Giselle: Ninety-Seven Questions, with Hundreds of Answers
by Alastair Macaulay, Doug Fullington, Maina Gielgud, Cynthia Harvey, Jane Pritchard, Alexei Ratmansky, and Marian Smith.
At present this remains a working document, chiefly from 2014-23 email correspondence, and obviously incomplete. We have already added to it with new material (October and November 2021, August 2022, August and November 2023); we hope to keep building on it in time to come.
I.
Questions 1-25: Giselle’s sources and context.
The ballet Giselle has retained its fascination for amost a hundred and eighty years. Is this, however, because it’s been changed and changed again?
Some of this ballet’s most famous features were added in the second half of the nineteenth century, others in the second half of the twentieth. It was never sacrosanct. Within two or three years of its world premiere, it was presented in three-act and four-act versions.
What’s left of the 1841 Giselle? What kind of authenticity or rightness should we ascribe to the passages we’ve loved in recent performances? It’s worth investigating this ballet’s histories. My own experience of Giselle, amassed from observing performances by many companies, goes back to 1975. This doesn’t make me an expert - but it does help me to know many of the questions to ask about it.
I’m not alone in asking these questions. 2011 and 2019 brought us the most historically informed two productions of Giselle for many decades: the Pacific Northwest staging of 2011 (Peter Boal, working with Marian Smith and Doug Fullington) and the Bolshoi one of 2019 (the work of Alexei Ratmansky). 2022 is bringing us a third: Ratmansky’s new production for the United Ukrainian Ballet. After the premiere of the Pacific Northwest Ballet production, I began to put questions to Fullington and Smith, the two historians involved in that staging. In July 2016, I convened a three-day seminar on Giselle at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Doug Fullington and Marian Smith were leading contributors. A film of the seminar was made for the Library, where it may be seen. Since then, I have also put these and other questions to the ballerina/director Maina Gielgud and to the scholar Jane Pritchard. In 2019, I was asked by the Bolshoi Ballet of Moscow to interview Alexei Ratmansky before his new production for that company; I have introduced material from the interview, and related correspondence, into this questionnaire. After our first publishing this here in October 2020, I have placed new questions to our team, who have made time to write answers, which are to be found in this revised version (October 2021). In August 2022, I interviewed Ratmansky about his new production for the United Ukrainian Ballet; I have incorporated his answers here.
All these scholars have contributed answers when time has allowed. We publish it in its current incomplete condition, on the understanding that there is always more to say and to discover.
Alastair Macaulay (AM) is a critic and historian; he was chief dance critic of the New York Times in 2007-2018.
Doug Fullington (DF) and Marian Smith (MS) are the scholars who assisted Peter Boal in his 2011 production of Giselle for Pacific Northwest Ballet.
Maina Gielgud (MG) danced Giselle and Myrthe in several productions before directing the ballet for the Boston Ballet and Australian Ballet.
Cynthia Harvey (CH) danced Giselle with both American Ballet Theatre and the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden in the late twentieth century. In 2021, she presented for American Ballet Theatre’s JKO School a weekend seminar on “Giselle”.
Jane Pritchard (JP), a British dance historian, was archivist to English National (London Festival) Ballet, now working at the Theatre department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Alexei Ratmansky (AR), former artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet and longterm artistic associate of American Ballet Theatre, staged new productions of Giselle for the Bolshoi in 2019 and for the United Ukrainian Ballet in 2022.
Notes: All Titus and Justamant translations are by Marian Smith. Translations from the Stepanov are by Anastasia Shmytova and Kaleriya Maslyak with Doug Fullington.
Giselle nomenclature: The makers of the ballet wrote of Giselle, Albert, Myrtha, Wilfride. We’ve tried to keep to those names here. Note that the name “Albert” is pronounced differently in French than in English. (We retain “Albrecht” when quoting sources using that name and referring to specific productions where the name is used.)
The régisseur/notator known sometimes as “Nikolai Sergeev” or “Nicholas Sergueyeff” is named here as “Nicholas Sergueyev”.
1-25. Giselle and its sources.
AM: I know a little about some of the nineteenth-century material - but here I’m asking questions principally because I’m steeped in the subsequent performance history of Giselle. Others will certainly have seen more productions, casts, and performances than I, but I’ve seen at least sixteen productions over more than forty years, and many dozens of casts. So I certainly have questions.
Let me introduce you all.
Doug Fullington and Marian Smith: you two have spent years absorbing yourself in the nineteenth-century evidence for Giselle and many other ballets. Under Peter Boal’s supervision, you’ve worked on the 2011 Pacific Northwest production and its 2014 revival. Were it not for the Covid-19 lockdown, I would have joined you in April 2020 for a Giselle conference in Seattle and for the next revival of that production.
Maina, your knowledge of the performance history of Giselle goes back much further than my own – it goes back to your having mixed as a child in Tamara Karsavina’s and Anton Dolin’s circles in London in the 1950s. You later worked on Giselle with Dolin, with Rosella Hightower, and with Mary Skeaping in subsequent decades. You’ve danced both Giselle and Myrthe; you’ve staged the ballet; you’ve coached individual Giselles and Alberts (Albrechts).
Alexei, you were preparing a new/old Giselle for the Bolshoi when I interviewed you for the Bolshoi program: I use here the answers you gave me then. You’ve also danced Albert. Your Bolshoi production had its premiere in November 2019, your United Ukrainian one in August 2022. In 2021 and 2022, you’ve gone on addressing my Giselle questions.
Jane, you’ve been an archivist and historian for many institutions, with nineteenth-century ballet and the Diaghilev company among your specialties. And your experience of watching ballet in several countries goes back further than my own.
1.
AM: The central dualism of Giselle is that the heroine is alive in Act One, a ghost in Act Two. Was this without precedent in ballet? There are plays, not least by Shakespeare, where we see characters in life and then as ghosts; and Giselle was made in Paris in an era when the French had newly discovered Shakespeare.
In other ways, Giselle is modeled on La Sylphide: the real world in Act One, the forest where spirits dance naturally in Act Two. In La Sylphide, however, nobody dies halfway through. I can also see that Giselle is a dance sequel to the opera Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), which ends not with the heroine’s Mad Scene but with the great scene for the hero (Edgardo, her lover) amid the tombs of his ancestors: when Edgardo learns of Lucia’s death, he invokes her spirit, says he means to join her, and commits suicide in order to do so. Donizetti, the composer of Lucia, had arranged a French version, Lucie de Lammermoor, in 1839. He and the younger composer Adolphe Adam became friends; Adam’s subsequent music, including aspects of Giselle, shows signs of Donizettian influence.
But was Giselle new in the way it divided the heroine between the living (Act One) and the dead (Act Two)?
MS: One of the most striking precedents, aside from La Sylphide, was, of course, Robert le diable (1831), which electrified (and offended) audiences with its dead nuns who came back to life, wearing white tutus. As for dividing the heroine between the living (Act One) and the dead (Act Two) – yes, Giselle is the first work I know that does this. But bear in mind that there were more mortals in Act Two than there are now. There are gamekeepers, village men, and at the end, a bunch of people from the court.
AM: My point is that Giselle seems to be the first heroine who returns after death. Later ballets – notably La Bayadère – build on this.
MS: I do think that the generic switch — from a comique piece in Act One to a poignant melodrama in Act Two— is quite ingenious, and helps account for the work's initial and ongoing popularity.
There are two scenes, now “lost”, in Act Two in which mortal characters find themselves in the Wilis' territory and become frightened. The first is the opening scene of Two, which opens with a jolly gathering of gamekeepers setting up camp at night in the woods. (They are drinking out of the wineskins they have slung over their shoulders, and the music tells us that the mood is light.) Hilarion, the boss, comes to join them and immediately sees that they are in a dangerous place. He warns them. The mood turns somber when Hilarion happens across Giselle's gravestone. The gamekeepers respectfully remove their caps. The clock strikes midnight, and the gamekeepers, now nervous, count the chimes on their fingers. When the will-o'-the-wisps appear soon thereafter, the frightened men move in a clump from one side of the stage to another, trying to avoid them. (This brought some laughs from the audience in Seattle.) It is a fun scary-ghost-story sort of scene; it gives you a delicious chill, and shows that you, in the audience, have entered into a strange new place.
It is true that sometimes, today, bits of the music for this scene are used, with bits of action - but without the jolly element of setting up camp in the woods and drinking, or the funny bit about the men counting the chimes on their fingers, or Hilarion warning the men away, or the men removing their caps when they see Giselle's grave.
The second of the lost scenes takes place after the Wili Giselle has made her first appearance and executed those frightening, furious turns. It’s nice to have a bit of levity here, and in this scene we find a group of village men returning from a festival in a neighboring village. To the sound of a harp (“a bizarre music"”, as the libretto puts it), first one Wili and then another, and another, appear and “fascinate” the men “with their voluptuous poses.” “The young men are intrigued by these attractive young females, but the old man in the group is wiser. He warns the young ones away, and they manage to escape with their lives.” The music for this scene is in the score, and was recorded by Richard Bonynge, but I had never seen it performed until we incorporated it into the PNB production.
Both of these scenes show an encounter of mortal men with malign supernaturals. Seeing the direct engagement of the two types fairly early in the acts helps us ease us into the Wilis' world. Also, it makes for a good ghost story.
Both of these scenes have humor in them, too, which affords comic relief. The scene of the gamekeepers, coming at the beginning of the second act, is the first scene we've seen since the shocking and dismaying closing tableau of Act One, in which Giselle lies dead. And then, the scene of the villagers comes a few scenes later, immediately after Giselle has risen from her grave and been greeted by Myrtha—something that's not funny at all. So the comedy provided by the villagers is welcome.
