outpouring of male dance bravura at its noblest. And he does it in response less to Myrtha than to Giselle – less to Myrtha’s gestures of  “You, here, must dance to death” than to Giselle’s sweet gesture of “Follow!” Follow me; follow me into dance; follow me into love; follow me into death.

   Now, finally, all the wilis dance with Giselle and Albrecht; and he dances the same step as them. It is another wili signature step – arabesque sauté with a demi-fouetté switch in the air. Women dancers all love dancing Act Two of Giselle. You can easily see why: all those steps for the wilis are steps for those who love dance itself. Now Albrecht is dancing them too.

   He collapses; the wilis triumph… But no. Four o’clock strikes; dawn appears; the wilis return to their graves. In the scene that then brings Giselle to its close, one feels with daybreak Albrecht’s return not just to Bathilde but also to sanity. But such sanity brings with it a sense of tragic loss.

   In Swing Time, the Astaire-Rogers movie that dance fans tend to love most, Ginger and Fred are about to part, it seems, forever. He is engaged to marry another woman; she will accept another man. The mood is subdued, tender, very softly tragic. Ginger asks Fred: “Does she dance very beautifully?” Dreamily, he asks “Who?” “The girl you’re in love with.” “Yes”, he answers, “very.” But Ginger sweeps gently on: “The girl you’re engaged to, the girl you’re going to marry.” But Fred doesn’t even know how his fiancée dances: “I’ve danced with you. I’m never gonna dance again.” And so to the film’s last great number. He sings to Ginger of how he has lost “la belle, la perfectly swell, romance” and then stresses: “Never gonna dance. Never gonna dance. Only gonna love - you.”  So it is now with Albrecht. He lives on; he presumably will marry Bathilde. But he has danced with Giselle, has danced for love and dance and death, and now that he is safely back in the land of the living, we can’t imagine that he’ll ever dance again.

   By contrast, Giselle, the wili, will dance again – will rise each night with all the other wilis. As Act Two ends, however, that’s not what you feel. You do sense her noble relief that she has saved him from the wilis; you may even sense pious desire that Albrecht should now return to Bathilde. But you may feel something else too: that she has triumphed over her own wili self, has defeated the Dance of Death and has defeated Love-in-Death – those dark Romantic goals from which she, in this great test of character, has saved herself.

   The ballet tells her story, and yet it’s one that continually takes her, and us, by surprise. She dances for love and despite love; dances for dance’s sake and despite her own love of dance; as if dance were now a life force, now a death force. When dance was too much for her early in Act One, Albrecht had rushed to take care of her; now when it is too much for him in Act Two, she has rushed to take care of him; but on both occasions the dance itself has continued and caught them up like a perpetuum mobile. Giselle is the ballet’s most conflicted character, but also, eventually its most inscrutable. You watch her here as if she were a remote figure of mystery, there as if you were inside her very nervous system. We can’t re-tell her tale as an allegory, and you can’t deconstruct the dance out of it. Giselle as jilted stenographer or as consumptive floozy or as AIDS victim: those miss the point. When she steps out of her cottage door, she dances. Dancing is her story. That story takes her where she never dreamt of going.

@Alastair Macaulay, 2002, revised 2020.

[1] Just how Giselle fades away is a matter of some textual debate. Ivor Guest shows in The Romantic Ballet in Paris how, during rehearsals for the 1841 original, they decided not to return Giselle to her grave but instead to have Albrecht rest her on a grassy knoll – down through which which she then sank. This was part of the “traditional” Russian Giselle that the Royal Ballet inherited in the 1930s; I saw it performed this way at Covent Garden many times in the early 1980s. Balanchine – not a choreographer much involved with Giselle – nonetheless took pains to reinstate this feature when he coached Tamara Toumanova as Giselle at the Paris Opera in 1947. (See the 1983 compendium Choreography by Balanchine.) The idea is that the grass receives Giselle even before she can be returned to her grave itself; and that all the ground here belongs to the wilis. It must be said nonetheless that it doesn’t always work, and some logical ballet-watchers have been left imagining poor Giselle burrowing her way underground back to her grave. In the twenty-first century, this floral end has been restored in both Peter Boal’s 2011 Pacific Northwest Ballet production (thanks to Doug Fullington and Marion Smith) and Alexei Ratmansky’s 2019 Bolshoi production.