These two scenes keep the second act from being unrelentingly lugubrious. And really, the impact of the sad and poignant scenes of Act Two is actually strengthened by the inclusion of some levity in the mix. Keeping humor out of the second act makes maintaining its interest more difficult.
AM: The first gamekeepers’ scene is certainly one I’ve seen: it’s in the Mary Skeaping production (London Festival Ballet/ English National Ballet), which I watched from 1977 onward and have seen again in this century.
Two operatic precursors of this meeting of mortals with the supernatural occurred in Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787) and Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821). Don Giovanni, that great classic of music theatre, joined the Paris Opera repertory in 1835, in French translation as Don Juan, replete with ballet. My hero Adolphe Nourrit – the creator of the title role in the original Robert le Diable and the author of the scenario for La Sylphide - was Don Juan. A central plot element is the return of the Commendatore after death to take Don Juan/Giovanni to hell. In Freischütz, the Wolf’s Glen scene became a classic example of Romantic drama, with mortal man meeting the otherworldly at its most gruesome and terrifying.Berlioz helped to adapt Freischütz for the Paris Opera in 1841, the year of Giselle.
Both those operas also have strong elements of comedy. Every scene for the Commendatore in Giovanni also features Leporello, the Sancho-Panza-like servant whose funny ordinariness offsets the heroic drama of retribution elsewhere onstage.
2.
AM: The idea of Giselle began with Théophile Gautier – poet, novelist, critic, leading light of the French Romantic movement, and founding figure of the Parnassian movement in poetry. In a famous introduction to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, he argued for “l’art pour l’art” – art for art’s sake – an argument for art possibly subverting morality that may anticipate Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement.
Heinrich (Henri) Heine had spent much time in Paris; Gautier and he were friends. Gautier wrote to him about how the idea of the ballet occurred to him one night on reading Heine’s account of the legend of the wilis in his, Heine’s, De l’Allemagne. As the process went on, he handed over Act One to Jules Vernoy de Saint-Georges, an experienced ballet librettist. He specified that Giselle had to die at the end of Act One - he seemed indifferent to the cause of death - and he established the characters of Hilarion and Albert (Albrecht).
Actually, Gautier writes about Giselle more than once over the months and years. Am I right that there are discrepancies between his accounts of it?
DF: Marian can reply to this better than I can, but my current impression is that Gautier’s writings were sometimes at odds with what the performance sources tell us (about Hilarion, for example). And yet his writings seem to have informed a lot of subsequent ideas around Giselle: for example, that Giselle stabs herself with the sword during the mad scene, and that Albert’s name should be Albrecht, neither of which were part of the ballet’s conception. I suppose this is simply due to the fact that his writings were available and the performance documents were not. But now that they are, I think some reassessment is in order.
MS. Yes! I comment on Gautier’s variant tellings of Giselle’s manner of death below. Gautier’s writings are so beguiling and gratifying to read, and more widely available than the original source materials, so we’ve relied on them.
3.
AM: As I go over “Giselle”, I’m newly struck by its structural fluency/coherence, particularly the fluency of Adolphe Adam’s score. Apart from the peasant pas de deux, there are only three isolated variations, two of which - both for Giselle - were added in the late nineteenth century. (And the Act Two one is brilliantly worked into the ballet’s musical memory bank.)
In fact, I’m now almost surprised by the way Albert’s Act Two variation is isolated. Was it always that way from 1841 on? Does Titus or Justamant or Stepanov suggest ways in which the wilis were active during its course?
Otherwise it’s remarkable, when I think of the operas I know from the 1830s and 1840s, that “Giselle” really is moving into a proto-Wagnerian avoidance of separate numbers. But maybe I’m wrong? Maybe some Bournonville ballets have this structural connectedness too. Your thoughts? We’re some of the lost French ballets of the 1830s more connected than the later Petipa idiom?
DF. We’ve found that Giselle’s action and dance was very integrated according to the early performance records we’ve studied (Titus and Justamant). Many sections of the balle qualify as pas d’action, with mime and dance far less separated than we see in Petipa’s surviving ballets. Even within more formal multi-movement dance suites, such as Giselle and Albert’s Act One pas de deux (which included four sections, including a variation for Giselle), the Peasant pas de deux, and G & A’s Act Two pas de deux, solo and duo passages are more fluidly combined.
As far as I know, we haven’t found any evidence of other stage activity during Albert’s Act Two variation. It is part of the larger multi-movement pas de deux that he dances with Giselle, of course, and follows a lengthy solo passage for Giselle in the previous Andantino that comes after the adagio. To me, and I think Marian may agree, it makes dramatic sense for him to dance this solo at this point in the narrative when Myrtha is forcing him to dance to exhaustion so they can drown him as they did Hilarion.
Other danced passages that aren’t formally designated as variations in Giselle qualify as such because of their length, including Myrtha’s solos at the beginning of Act Two and during the Wilis’ dances and Giselle’s Andantino solo.
We have identified a number of passages of music that seemed to have been intended for Giselle to dance that were cut from Adam’s autograph score. Grisi was coming back from an injury before the premiere, and we surmise that dance passage may have been shortened and, in some cases, cut in order to accommodate her.
MS. I would like to add a note about continuity in "Giselle", though it does not concern the dance numbers. Is is the thoughtful way that one scene is made to elide into the next. Here is but one example (I am sending video via WeTransfer to show it): After Berthe's big mime scene, Giselle wants to leave with Albert, but Berthe insists that her daughter return to their house. The sound of hunting horns is heard in the distance, making Loys nervous. He shoos the village girls off to upstage right (away from the hunting party), and Giselle reluctantly goes back into the house with her mother. Quite often, this stage is empty while the music plays; the action is eliminated. But this action is important: it deepens the characterizations a bit (village girls are excited about the hunting horns; Berthe is very determined to get the reluctant Giselle back in the house) and helps build tension about the conflict Albert has set up.
(There are many other instances of an empty stage or missing characters in scenes for which Adam explicitly wrote in voices and action!)
4.
AM: Gautier conceived the ballet for the young ballerina Carlotta Grisi, who was the partner of the young ballet master and dancer Jules Perrot. Later, Grisi became his, Gautier’s, sister-in-law. She grew up in the era of the classic sylph, Marie Taglioni, but also that of the great actress ballerina, Fanny Elssler – Gautier’s responses to both ballerinas in the late 1830s are famous - and she, Grisi, combined some of their virtues. She also came from an operatic family and had enough singing skill to perform some arias early in her career. As Marian has written in Ballet and Opera in the Era of “Giselle”, there were many overlaps between opera and ballet in that era, but Grisi may have been more equipped than most for a work that has some operatic qualities.
Decades ago, I read a brilliant Ph.D. thesis by the Canadian-British scholar John Chapman on Romanticism in the Romantic Ballet. He observed that Grisi was praised by French critics for seeming to dance for dance’s sake – la danse pour la danse. This immediately connected for me with Gautier’s credo of l’art pour l’art, art for art’s sake. Whether or not she was the technician and stylist that Taglioni was, or the actress that Elssler was, this quality of being motivated by dance itself seems very close to the heart of Giselle and - another role she created for Perrot - Esmeralda. And perhaps it made her close to Gautier’s larger aesthetics as well as to his personal tastes in stage divinities.
Any comments here, scholars? I’ll just point out that Grisi’s roles of Giselle and Esmeralda are the presursors of Nikiya in La Bayadère: dancers for whom the love of dance is part of the story. But dance as the subject of drama was already in the air. We’ll return to this.
5.
AM: The wilis are nocturnal spirits who rise after the midnight hour to dance men to death. Gautier had imagined Giselle rising from the grave as a wili, albeit a conflicted wili. Next, Saint-Georges added to Act One the idea that Giselle in life was already mad about dancing. This suited Grisi, who was noted for her quality of dancing for dancing’s sake.
Saint-Georges didn’t conjure it from thin air, however. Have you ever read about the dance plague of the Rhineland in the late medieval era? There’s a good book by John Waller, The Dancing Plague (2009 - printed in the UK as A Time to Dance, a Time to Die). He particularly writes of the fatal dance-mania of Strasbourg of 1518. But he’s aware that there had been earlier instances, chiefly in the Rhineland. Lincoln Kirstein, in his exceptional Dance, a short history (1934), is an earlier historian who records some of these reports of fatal, collective, dance-mania: his examples go back at least as early as 1013. He discusses these outbreaks as part of the medieval concept of the Dance of Death.
DF: So fascinating about the dancing plague!
Although Giselle may have been envisioned in the Middle Ages (the original libretto does not give an indication), the original costuming is a mix of contemporary, i.e., 1840s current style of dress (for Giselle herself and the female peasants) and an idealized, and also fashionably current, mediaeval look for the men. This is evident in the costume drawings for 1841 and subsequent Paris productions, and also the 1845 engravings in Les Beautés de l'Opéra.
Jérôme Kaplan, designing our Pacific Northwest production, solved this stylistic incongruity by removing the then-in-fashion idealized mediaeval looks and by costuming the entire ballet in the same period—the period in which Giselle herself is costumed.
MS: Giselle’s love for dancing was inspired by a character in Hugo’s poem – see below.
AM: Alexei, can you say what period Giselle is set in?
AR: I’m not sure - and I don’t know how much it matters. My designer, Robert Pereziola, and I have based our Bolshoi designs on those of Alexandre Benois; and I think Benois had done his research. It just looks very pretty and very right for the choreography and the story.
AM: Well, I think it matters somewhat when Giselle is set - but then I’ve seen one production set in the early twentieth-century Jazz Age, with some characters arriving onstage by car.
6.
AM: Giselle was conceived in the era of the ballet d’action, the narrative ballet. So how do you find dramatic justification for dancing itself in a story ballet? - especially in the era in which expressive mime carried much of the story? Well, dance-mania is one answer: characters dance because they’re wild about dancing itself.
There are two pre-Giselle ballets where dance-mania is a theme: Vincenzo Galeotti’s The Whims of Cupid and the Dancing Master (1786), which the Royal Danes kept in repertory in Copenhagen until the early 1980s, and Pierre Gardel’s La Dansomanie (1800), which the Paris Opera revived (presumably without the original choreography) c.1979. Both were comedies, with people dancing helplessly, unable to resist dance-craziness. (The comedy of people dancing against their will is something Bournonville used later, in the 1851 The Kermesse in Bruges.)
So dance-enthusiasm was in the ballet air at the time of Giselle. The obligation to dance, no matter the consequences, recurs in Esmeralda and La Bayadère, in each of which the female protagonist is a professional dancer. Did anybody, in any of the period sources you've investigated, remark on the parallels between Giselle and other dance-mania stories?
MS: All the dancing characters in ballets at the Paris Opéra in those days danced for a reason. Village festivals, balls, entertainment for the Pasha, celebrations of harvests, weddings—you name it, there was a reason for the dancing. So it makes sense that Gautier created a character, Giselle, who loved to dance and did it every chance she got. Same thing for the Wilis. They're not just regular ghosts—they're ghosts whose nature drives them to the dance.
I don't know of any dansomania-themed ballets during the Giselle period, but the theme of involuntary dancing comes up every so often in other ballets; it's one of many devices that ballet story-writers (ballet librettists) used to introduce dancing into the action. For instance, Native Americans couldn't help but dance when they heard the sound of the dancing master's violin in Les Mohicans, a short-lived ballet of 1837. In La Tarentule (1839), one of the main characters is bitten by a spider: the toxin makes him dance. In Lady Henriette (1844), the deranged residents of Bedlam dance at recreation time, each one acting out the "eccentricity" of his or her own monomania. And so on.
(Never mind the Gardel/Méhul Dansomanie of 1800, which I wish I could see!)
DF: And in the Ivanov-Drigo 1893 Magic Flute, the country boy Luc plays a flute which forces those hearing it to dance.
AM: In one respect, Esmeralda and La Bayadère have one extra turn of the screw beyond the Giselle we know: their heroines each have to dance when their hearts are breaking, and yet their sheer love of dance helps to carry them through.
I suspect that it was to create similar effects that Giselle was expanded, in Italy, into a four-act ballet in 1843 for Fanny Cerrito and a three-act one for Fanny Elssler. In those productions, Bathilde invited her new village friends, Giselle included, to the castle for the celebrations for her wedding. In the act set in the castle – where Elssler apparently reached her peak - Giselle covered quite a range: she danced at the festivities for Bathilde, she discovered Albert’s true identity and perfidy, she went mad and died. I wish we knew more of these early productions. My sources are Ivor Guest’s biographies of Fanny Cerrito and Fanny Elssler. See 7 below!
7.
AM: Did anyone in the nineteenth century spot parallels between Giselle and Faust? The hero of the latter, caught between the devil and heaven, is a deceiver who toys with the affections of a simple girl. The pure and simple girl has another admirer, who doesn’t stand a chance. I especially feel the Faust connection in American Ballet Theatre's production of Giselle, where Hilarion leaves a nosegay on the heroine’s doorstep, which she never notices – something also done in Gounod's 1859 Faust opera by Marguérite’s other admirer Siébel. Gretchen/Marguerite, treated by Faust worse than Giselle is by Albert, goes mad; yet she then saves Faust’s soul by praying for him.
Goethe’s Faust (1790-1832) considerably pre-dates Giselle. By the time of Giselle’s creation, Faust was beginning to be adapted into classical music and popular drama. Ivor Guest’s biography, Jules Perrot, tells us (pp.208-9) that Perrot had danced in 1833 in Deshayes’s Faust in London. (Perrot may have also heard of Bournonville’s Copenhagen Faust (1832) and Salvatore Taglioni’s Naples one (1838). Carlo Blasis had planned one for 1835, but it had never been realized.) Before all these, the Porte Saint-Martin theatre in the 1810s had presented a spoken-theatre Faust in which the great Frédérick Lemaître had made a sensation as Méphistophéles. Guest writes that Perrot would have seen that production in his teens and would have based his 1848 ballet Faust on it, which he first created at La Scala for Fanny Elssler.
MS: It's clear that there are parallels, as you point out. So many artists in the nineteenth century were deeply inspired by the Faust story, and Adolphe Adam had even composed a score for a Faust ballet in London in 1833.
The daisy-petal scene in Faust may have led to the light-hearted one in Giselle. (And I do believe it is a light-hearted scene for the characters in the first act, without portentous overtones. Its deeper meaning should not reveal itself until the second act.)
Here are the lines from Goethe's Faust: “Faust: What do you murmur? /Margaret: . . . Loves me —not—loves me— not (tearing out the last leaf in utter joy:) /He loves me! / Faust: Yes, my child. Let this sweet flower's word/ Be as God's word to you. He loves you.”
I don't know of any specific references to Faust in the nineteenth-century Giselle commentary, though I assume the likenesses between the two works were obvious to many theater-goers. It was typical to have cross-references in those days (just as we do today in film and TV and on Broadway). These sorts of allusions -- to plots, characters, scene types -- can be hard for us to notice because so much of the literature and other theater hits of that period in Paris are unknown to us today. But it was a rich environment in which audiences thrived this sort of thing.
AM: Adolphe Adam not only composed a three-act ballet of Faust for London in 1833, he then (I’ve just discovered) re-used some of its music in the 1841 Giselle. Its choreographer in 1833 was André-Jean-Jacques Deshayes (1777-1846) – who, in 1842, co-choreographed the 1842 London premiere of Gisellewith Jules Perrot.
8.
AM: As we’ve already begun to show, Giselle is a ballet that has been serially revised – more than perhaps any of us realized until we were well into research. Within the first two or three years after the premiere, Giselle was being given in revised productions around Europe: these included both three-act and four-act versions. In a number of productions between 1844 and 1945, Albert died at the end of the ballet.
So let’s look at this very incomplete performance history I’ve assembled of the ballet. Doug and Marian have provided supplementary information, as you’ll see.
Giselle – an incomplete list of highlights of its performance history by Alastair Macaulay.
1833
Adolphe Adam (1803-1856) composes a three-act ballet of Faust for the King’s Theatre, London; the scenario and choreography are by André-Jean-Jacques Deshayes. Adam later recycles some of the music in the 1841 Giselle.
1835
Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), resident in Paris since 1830, publishes Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany), translated into French as De l’Allemagne the same year.
1837
The ballet La Fille de l’air, produced at the Folie-Dramatique, Paris, features a dance scene in which wilis are summoned from their tombs and surround the hero, to music from Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots (1836). The hero “falls to the ground exhausted, and in on the point of expiring when the spirit of the air calls upon the wilis to desist. As they advance upon their intended victim, she protects him with one arm while commanding them to disperse with the other. She overcomes their power with an imperious look, and one by one they return to their tombs.” (Ivor Guest, Jules Perrot, p.65.
1841, April or later
On February 12, Carlotta Grisi (1819-1899) made her debut at the Paris Opéra, partnered by Lucien Petipa (1815-1898). She has been hitherto the partner and protégée of Jules Perrot (1810-1892), who - though not re-engaged as a dancer at the Opéra, where he had performed to great effect in the early 1830s – arranges all her dances. Soon there is a search for a new vehicle to showcase her. Adolphe Adam is approached by Léon Pillet (1803-1868), director of the Opéra since 1840, to consider composing La Rosière de Gand for this purpose. (Ivor Guest, The Romantic Ballet in Paris, pp.203-4.)
At this point, however, the poet and critic Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) takes up the tale of the wilis from Heine’s De l’Allemagne, adapting it as “Les Wilis, a ballet”, then passing the idea to the professional librettist and playwright Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-George (1799-1875), who after three days produced the two-act scenario, Giselle, or Les Wilis, a ballet”. Always intending this for Grisi, the men show it to Adolphe Adam, who, sharing their enthusiasm, persuades Pillet to postpone La Rosière de Gand in favour of Giselle. Adam composes the new score with enthusiasm, re-using some pages from his earlier ballet score for Faust. (See Ivor Guest, The Romantic Ballet in Paris, pp.204-6, 296.)
August Bournonville (1805-1829), en route to Naples, spends whole weeks in Paris. He “attended a rehearsal of Giselle, where Théophile Gautier and Balletmaster Coralli shared the idea and the arrangement with the dancer Perrot, whose supposed wife, Carlotta Grisi, performed the title role with a perfection, in choreographic respects, the like of which was not to be found in any other ballerina; but in the area of ‘the poetry of grace’ she was greatly inferior to Marie Taglioni.” (Bournonville, My Theatre Life, p. 533)
Later, Bournonville writes of libretti produced by multiple collaborators: “….as for Giselle, I myself have seen how Perrot taught Carlotta Grisi fragments of the main role of another ballet, while the subject, which was taken from Heine’s Die Wiles, was conceived by Théophile Gautier, arranged and revised by Saint-Georges, and finally mounted or - if one prefers - composed by Balletmaster Coralli.” (My Theatre Life, p. 20)
June 28, 1841
Premiere, Paris Opéra, on Grisi’s twenty-second birthday. The scenario is by Théophile Gautier and Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-George; the designs are by Pierre-Luc-Charles Ciceri; the choreography is officially by Jean Coralli (1779-1854), though the ballet’s makers know that Giselle’s dances are by Perrot. Adam’s score was supplemented by a suite by Frédéric Burgmüller, which concluded with a lilting waltz already known under its original title Souvenirs de Ratisbonne. (Ivor Guest, The Romantic Ballet in Paris, pp. 211.) Carlotta Grisi is Giselle; Lucien Petipa is Albert; Adèle Dumilâtre is Myrthe; Jean Simon is Hilarion. According to the Paris Opéra unwritten rule that opera and ballet were combined in every performance, the Giselle premiere is preceded by the third act of Rossini’s opera Moïse (or Moïse et Pharaon).