[2] Marian Smith. Ballet and Opera in the Age of ‘Giselle’, Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 198-99. The ending was drawn-out. Like the title character of La Sylphide returning James’s wedding ring with her dying breath, Giselle urged Albrecht now to marry Bathilde, while Albrecht’s squire Wilfride summoned Bathilde and others into the forest, finally leading Albrecht to Bathilde as the sun rises. A version of this was performed by the Vic-Wells Ballet at Sadler’s Wells until 1939 Julia Farron and David Vaughan both recalled how then Bathilde would come on and take Albrecht back at the end of the act.

This Bathilde dawn ending has also been restored in the 2011 Pacific Northwest and 2019 Bolshoi productions.

[3] Edwin Denby, Dance Writings, Dance Books, 1987, p. 372 (“An Open Letter about the Paris Opera Ballet”)

[4] Margot Fonteyn in Keith Money, The Art of Margot Fonteyn (no page number), 1965.

[5] One of the unforgivable textual changes of Peter Wright’s 1986 Giselle production - still currently performed by the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden - is to splice this Giselle-Bathilde mime dialogue in half. When Giselle tells Bathilde “I love to dance”, Wright stops the scene so that Giselle can perform her big solo (which rightly occurs elsewhere in act, as the climax of the harvest celebrations). This may scene dramatically logical, but it involves a nasty musical wrench. And it makes the second half of the Bathilde-Giselle mime scene seem to have a laboured “As we were saying” quality.

[6] Carlotta Grisi, the original Giselle, had nearly pursued a career as an operatic soprano, and she had sung the title character of Lucia di Lammermoor – the opera written by Donizetti, only six years before the premiere of Giselle, with the most stratospheric Mad Scene in opera. Carlotta Grisi came from a celebrated operatic family; her cousin Giulia Grisi was now becoming the reigning diva of the age. And the two greatest dramatic sopranos of the 1830s, Giuditta Pasta and Maria Malibran, are both said to have urged Carlotta to have pursued opera.

[7] Théophile Gautier, as quoted in Ivor Guest, Fanny Elssler, A. & C. Black, 1970, p. 116.

[8] “Then Antonia’s voice was heard singing low and soft; soon, however, it began to rise and rise in volume until it became an ear-splitting fortissimo; and at length she passed over into a powerfully impressive song which B- had once composed for her in the devotional style of the old masters….”  From “Rath Krespel”, in The Best Tales of Hoffmann, edited with an introduction by E.F.Bleiler., Dover, New York, 1967.

[9] “Once she had begun, her feet would not stop. It was as if the shoes had taken command of them. She danced around the corner of the church; her will was not her own… She danced through the gates of the churchyard; but the dead did not dance with her, they had better things to do….. The church door was open and she danced toward it, but an angel, dressed in white, who had on his back great wings that reached almost to the ground, barred her entrance. … ‘ You shall dance,’ he said, ‘dance in your red shoes until you become pale and thin. Dance till the skin on your face turns yellow and clings to your bones as if you were a skeleton. Dance you shall from door to door, and when you pass a house where proud and vain children live, there you shall knock on the door so that they will see you and fear your fate. Dance, you shall dance… Dance!’ ‘Mercy!’ screamed Karen, but heard not what the angel answered, for the red shoes carried her away… always dancing.” (The Penguin Complete Fairy Tales and Stories of Hans Andersen, translated by Erik Christian Hauggard, pp. 291-3.)  Andersen published The Red Shoes in 1845. Had he been influenced by Giselle? It is possible. His friend the choreographer August Bournonville had watched the original Giselle in both its original rehearsals and in some of its early performances. And, although I do not know whether Andersen – a ballet-lover - saw Giselle during two months he spent in Paris in early 1843, he certainly spent time then with Gautier, its prime architect.

[10] Alexei Ratmansky (email 14.ix.2019) makes the excellent point that he hears no suicide in Adolphe Adam’s score.

[11] Théophile Gautier, as quoted in The Ballet Called Giselle, by Cyril W. Beaumont, 1944, Dance Books, 1988, p. 21. Arlene Croce, A New Old ‘Giselle’, pp. 370-5 of  Croce, Going to the Dance, Knopf, 1982.