In La France musicale, Escudier calls Adam’s score “ a real tour de force”. In an era where most ballet scores were patchworks of old material, its only recognized borrowings are eight bars from a song by Loïse Puget and three from the Huntsmen’s Chorus in Weber’s Euryanthe. Escudier finds the overture has orchestration in the style of Cherubini. (Luigi Cherubini <1760-1842> had been resident in France since the 1780s. Beethoven regarded him as the greatest of his contemporaries; Rossini, Chopin, and others admired him greatly.) Escudier also writes that an enchanting Act One waltz, “quite in the Germanic spirit of the subject,” may “well achieve the popularity of the best waltzes by Strauss.” (Guest, The Romantic Ballet in Paris, p.213)
Describing a week in Paris on his return from Naples, Bournonville writes, “I delighted in seeing a couple of performances of Giselle.” (My Theatre Life, p.547)
Gautier writes on July 5 (a week after the premiere) a famous letter to “My dear Heinrich Heine” about how “a few weeks ago, my eyes rested in a charming passage… In a burst of enthusiasm, I even took up a large sheet of fine white paper and wrote at the top, in superb rounded characters, ‘Les Wilis, a ballet’.” (Gautier On Dance, translated and edited by Ivor Guest, p.94.)
Wikipedia relates that “Giselle made 6500 francs between June and September 1841. This was twice the amount for the same time period in 1839. Grisi's salary was increased to make her the top earner among the dancers at the Opéra. Souvenirs were sold, pictures of Grisi as Giselle were printed, and sheet music arrangements were made for social dancing. The sculptor Emile Thomas made a statuette of Giselle in her Act II costume. A silk cloth was manufactured called façonné Giselle, and Madame Lainné, a milliner, sold an artificial flower called 'Giselle'. The ballet was parodied at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in October 1841.”
DF: We all know the dangers of Wikipedia! - but it must be said that some Wikipedia articles on nineteenth-century ballets are useful.
AM: 1842
March 12. London, Her Majesty’s Theatre. First London production of Giselle, staged by André-Jean-Jacques Deshayes and Perrot. Grisi dances Giselle, Perrot Albert. (Ivor Guest, Jules Perrot, pp. 81, 83.) Eleven successive performances – nine of the entire ballet, two of the second act alone.
St Petersburg. Titus stages Giselle, “having been sent to Paris to study the work, which was hailed as a vehicle for Russian ballerinas and a tonic for the post-Taglioni doldrums.” (Wiley, A Century of Russian Ballet, p, 173)
September. At the Paris Opéra, Elisa Bellon dances two performances of Giselle, unusually musical and greatly applauded. (Guest, Perrot, p.88.) At the Opéra, the title role is danced mainly by Grisi throughout the 1840s.
1843
Milan, La Scala. On January 17, Fanny Cerrito (1817-1909) dances a four-act version of Giselle, staged by Antonio Cortesi. Cortesi writes in a preface that he has re-shaped and amplified the plot to “make it more interesting”. The action is transferred from Silesia to Bosnia. The Duke of Courland becomes the Prince of Serbia and is now the hero’s father rather than his prospective father-in-law. Act One features a confrontation between Albert (Albrecht) and Hilarion before the peasants only. Giselle faints, but later assures Hilarion he may marry her if his accusations prove true. She and her mother set forth to see an old hermit as the act ends. In Act Two the hermit tells her that she must prepare for suffering and that God will be merciful to her. In Act Three, Giselle, her mother, Hilarion and (!) the hermit arrive at the castle during a ball. They recognize Albrecht and the extent of his betrayal. The Mad Scene follows. Though the fourth act is along the lines of the traditional Act Two, the Queen of the Wilis, affected by the tears of Giselle, shows compassion for the lovers. Giselle blesses the union of Alberta and Bathilde “and rises to thank the Queen, as a series of groups brings the final curtain down on the customary display of splendor.” The music was not by Adam, but by “Federico Vicci and Verdi”; the printed programme also credits Giovanni Bajetti, concert master of the Scala orchestra. (Ivor Guest, Fanny Cerrito, pp. 50-51.) (I have wondered if the Verdi was Giuseppe Verdi, who was based around Milan at this time. But his breakthrough into great popularity came in March 1842 with Nabucco. It seems unlikely he would help out with Giselle the next year, when he was preparing for his next triumph, I Lombardi, which opened at La Scala in March 1843.)
MS: According to Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell, Adam’s music was used in this production, but altered by the maestro al cembalo Giovanni Bajetti to accommodate omissons and additios in the action. She also points out that Cortesi’s production of Giselle, one of many in Italy, was performed at all the major Italian opera houses but one. Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell, “Theatrical Ballet and Italian Opera,” in Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, eds, Opera on Stage, The History of Italian Opera, Systems, vol. 5, part II (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998)
AM: London, Her Majesty’s Theatre. Perrot, after Deshayes’s death, is now ballet master at Her Majesty’s. On March 30, Fanny Elssler (1810-1884), coached by him (Guest, Perrot, p.94) makes her debut as Giselle, her first new role for three years.
The Morning Herald writes of her Act II: “Emerging from the shroud of death, she assumes a new species of existence; she seems driven by an irresistible fate to work out the destruction of her lover, and yet is this influence checked by some lingering yearnings of humanity, which prompts her to save him from the fatal snare. The expressions which the actress gives to the scene is distinct and awful. No smile of recognition animates the face of the poor phantom. The features are pale and immovable, wearing an air of plastic resignation, yet sad, inconsolate, and deathlike. She executes the malign bidding of the Wili Queen with involuntary readiness, but the sentiment of earthly love still clings to her, although the outward manifestations of dismay and repugnance are obliterated from her countenance. The spectre maiden unconsciously binds fresh chains around the sympathies of her lover; she lures him to his doom with the bewitching phrases of her dancing, with her fanciful flittings in the pale glimmer of the moon and her erratic flights through the air – but more so by those fascinating evidences of love which she practiced when living, and which even the grace cannot utterly suppress.
“In this silent pantomime Fanny Elssler is most eloquent and pathetic. The opposite characteristics of the forlorn spirit are strongly marked, and the touches of art, which give form, substance, and elevation to the conception, are so manifold that admiration can scarcely find terms in which to vent itself. Such a complete expression of a dramatic sentiment has never before been evolved by the merely imitative means of the ballet. It has been left for Fanny Elssler to show the full eloquence of bodily gesture, and what a forcible significance and intensity may be given to it when genius and feeling are the prime movers.” (Ivor Guest, Fanny Elssler, pp. 198-99.)
1844
February 15. Milan, La Scala. Elssler dances a three-act version of Giselle. The first act is divided into two scenes. Act One ends when the princess discovers that Giselle, like her, is in love. “She invites everyone – Giselle, her mother, Hilarion, even a band of fortune-telling gypsies – to attend her wedding ball at the castle.” Act Two occurs in the castle ballroom. Albrecht, seeing Giselle among the guests, hastily retires. Giselle is among those who dance a divertissement. Bathilde asks her father to find Albrecht. The dénouement of the mad scene is as usual. Act Three is like the traditional Act Two, but Albrecht dies - and in an apotheosis, is seen united with Giselle. (Ivor Guest, Fanny Elssler, pp. 207.)
The Milanese critics felt Elssler least suited to the third act, but considered the mad scene its highlight. She dances performances until Easter.
1848
October 13 (Ivor Guest) or 10 (Roland John Wiley). Elssler makes her Russian debut as Giselle at the Bolshoi, St Petersburg.
DF: Petersburg Ballet. Three Centuries gives 1 October 1848 (O.S.) as Elssler’s debut.
AM: 1850
“Perrot took the whole ballet apart and began again when Grisi… arrived in St Petersburg… He had Petipa beside him, since Petipa was technically the producer; and it was Petipa the producer who made certain modifications to the dance of the Wilis in Act Two.” (Money, Pavlova, p.39)
According to Wikipedia, “For Carlotta Grisi's performances as Giselle with the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg, Perrot commissioned the composer Cesare Pugni to score a new pas de cinq for the ballerina that was added to the first tableau. [37] This pas was only retained for Grisi's performances and never performed again after her departure from St. Petersburg.
On May 19, Fanny Elssler dances Giselle at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow. A triumph. The critic of Vedomosti Moskovskoi Gorodskoi Politsii wrote “To conclude, Elssler is the first dancer to have made the end of Giselle intelligible to me. Albrecht would return to the glade the following night in the hope of finding the spirit of Giselle again. He is not afraid of the evil of the wilis, not of their fatal dances, not of death itself…. But Elssler’s Giselle has already renounced her earthly love in the last scene of this ballet. She has yielded up all earthly things. Her last look is one of prayer, and one has the presentiment that on the following night Giselle will no longer be among the wilis. The force which has chained her to the earth has already been broken.” (Guest, Elssler, p. 240. He notes that the impression of Albrecht’s return the next night could only be achieved if the original ending, showing Bathilde’s appearance to find Albrecht, had been cut.)
1851
In Moscow, ballet students take their revenge on the ballet master Frédéric when he pays them insufficiently. “The ballet Giselle was being given, and we were taking part. In the second act, when the huntsman, who was being played by Frédéric <the ballet master>, falls into the hands of the shades, they torment, him, balletically of course – that is, they turn him around when he ought to run up a hill. We, the last on the hillock, were to turn him and throw him into the water. So we really began to turn Frédéric! Throwing him down the hill, we kept repeating: ‘There you have your 10-kopeck piece!’” From the Recollections of the Artiste A.P.Natarova, 1903. (Wiley, A Century of Russian Ballet, pp. 150-1)
1854
Nadezhda Konstantinova Bogdanova (1836-1897), a Russian ballerina with a Western career, makes her debut as Giselle in Vienna. She has already danced the role in provincial tours of Russia. “One novelty about this must not be overlooked: Miss Bogdanova danced in Vienna among live trees and flowers placed on the stage; in the second act of Giselle the flowers were picked and thrown, and after the performance were quickly passed into her admirers’ hands.” (The Bogdanov Artistic Family, 1856. Wiley, A Century, p.210.)
1856
“A significant event in the history of Russian ballet occurred at the beginning of the same year: N.K.Bogdanova <Nadezhda Konstantinova Bogdanova>, a Russian ballerina, first dancer of the Paris Grand Opéra, made her <Petersburg> debut with great success in the role of Giselle.” (Recollections of T.A.Stukolkin, Artist of the Imperial Theatres, probably written in the 1890s. Roland John Wiley, A Century of Russian Ballet, p.126.)
On p.185, Wiley gives the date of Bogdanova’s debut as 2 February.
1863
Revival of Giselle at the Paris Opéra by Lucien Petipa for the visiting Russian ballerina Martha Muravieva (1838-1879). “Giselle seemed a very appropriate choice, being in the St. Petersburg repertory, and although it had not been given in Paris for some years, being remembered sufficiently well there to be produced quickly.” Though Muravieva knew the role in Russia, she was coached privately in Paris by Jules Perrot and gained many new points and insights.
“At the close of the pas de deux with Mérante, who played Albert, she produced an exciting effect by changing the tempo, ‘<breaking> measure with a rallentando such as singers use at the end of an aria’. The mad scene at the end of the first act, the danse de folie as it was then called, perhaps being presented with a greater dance content than later became the rule, was very skillfully handled, considering that her dramatic ability was not specially developed.”
Jules Janin wrote that in the second act she appeared “a shadow, a mist, like a dream come from from the ivory gates.” (Guest, Perrot, p.327)
Muravieva returned in the role the next year.
It seems to be at this time that Justamant records the Paris Giselle in his notation/description.
DF: This is difficult to nail down precisely. The Justamant MS doesn’t include interpolated dance numbers that were part of the Paris score at that time, and it includes numbers that appear to have been omitted. The manuscript isn’t dated and a contemporary performance venue isn’t given (unusual for Justamant). The Moscow scholar Sergei Konaev suggests that the notation was made in the late 1850s or early 1860s.
AM: 1867
Wikipedia on Giselle states that three solo variations were added to the ballet by Petipa during the latter half of the 19th century:
“The first was arranged in 1867 for the grand pas de deux of the second tableau for the ballerina Adèle Grantzow. The music was composed by Cesare Pugni and was based on Adolphe Adam's ‘he loves me, he loves me not’ leitmotif. This variation has been retained in the ballet ever since.”
This is Giselle’s final solo, performed at Myrthe’s command and addressed in large part to Albert.
DF: The date of this first additional variation is probably 1866; and the variation may have been added in Moscow or Paris, in both of which Grantzow performed Giselle before dancing it in St. Petersburg. The likely composer is Minkus, who was working closely with Arthur Saint-Léon, the likely choreographer, at the time.
AM: 1868
Final nineteenth-century performance of Giselle at Paris Opéra. (But it was also announced for the 1869-70 season. Ivor Guest, The Ballet of the Second Empire, p.228. Adèle Grantzow was to have danced it; she fell ill.)
1878
February, St Petersburg Ekaterina Vazem dances Giselle. (Wiley, A Century, pp. 288-9.)
1884
St Petersburg. Petipa, “his creative energies flagging,” revives Giselle. (Wiley, A Century, p. 323.) He made further modifications, “more distinctively,” to the dance of the Wilis, “while Minkus fiddled about with parts of Adam’s score” (Money, Pavlova, p.39)
DF: I wish Money provided citations. The revival for Maria Gorshenkova with Pavel Gerdt premiered on 5 February 1884 (O.S.).
AM: 1886
The Wikipedia entry on Giselle writes on the second of the three solo variations added by Petipa to this ballet:-
“The second… was added by Petipa to the first tableau for the ballerina Emma Bessone's début as Giselle at the Mariinsky Theatre in 1886, and on this occasion the composer Riccardo Drigo wrote the music for the variation. The music was never used again after Bessone's departure from Russia until Agrippina Vaganova added it to the Peasant pas de deux for the Kirov Ballet's production of Giselle in 1932. The inclusion of this variation in the Peasant pas de deux remains part of the Mariinsky Theatre's performance tradition of Giselle to the present day.”
DF: Bessone’s St. Petersburg debut in Giselle was on 12 April 1887 (Old Style).
AM: 1887
And the Wikipedia Giselle entry says, of the third of the three solo variations added by Petipa to Giselle:
“The third… was also composed by Drigo and has survived as one of the most beloved passages of Giselle.”
Evidently, this is Giselle’s main Act One variation, usually danced with hops on point today.
“This variation, sometimes dubbed as the Pas seul, was arranged in 1887 for the ballerina Elena Cornalba. The variation was also danced by Cornalba's successors in the role of Giselle at the Mariinsky Theatre. Cornalba's variation was first performed outside of Russia by Olga Spessivtseva in 1924 at the Paris Opéra, and from then on all productions staged outside of Russia included the variation. There was much confusion at that time as to who was responsible for composing the music, leading many ballet historians and musicologists to credit Ludwig Minkus as the author, a misconception which still persists.”
DF: Sergei Konaev and, I believe, Yuri Burlaka both have identified this variation as one added for Cornalba in an 1887 revival of Fiammetta. The music is proably by Riccardo Drigo. Cornalba made her St. Petersburg debut in Giselle on 18 December 1888 (O.S.). Whether the Fiammetta variation was transferred to Giselle at that time or later, it was part of the ballet by 1903 at the latest, when its choreography wasnotated in the Stepanov system as danced by Anna Pavlova.
AM: 1899
September 5, St Petersburg. Henrietta Grimaldi dances Giselle; Olga Preobrazhenskaya (1871-1962) dances Myrthe. Lubov Egorova (1880-1972) and Anna Pavlova (1881-1931) dance Moyna and Zulma. (Keith Money, Anna Pavlova, p.17)
DF: The printed program for 5 September 1899 (O.S.) lists Lubov Petipa in the role of Zulme. Andrew Foster confirms Pavlova’s Zulme debut was 26 September 1899, when she took over the role from Lubov Petipa, who danced Myrtha.
AM: Act Two is recorded in Stepanov notation. This records Albrecht collapsing, fatally, at the end of the ballet, with Wilfred and the huntsmen finding his dead body at dawn.
December 29, St Petersburg. Olga Preobrazhenskaya makes her debut as Giselle.
DF: Petersburg Ballet. Three Centuries states Preo debuted on December 28 (O.S.).
AM: 1901
St Petersburg. Carlotta Zambelli (1875-1968) makes her Russian debut as Giselle. “When finally Zambelli arrived, the critics turned sharp eyes upon her supposedly supreme technique. Those who championed Kschessinskaya against all rivals observed that the star of the Paris Opéra did fouettés en attitude on demi-pointe. By contrast to this dismissive quibbling, Svetlov’s review of Zambelli was almost entirely favorable. The visitor was partnered by Nicolas Legat. Julie Sedova was cast as Myrtha, and Pavlova and Lubov Egorova, were Zulme and Moyna, the soloist Wilis of Act Two.” (Money, Pavlova, p.27)
1903
April 30. (Money, Pavlova, pp. 42, 38-39) Anna Pavlova makes her debut as Giselle, “a role she knew could not possibly have come her way for years had not Petipa demonstrated his complete faith in her abilities…. Giselle had been in the repertory only sporadically, with long productions between one production and the next, and in every instance the ballet had been reworked considerably for the principal exponent, so that there was no clearly defined shape or tradition. Zambelli had been encouraged to interpolate passages that flattered her own particular strengths, and Pavlova had not interfered with Cecchetti during this process; it was the accepted way of working at the time.”
Stepanov notation is made of Act One of this revival.
1910
Tamara Karsavina (1885-1978), coached by Evgenia Sokolova, makes her debut as Giselle in Prague on April 24.
In May-June, in London, at the Coliseum, she then dances Gisella or La Sylphide, with a company otherwise of Moscow dancers. Dances are credited to Petipa; music by Adam. It is mainly the second act of Giselle. She dances this twice nightly, six days a week, for two weeks; 24 performances in all. (Foster, Karsavina, p.98, 107. Money, Pavlova, p. 110.)
Then on June 18, she dances Giselle in the premiere of Diaghilev’s new production at the Paris Opéra. Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950) dances Albert. The production has been attributed to Mikhail Fokine (1880-1942). Designs are by Alexandre Benois (1870-1960).
In St Petersburg, on October 9 (October 26, OS), Karsavina makes her Maryinsky debut as Giselle, with Samuil Andrianov as Albert.
1911
One of the four performances danced by Karsavina danced in the Maryinsky’s 1910-1911 season, on February 5, was the notorious one with Nijinsky – his first St Petersburg performance of Albert - which resulted in his dismissal from the theatre’s staff. (He wore the Benois costume in Act I. Its lack of hose, or over-trunks, was deemed offensive to the audience, especially to those in the Imperial Box – or that was the claim made in a scandal that was almost certainly engineered. Nijinsky’s dismissal freed him to sign permanently with Diaghilev’s company: whereupon many others dancers followed suit.)