[12] Karsavina was Diaghilev’s first Giselle in 1910 (dancing it with Nijinsky, in famous designs by Benois). More importantly, she knew the ballet from the Maryinsky, which alone preserved Giselle from 1870 until 1910. (She would have seen it played en travesty by Enrico Cecchetti. In recent years, the performer/critic David Vaughan has also played this role, with the mime scene, in an American production.) This mime scene is very clearly demonstrated by Sandra Conley in the Royal Academy of Dance’s video Mime Matters (2002). Nonetheless, I still find most of it makes no sense save to the initiated.

   Marian Smith discusses the 1841 original in Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle, pp. 180-3. But her own book shows how, even then, mime failed to communicate to some observers: see pp. 116-118. (See also Macaulay, Times Literary Supplement., February 2002.)

[13] There is some debate over whether Berthe is miming “man with plumed hat” or something else. However, I have once seen Albrecht enter Act Two wearing a plumed hat. This was in Alexei Fadeyechev’s performance with the Bolshoi. (Dancing Times, May 1987.) The Bolshoi production did not include Berthe’s mime scene, but Fadeyechev’s performance made the hat seem perfectly in character and unembarrassing.

[14] Croce, private correspondence. Marian Smith op. cit., p.170.

[15] Alexandre Benois, Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet, Putnam, 1941, pp. 69-70.

[16] Smith, op. cit., p. 168.

[17] Alastair Macaulay, “Adolphe Nourrit - Tenor of the Three Glorious Days”, Opera, March 1989. Macaulay, “The Author of ‘La Sylphide’ – Adolphe Nourrit 1802-39”, Dancing Times, November 1989. Marian Smith, op. cit.

[18] Alexei Ratmansky (email 14.ix.2019) observes that Hilarion, Myrtha, and Albrecht (Albert) all make their first appearances in Act Two from the same upstage left corner in Sergueyev’s notation of Petipa’s Mariinsky production; Myrtha enters from that corner in the c.1860 Justamant account too.

     For ballet-goers today, that diagonal has further connections. In Balanchine’s 1934 ballet Serenade, a ballet full of Giselle echoes, the two leading men made their first entrances along this same slow diagonal (the first man at the end of the first Sonatina movement, the second at the start of the final Elegy movement). And both of Serenade’s leading men recall not only Albrecht looking for Giselle but Orpheus entering the underworld.

[19] Théophile Gautier, Gautier on Dance, selected, translated, and annotated by Ivor Guest, Dance Books, 1986, p. 94.

[20] Parts of this scene in Robert le diable, which go as follows in English, are strikingly close to Myrtha’s first scene in Act Two of Giselle:

    Bertram: “Here, then, are the ruins of the ancient monastery dedicated by Rosalie to the daughters of the Lord!

    These daughters of the altars, who, with unholy devotion,

    burned impure incense to other gods,

    made pleasure reign where virtue once ruled”

 (He approaches the tombs)

  “Nuns, who repose beneath these cold stones,

  do you hear me?

  For one hour, leave your sepulchral beds,

  arise!

  Have no fear of the terrible wrath of an immortal saint

  - have no fear.

  It is I, king of hell, who summon you…

 (with an expression of sadness)

 “It is I, I, damned like you!

 Nuns, do you hear me?”

 (Variously, the nuns arise.)

 “Daughters, formerly of heaven, today of hell,

 hear my supreme command:

 A knight whom I love is coming here among you…

 he must pluck this green branch;

 but, should his heart waver, should he deceive my purpose,

 he must be seduced by your charms;

 force him to fulfil his imprudent promise;

 by concealing from him the snare that my hand has laid for him!”

 (The nuns bow to Bertram, who departs. The instinct of passions immediately returns to their bodies, which only a short while before were inanimate. The young women, after recognising each other, now give signs of delight at again seeing one another. Helen, their mother superior, invites them to take advantage of the moment, and to yield themselves up to pleasure. This order they obey at once. From their tombs, the nuns remove the objects of their profane delights: they produce amphoras, cups,and dice. Some of them make offerings to an idol, while others adorn their heads with crowns of cypress and they fling off their long robes, the better to join in their dancing with lightness. Soon they are aware of nothing but the attractions of pleasure, and the dance becomes a wild bacchanal…) Robert le Diable. English translation of original French libretto by Richard Arsenty, 19885, slightly revised by Alastair Macaulay in 2002.

[21] I’m grateful to an email from Alexei Ratmansky here (14.ix.2019). “The latest expertise didn't confirm Petipa's hand on the score from St Petersburg’s Theater Museum. So there is no evidence that he made any notes of the original Giselle. Yuri Slonimsky is responsible for this myth.”