1911-1914
Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes dances its Benois-designed Giselle in Monte Carlo in 1911, 1912, 1913 and 1914; in London, in its second 1911 season there; in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, in 1913; and in some performances in Germany. Karsavina is usually its Giselle. Nijinsky is Albert until his 1913 dismissal from the Diaghilev company, whereupon Adolf Bolm (1884-1951) inherits the role. (Foster, Karsavina, pp. 98-99.)
For the July-October 1911 Coronation season in London, the Diaghilev Russian Ballet season at Covent Garden includes Giselle with Karsavina and Pavlova as the two Giselles. Nijinsky was Albrecht. Enrico Cecchetti, with his great gifts as a mime, played Giselle’s mother. (Buckle, Diaghilev, pp. 209, 211)
1924
Paris Opéra. Giselle revived in Paris for the first time since 1868, for Olga Spessivtseva (1895-1991).
DF: This production was staged by Nicholas Sergueyev (Nikolai Sergeev) (1876-2951), the former Maryinsky régisseur.
AM: In the same year, Boris Romanov's Ballets Romantiques company performs Giselle in Paris. Giselle is Hélène Smirnova (1888-1934), Albrecht is Anatole Oboukhov (1896-1962), Bathilde - Elsa Kruger. According to André Levinson (La danse d'aujourd'hui – 1929 , pp. 92-98), Romanov (1891-1957) reimagined the work pretty radically, with a corps de ballet of only twelve dancers. And near the end of his account, Levinson writes: “Ainsi s'est révélé, à Paris, le plus grand talent chorégraphique de notre génération.”
Levinson does not name the Albrecht in one account, but he discusses the production again elsewhere in La Danse d'ajuourd'hui, in the chapter on the Romanov company, where he indeed identifies Oboukhov as Smirnova's Albrecht.
1932
In London, Giselle is staged by Nicholas Sergueyev for the Camargo Society at the Savoy Theatre. Olga Spessivtseva and Anton Dolin (1904-1983) dance the lead roles. Frederick Ashton (1904-1988) is Hilarion.
Silent film survives to show parts of Spessivtseva’s Act One performance and of Prudence Hyman and Stanley Judson in the Peasant pas de deux.
1934
1 January. Vic-Wells Ballet first night of Giselle at Sadler’s Wells, production by Nicholas Sergueyev; choreography “after Coralli”. Scenery and costumes by Barbara Allen. Alicia Markova (1910-2004), Anton Dolin, Hermione Darnborough are Giselle, Albrecht, Myrta. (Alexander Bland, The Royal Ballet, Sarah Woodcock appendix, p.278.) Nine performances.
1935
William Chappell (1907-1994) re-designs the Vic-Wells Giselle. Markova, Dolin, Beatrice Appleyard dance the lead three roles. Five performances.
1936
January, London. The Markova-Dolin Ballet dances Giselle. Décor and costumes by Phyllis Doulton.
Markova receives coaching - perhaps later in the Markova-Dolin company’s life - by Bronislava Nijinska. (Markova, Giselle and I, p. 54)
1937.
Margot Fonteyn (1919-1991) makes her debut as Giselle, Sadler’s Wells, Vic-Wells Ballet. Silent films exist of parts of Act One. Robert Helpmann (1909-1986) is Albert: photographs suggest that his Albert dies at the end of the ballet, as in the Stepanov notation.
Fonteyn dances the role until 1969.
1938
London, Drury Lane. The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo stages a new production of Giselle, with new designs by Alexandre Benois. Alicia Markova and Serge Lifar (1905-1986) are first cast, with Alexandra Danilova (1903-1997) as Myrtha.
1940
Anton Dolin stages Giselle for American Ballet Theatre. Silent film exist of parts of a 1940 performance with Nana Gollner (1920-1980), as Giselle, and Dolin; and of a 1943 performance with Markova and Dolin.
1944
Leonid Lavrovsky (1905-1967) stages a new Giselle for the Bolshoi Ballet, with Galina Ulanova (1910-1998) as Giselle. This production was recognized as a revelation of Stanislavskian realism, not least when it is first danced by the Bolshoi in London in 1956.
1945
Marie Rambert (1888-1982) stages a famous Giselle with the Ballet Rambert, with Sally Gilmour (1921-2004) as Giselle.
1946
12 June, Covent Garden. Sadler’s Wells Ballet, new production of Giselle, production attributed again to Sergueyev, scenery and costumes by James Bailey (1925-1980). This production lasts till 1960; Bailey also designs the Royal Ballet’s next production (1960-1970), and his designs were used again for the 1980-85 one.
American Ballet Theater stages a new production of Giselle with designs by Eugene Berman (1899-1972). There are reports/rumors that George Balanchine (1904-1983) assisted in the staging, but that Dolin soon got rid of the Balanchine touches. Balanchine is believed to have added the ending with Giselle sinking into a flowery knoll on the side of the stage opposite her grave.
1947
When Tamara Toumanova (1919-1996) dances Giselle at the Paris Opera, Balanchine coaches her. According to Maria Tallchief (1925-2013), Balanchine’s coaching was revelatory, both for the role and the ballerina, but Toumanova then discarded all his touches at her performance. Balanchine nonetheless praised Toumanova to the heights: Tallchief, telling the story c.1980 to Arlene Croce, remarked “He was in love with her – he’s still in love with her!”
1950s.
Irina Kolpakova (b.1933) saw at the Kirov Ballet (as she later told Alexei Ratmansky) the ending with Giselle sinking into the flowery knoll opposite the grave.
1956
During the Bolshoi Ballet’s London season, one performance of its Lavrovsky Giselle is filmed at Covent Garden with Galina Ulanova and Nikolai Fadeyechev (1933-2020).
1957, December
When the British ballerina Beryl Grey toured the Soviet Union, she danced Giselle in Tbilisi. She found that the unfamiliar theatrical business for Act Two included an entrance through a trap door and an exit through another trap door (“disappearing into a bed of roses while miming to a sorrowful Albrecht that she gave her blessing to his marriage with Bathilde”). (David Gillard, Beryl Grey, 1977.)
1958, January
When Grey danced Giselle with the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad, she encountered further unfamiliar stage business. At one point she had to be pulled swiftly across the back of the stage on a trolley with one leg stuck up in a holder so that it looked as though she was floating around the woods poised in a perfect but, in the circumstances, thoroughly dangerous arabesque. Then there was much dashing up and down artificial hills, peering through imitation bushes and, finally, a perilous climb up twelve steps into a tree branch. Once aloft in the foliage she had to clamp herself into a hidden metal foot holder and hip rest and the branch was dipped down towards the doleful Albrecht, mooning about below. Standing on one leg, in arabesque, she had to drop flowers in him as he peered up into the tree. After that it was back down the stairs, across the stage and onto the top of her grave before beginning her descent through a trap-door, as the ghost of poor Giselle finally went to ground.” (David Gillard, Beryl Grey. 1977.)
1960, 30 September.
A revised Royal Ballet Giselle has its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. Choreography is now attributed to Coralli/Perrot as revised by Sergueyev, with supervision and supplementary choreography by Frederick Ashton, with the assistance of Tamara Karsavina. Margot Fonteyn, Michael Somes (1917-1994), Anya Linden (b.1933) lead the first cast. Ashton choreographs a new female variation for the peasant pas de deux; the Bathilde ending of the ballet is also reinstated but only for a few performances. Karsavina gives the production the version of Berthe’s Act One mime speech about the wilis; Gerd Larsen (1921-2001) was Berthe. This version of the mime speech is revived for the Covent Garden branch of the Royal Ballet in the 1980 and 1986 productions; the company still performs it.
1968
Peter Wright (b. 1926) first directs Giselle for the Royal Ballet touring company. Among other touches, the peasant pas de deux became a pas de six, thus avoiding the chance that any one soloist may outshine Giselle.
Since then, Wright productions of Giselle have proliferated internationally.
Also this year, American Ballet Theatre acquires a new production of Giselle, staged by David Blair (1932-1976). Subsequent revisions are made in the early 1980s by Mikhail Baryshnikov (b.1948); in 1987 new designs are added; in the 1990s the production is reattributed to Kevin McKenzie (b.1954).
1971
Mary Skeaping (1902-1984) stages a historically informed Giselle in highly Romantic style for London Festival Ballet, with an added pas de deux for Giselle and Albrecht in Act One and the fugue for the wilis in Act Two. Designs are by David Walker (1934-2008): they give several extra flying and other scenic effect.
This has been danced by the company’s successor, English National Ballet, in the twenty-first century.
1977
At some time around here, the Kirov Ballet dances a new Giselle, largely traditional but supervised by Oleg Vinogradov (b.1937). In some performances over the years, certain special interpreters of Albert are allotted an extra variation in Act One. In Russia, the production is given with extra flying effects.
This production is still performed.
1984
Dance Theatre of Harlem production, set in Louisiana and the bayous. Staging by Frederic Franklin (1914-2013); scenery and costumes by Carl Michel.
1985
Peter Wright directs a new Royal Ballet production still performed in 2016. This can be seen on a 2008 color DVD, with Alina Cojocaru, Johan Kobborg, Marianela Nuñez, and a 2017 color DVD with Marianela Nuñez and Vadim Muntagirov. This retains (a) the Karsavina mime scene for Berthe (b) the peasant pas de six, but with Ashton’s variation for its lead woman.
This production is still performed.
1986, October.
A new production of Giselle for the Bolshoi Ballet by Yuri Grigorovich (b.1927) has its premiere in Paris, with illustrious casts: Natalia Bessmertnova (1941-2008) and Yuri Vasyuchenko, Ludmila Semenyaka and Vyacheslav Gordeyev, Nadezhda Pavlova and Irek Mukhamedov, Nina Ananiashvili and Alexei Fadeyechev.
This production is still performed.
1987
American Ballet Theatre’s Giselle, attributed since 1980 to Mikhail Baryshnikov’s direction, is given new scenery (by Gianni Quaranta) and costumes by (Anna Anni). In later years, the direction is attributed to Kevin McKenzie and the score is re-orchestrated by John Lanchbery (1923-2003); but much of the production is unaltered from now.
This production is still performed.
1997
Vladimir Vasiliev (born 1940) stages Giselle for the Bolshoi Ballet, with designs by Hubert de Givenchy. In due course, this becomes one of two productions used by the Bolshoi. (I saw both in 2014.) Hilarion is a dance enthusiast who leads the village hops in Act One, and is still doing splendidly in Act Two when Moyna and Zulma hurl him into the lake regardless. Albrecht also has lots of energy at the end: once he loses Giselle forever, he does an ardent circuit of heroic jumps around the stage. The peasant pas de deux becomes a pas de huit, giving the impression that this village abounds in dance virtuosi.
This production is still performed.
2011
Peter Boal, Marian Smith, and Doug Fullington stage a historically informed Giselle for Pacific Northwest Ballet.
This production is still performed.
2019
Alexei Ratmansky stages a historically informed Giselle for the Bolshoi Ballet of Moscow. (The company already has two current productions.)
This production is still performed.
2022.
Ratmansky, using sets and costumes from David Bintley’s Birmingham Royal Ballet production, stages a new Giselle on the new United Ukrainian Ballet. This has its premiere in The Netherlands in August, and is then seen in London at the Coliseum in September.
9.
AM: Marian, a central point of your book Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle is that ballet at the Paris Opéra (the world’s most prestigious opera house at the time) always shared the programme with opera at every performance in the early nineteenth century. Did that remain true for Giselle in St Petersburg throughout the nineteenth century?
DF: In Paris in 1841, Giselle was followed on the program by the third act of Rossini's opera Moïse et Pharaon. In St. Petersburg in 1842, Giselle appears to have been performed on its own. The premiere was a benefit for Antoine Titus, the balletmaster/stager.
Here's a rundown of some later interpreters in St. Petersburg and what was also on the program:
Lucile Grahn (1843) - Giselle appears to have been the only work on the program
Fanny Elssler (1848) - Giselle, followed by a one-act vaudeville
Carlotta Grisi (1850) - Giselle appears to have been the only work on the program
Nadezhda Bogdanova (1856) - Giselle appears to have been the only work on the program
Marfa Muravieva (1862) - Giselle, followed by the first two acts of the ballet Robert and Bertram
Adèle Grantzow (1866) - Giselle was followed by a divertissement
Ekaterina Vazem (1878) - Giselle, followed by the fourth scene of the ballet Meteora.
Maria Gorshenkova (1884) - Giselle was followed by a divertissement
Emma Bessone (1887) - Giselle may have been the only work on the program, but I don't have a program to confirm it
Elena Cornalba (1888) - I only have a program for 1 January 1889 at which Giselle was followed by the one-act ballet Peasant Wedding.
Henrietta Grimaldi (1889) - Giselle, followed by the first act of the ballet Daughter of the Mikado.
Anna Pavlova (1903) - Giselle, followed by the one-act ballet Flora's Awakening.
MS: Also, FYI, there is a fun site called Chronopera. You can look up what was performed and when at the Opéra. It's not perfect (if you examine the calendar at the Opéra there are more details, including info about benefit performances) but is very useful and something that I consult often: http://chronopera.free.fr .
10.
AM: Doug, Marian: What sources have you used for your Pacific Northwest Giselle (new in 2011) and for your understanding of the ballet?
DF: The Pacific Northwest production, for which Marian and I were consultants, is a “hybrid production,” if you will, and can’t be considered a reconstruction. We consulted the following sources:
(i) The 1842 répétiteur: This was possibly compiled in Paris by Antoine Titus for use in the 1842 St. Petersburg staging of Giselle. It is a musical score arranged for violin and cello with many annotations in French relating to the action of the ballet.
(ii) Justamant notation: This incredible document was prepared by Henri Justamant. It may document the Paris production, although it’s hard to determine when it was made based on what it includes and doesn’t include. It is a prose description of the entire ballet with detailed stick-figure drawings. Pantomime, action, and dance are described in French prose in great detail, and the whole thing reads like a screenplay.
(iii) Stepanov notation: This was likely made circa 1899-1903 by Nikolai Sergueyev. It includes prose descriptions of mime and other action along with Stepanov notation of choreography, mostly for legs and feet, with occasional notation for upper body movement. Anna Pavlova is listed as Giselle in the first act; she first danced the role in 21903. In Act Two, she is listed as Zulme, a role she first danced in 1899.
Peter Boal, who oversaw the PNB production, included now-traditional choreography that evolved over time, added a scene for children at the beginning of the ballet, and choreographed the “lost scene” with the villagers and wilis in Act Two. In addition, much of the material revived from Stepanov notation was altered by Peter according to personal taste.
AM: Where is the original of the Titus? Are copies available?
MS: It is at the Theatre Museum in St Petersburg. The Museum may make copies available, though I have no knowledge of its being digitized by the Museum as yet. I was able to purchase a microfilm of it in 1995.
AM: And the Justamant?
DF: The Justamant Giselle was published by the Deutsches Tanzarchiv in 2008.
MS: Yes – fortunately, it has been published in facsimile by OLMS Verlag and is widely available.
AM: Alexei, in your previous stagings of nineteenth-century ballets, you’ve mainly relied upon the Stepanov notations that were written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the St Petersburg productions at the Mariinsky Theatre. But with Giselle, there are earlier documents.
AR: Yes. I’m using the Stepanov notation as my main source; it was made by Nicholas Sergueyev. We can date it by judging from the names of the dancers mentioned: 1899 for Act Two and 1903 for Act One. But my big discovery has been Henri Justamant’s records. I’ve also been able to consult several different Russian versions (Petersburg and Moscow) of the Adam score, including the one owned by Enrico Cecchetti.
Since my 2019 Bolshoi production, I’ve also studied a Danish edition of the score that the scholar Knud-Arne Jürgensen kindly sent me.
AM: Can you say more about the score owned by Cecchetti?
AR: I found it in the Glinka museum of music in Moscow. It was given to them by cellist Rostropovich. It belonged to Pavlova, but had a stamp of Cecchetti and his notes.
11.
AM: While I’m asking about Henri Justamant (1815-1893), can you tell me more about him? Until recent years, I was unaware of his work. But your Giselle is not the only twentyfirst-century staging I’ve seen to use him. (The Brooklyn Ballet, for example, has performed his Pas de l’Abeille.)
So was he - like Alexei Ratmansky! - a choreographer who also recorded the ballets of others? What ballets and/or dances did he record? In what ways is he either useful or frustrating? Did other nineteenth-century ballet-masters use his accounts as a resource? Was he forgotten in the twentieth century?
MS: Claudia Jeschke and the late Robert Atwood reconstructed a pas from La Esmeralda (1859); it is in their film, called "Dancetime: Romantic Ballet" (available on iTunes), and they wrote about this pas and Justamant himself in an article in Dance Chronicle in 2006 ("Expanding Horizons: Techniques of Choreo-Graphy in Nineteenth-Century Dance"). The German scholars Gabi Vettermann and Paul Ludwig have also written about Justamant, who was born in Bordeaux in 1815 and trained at the Grand Théâtre there. As a young man, his career (as dancer or ballet master it is not quite clear) took him to various cities, including London, Berlin, Brussels, Lyon and Marseilles. After 1866, he produced ballets in no fewer than thirteen houses in Paris, including the Porte-Saint-Martin, the Théâtre de la Gaîté, the Renaissance, and the Opéra.
He recorded an enormous number of ballets. He also recorded ballets that were incorporated into operas, including Guillaume Tell and Les Vêpres siciliennes. Justamant was meticulous and tidy; he drew stick figures and wrote prose, naming particular steps. He also wrote out the text of the mimed conversations. His manuscripts are clear, detailed, and easy to read. They're miraculous! I have been compiling a list of his works and their whereabouts. Some are in Cologne (outside the city in Wahn Castle), some are in New York at the Dance Collection, some are at the Biblothèque de l’Arsenal, and some are at the Paris Opéra library (many of them available online at Gallica). There are a few others here and there.
To my way of thinking, the most exciting of the three unpublished collections is the one at Wahn Castle, because it includes major works. The musicologist Stephanie Schroedter is overseeing a publication on the Meyerbeer opera choreographies, I'm happy to say. I was just astonished when I found out the extent of the collection at Wahn, which includes descriptions of Le Corsaire, Paquita, Le Diable à Quatre, and Le Diable Amoureux.
AM: Alexei, in the last few years, you’ve turned to re-examining the evidence for the nineteenth-century in a big way. Your use of the Stepanov and other Russian sources has been shown in productions in America, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and (I think) Russia. But you’ve discovered Justamant more recently.
AR: Yes, my preparation for this Bolshoi Giselle (2019) is the first time I’ve worked with Justamant: he’s quite incredible, very, very detailed, with a lot of information. His account is beautifully written: it’s like a script for the movie. He’s absolutely wonderful, and I wonder if he was a more important choreographer than we think him: he’s so clever. People think he was documenting the Paris production of Giselle in the 1860s, but nobody is sure.
So here we have two notations from different times and different countries that at some times have great similarities but at other times are stylistically and choreographically very different. Petipa and Justament definitely had one source: the Jean Coralli version, new in 1841 at the Paris Opéra.
I find Justamant so interesting that I wonder if he should not be given a much bigger role in dance history. He writes a lot about steps, about characterisation, and motivation. I think it’s possible to reconstruct his version of Giselle.
The text for our Bolshoi production is based on the Sergueyev notation – but there are some sections of the Justamant that I absolutely adore: I just can’t resist little things here and there.
AM: Jane, may I bring you in at this point?