[22] The Russian Giselle probably also bore the imprint of Fanny Elssler, the great actress-ballerina who first danced Giselle for Perrot in London in 1842. Her Giselle was never seen in Paris, but in Russia it caused delirious excitement.

[23] Marian Smith, op. cit., pp. 175-8, p. 196, p. 198, pp.299-300 n.65, p.300, n.73. Arlene Croce, “Selling It”, Afterimages, p. 259 (“Minkus’s editing tightened Adam’s scheme to the point where we can speak of Giselle as a dance drama in the modern sense of united elements serving a single purpose.”) Joseph Horovitz, “Adam and his score”, Royal Opera House programme for Giselle, 2002.

[24] Natalia Roslavleva, Era of the Russian Ballet., Victor Gollancz, pp. 88.

Keith Money, Anna Pavlova, Collins, 1982, pp. 39. 42.

   Some parts of Giselle’s choreography, such as her hops on pointe in Act One, are long thought to have been post-Petipa, devised in the early twentieth century for Olga Spessivtseva; but Nicholas Sergueyev’s Stepanov notation shows that they were approved by Petipa as part of Anna Pavlova’s performance in 1903.

[25] I believe that, in this respect, the touring Ballets Russes versions were the same.

[26] According to Alexei Ratmansky (14.ix.2019 email), these wonderful bourrées are not recorded in the Stepanov notation and were not part of Petipa’s production. They may have been introduced in twentieth-century Western productions in the early twentieth century.

[27] Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, chapter 8.

[28] I may be misremembering this, but I think that, in one production I saw in the 1970s, she bourreed again right across the stage and, again, off, this time from left to right, along the opposite diagonal.

[29] Myrtha’s stage-skimming crosses, her re-entries at unexpected points, the weighty incantation of her dance along the ground were all intended to describe her authority in that space, on that spot of earth, and under it... Myrtha prepares the drama. Anyone who has not experienced the thoroughness of her preparation has not felt the icy breath of Giselle. ” Arlene Croce, “A New Old ‘Giselle’”, Going to the Dance, Knopf, U.S., p. 373. on Myrtha.

[30] Smith, op. cit., Appendix Two, p. 237.

[31] Croce, “Giselle, ou La Fille des Bayous”, Sight Lines, Knopf, U.S., 1987, p. 220. Also “A New Old ‘Giselle’”, op. cit, on Myrtha: “These are graves on which she dances, and they are, as see in a moment, the graves of dancers.”

[32] Croce, “The Kirov Abroad, Stravinsky At Home”,1982,. Sightlines, p.58.

[33] Alexei Ratmansky believes there is no evidence that the heads-down emphasis was ever part of the Mariinsky tradition of delivering this step. Even if it was introduced only in twentih-century Western stagings, however, I regard it (like Myrthe’s bourrées) as an improvement that deepens the drama

[34] Samuel Beckett, Footfalls, 1976.

[35] That walk, with its tendu-back pause, becomes one of the motifs of Balanchine’s Serenade.

[36] Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, IV, 4, 140-3.

[37] Doug Fullington and Alexei Ratmansky have both advised me that Justamant’s notation of his Giselle contains this diagonal of wilis; they believe it originated with Jean Coralli’s 1841 choreograohy for the wilis.

[38] Croce, “The Kirov Abroad, Stravinsky at Home”, 1982, Sightlines, 1987., p. 57.

[39] Smith, op. cit, Appendix Two, p. 237.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Ratmansky in 2019 also attempted to stage the fugue at the Bolshoi.

[42] Dickens, Great Expectations, chapter 8.

[43] Gautier on Dance (27: “Opera: Giselle”, La Presse, July 5, 1841), op. cit., p. 101.

[44] Smith, op. cit, Appendix Two, p. 237.

[45] Gautier on Dance (27: “Opera: Giselle”, La Presse, July 5, 1841), op. cit., p. 101.

[46] Smith, op. cit, Appendix Two, p. 237.

[47] Gautier on Dance, p.101.

[48] Edwin Denby, “Ballet Theatre Wins”, p. 357 of Denby, Dance Writings, Dance Books, 1987.

[49] Croce, “A New Old Giselle”, Going to the Dance, op. cit., p. 373.

Macaulay, Dancing Times,. May 1987.