JP: Henri Justamant is a brilliant source of information for nineteenth-century ballet. While it is true there is no official catalogue of his work. there is the sale catalogue for his manuscripts: Em. Paul, L. Huard et Guillemin Catalogue de livres anciens et modernes, et des manucripts originaux des ballets et divertissements de M. Henri Justamant. Vente du 15 mai 1893 (Hotel Drouot) Paris 1893. An original is in the Paris Opera collection and a photocopy in the Jerome Robbins Dance Collection NYPL.
Here I add a note I wrote somewhere, probably decades ago:
“Although information is sadly lacking on Henri Justamant in most histories of ballet (and his name frequently misspelled), thanks to the survival of much of his extensive archive, his career can be well documented. The only entry for Justamant in a twentieth-century dance dictionary (Barbara Cohen-Stratyner’s Biographical Dictionary of Dance 1982) claims that ‘there is no solid data on Justament’s [sic] birth, death, or training....’ the catalogue for the sale of his notation manuscripts following his death, gives an outline of his career, revealing that he was born in Bordeaux in 1815 and died at Parc Saint-Maur in 1890. His early choreography was created for the Grand Theatres of Marseilles, Bordeaux and Lyons (1843 – 60) and between 1861-64 he was ballet master at the Théâtre royale de la Monnaie, Brussels. From the mid-1860s he primarily worked at popular Parisian theatres including the Porte Saint-Martin, the Varieties, Renaissance, Folies-Bergère, Châtelet, Gaîté and Eden-théâtre he briefly choreographed at the Opéra in 1869. His most important and influential creations were the ballets in Offenbach’s Le Voyage dans la lune at the Théâtre de la Gaîté in 1875. He also choreographed ballets and feeries at Berlin and the Alhambra, London.”
I am somewhat obsessed by how Justamant’s Le Voyage dans la lune starts a whole trend of Snow Ballets leading to the scene in Nutcracker.
AR: There are some sections when I’m not a hundred percent sure that what Nicholas Sergueyev wrote down was Petipa’s idea. With some of his (Sergueyev’s) descriptions, you feel you’re with someone who was not in the heart of the rehearsal, someone who sees it from the side.
12.
AM: The Stepanov notations are not only with Nicholas Sergueyev’s papers in the Harvard Theater Collection but some have been digitized and are viewable on line. Should we assume that these 1899 and 1903 notations represent Marius Petipa’s supervision of the old ballet – and indeed his final thoughts on it? (Pavlova was the great protégée of his final years.)
DF: I think we can assume this, although the actual preparation of the 1903 production was done by Alexander Shiryaev as Petipa’s assistant. I’m looking at casting for Giselle during these years and match names listed in the notation to determine more exactly when the notations were made.
AM: Pavlova then went on to dance Giselle for almost twenty years in the West. She certainly made some radical experiments with its costuming (in Act Two, she sometimes wore grave-clothes closer to the Greek garb of Isadora Duncan than the supernatural sylph look of Romantic ballet) - but it’s likely that much of what she danced in the West was closely related to the version recorded in the Stepanov notation, since her name was mentioned in that for both acts. An oddity, however, is that - although the 1903 notation records her dancing the big Act One variation with hops on point (Drigo music) - neither she nor Karsavina seem to have danced it in the West.
Olga Spessivtseva danced Giselle in London in 1932 (part of her Act One was recorded on silent film) not long after Pavlova’s death; London critics compared the two interpretations. It was she who introduced the big Act One variation to the West: Dolin, who partnered her, thought it had been made for her, as did many others on the strength of his word.
But there was another important Western production, the 1910-1914 one that the Diaghilev Ballet Russe danced in Paris and later London. Alexandre Benois, who had admired Giselle since the 1880s in St Petersburg, designed this Ballet Russe staging. (He designed some later Giselle stagings too. One of these is the basis for the current Paris Opera production.) And Mikhail Fokine, who in many ways led ballet away from the style of St Petersburg, directed this Diaghilev Giselle, which featured the two pre-eminent Diaghilev stars, Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky.
DF: According to the scholar Andrew Foster, Karsavina didn’t dance Giselle in St Petersburg until after the Diaghilev production. But she had been coached in the role by Evgenia Sokolova; her debut as Giselle occurred in Prague on 24 April 1909, partnered by Achille Viscusi.
AM: Nijinsky danced Albrecht in Paris a few months before doing so in St Petersburg. Pavlova, whom Russian connoisseurs considered the greater ballerina, did dance Giselle with the Diaghilev production, but in London in 1911.
Do either of you know if there are any important discrepancies between the Mariinsky/Stepanov Giselle and this 1910-1911 Ballet Russe one?
DF: Harvard has two annotated piano scores relating to the 1910 Diaghilev production. The entire ballet is heavily cut. Several numbers are re-ordered in act one, and a man’s variation (“La Variation d’homme pour Giselle 1er acte”) from Tulip of Haarlem is interpolated before Giselle’s usual variation. (There is no notation for this variation that I know of.) Both piano reductions are heavily annotated in Russian and both are heavily marked in red, blue, green, and regular pencil. They’re kind of a mess and will take some lengthy going over to make sense of them.
AM: Hm. Alicia Markova writes, in Giselle and I, that Nicholas Sergueyev offered her the choice of two variations for her main Act One solo - Karsavina’s or Spessivtseva’s? She chose Spessivtseva’s. We’ll come back to that later. But it’s a puzzle: What variation was Karsavina’s? Whose was the one from Tulip of Haarlem?
DF: Based on the répétiteur interpolated into the piano score, the Tulip of Haarlem variation was a man’s variation. It precedes Giselle’s variation in the Diaghilev score.
That said, the G major flute solo that is part of the now-discarded Act One divertissement appear to have been used in the Diaghilev production. Maybe that was Karsavina’s solo? I don’t think it was notated, unless it hasn’t been identified.
The Sergeyev Collection includes a woman’s variation from Tulip of Haarlem, as danced by Vera Trefilova. It doesn’t match the Haarlem music interpolated into the Diaghilev Giselle.
MG: The question of the G major flute solo - I wonder if this is the same solo that Mary Skeaping uses for the extra pas de deux and solos in her production?
(I would love to hear the Tulip of Haarlem solo that Vera Trefilova danced!)
AM: And am I right to assume the Diaghilev company only performed it in 1910-1911?
DF: I don’t have a complete repertory list by year, but Harvard has Ballets Russes Giselle programs from 18 September 1913 at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires (Karsavina and Nijinsky), and 26 April 1914 (location not given, but text in French; Karsavina and Bolm).
AM: Was this Diaghilev/ Benois production resurrected by one of the post-Diaghilev Ballet Russe companies?
DF: I’m not sure how much this production influenced later ones. If Fokine and Diaghilev were responsible for changes in this production that differ from the standard Maryinsky version of the day, then I assume later productions weren’t particularly influenced by this one, except any staged by Fokine.
AM: Am I right that the Stepanov was the basis for three important Western productions in the 1930s? Namely, the 1932 Paris Opera one with Olga Spessivtseva and Serge Lifar, the 1932 Camargo Society production in London with Spessivtseva and Anton Dolin, the 1934 Vic-Wells one with Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin.
Markova danced Giselle until 1959: a legendary and influential interpretation, documented in several films (some silent, some with sound) between 1940 and the 1950s. I think Sergueyev also supervised Margot Fonteyn’s first Giselle in 1937 (we have much of her 1937 Act One on a silent film); she went on dancing the role till 1970 (even longer than Markova), and was coached in it in 1948 by Karsavina. We also have a 1962(?) studio film of her in the Act Two pas de deux with Rudolf Nureyev, and a very clear color silent film of her Act One in 1965.
Sergueyev also staged Giselle for Mona Inglesby’s International Ballet in the 1940s. It was from Inglesby that the Harvard Theatre Collection bought all Sergeev’s remarkable collection of Stepanov notations and other documents, which now are available on line.
DF: Sergueyev also staged the 1924 Paris Opéra production.
13.
AM: The choreography of the 1841 premiere was officially credited to the ballet master Jean Coralli - but Gautier lets us know that Giselle’s choreography was unofficially devised by Perrot. (Bournonville’s memoirs support this; they also say that some of Grisi’s material came from an older work.)
Perrot then took the ballet to London (where Elssler danced it as well as Grisi), St Petersburg and other cities; Coralli’s name was dropped from those later productions. Giselle, however, continued in Parisian repertory till the 1860s: how long was Coralli’s name attached to it?
DF: Coralli is given credit in the affiche for the St. Petersburg premiere in 1842. This continued in Petersburg during the Perrot years (1850-1858) and into the Saint-Léon years.
In 1850, when Perrot revised the production for Grisi in Petersburg, only Coralli (with Gautier) is credited (affiche for 15 October 1850, O.S.), but by 1856 (Bogdanova), Coralli is given general credit for the ballet and Perrot is given credit for the current production. This remained the case during Saint-Leon’s tenure in 1862 (Muravieva), and 1866 (Grantzow).
I don’t have affiches for 1884 and 1887, but on 1 January 1889 (O.S., Cornalba), general credit is given to St. Georges and Coralli, with the current production credited to Petipa. By 1899, Gautier was added again to the general credits. This triple general attribution was still in place in 1922. It has been copied elsewhere since, which may explain Jennifer Homans’ attribution (in The New Yorker, 2019) of the libretto of Giselle to Coralli.
AM: Perrot became the dominant ballet master in St Petersburg from the late 1840s till the late 1850s; Marius Petipa – brother of Lucien Petipa, the original Albert of 1841 - gained much of his early experience there in Perrot’s regime. The Russian Giselle is the one that survived with an unbroken performances tradition, but most of our evidence for this Russian Giselle comes from during or after Petipa’s era. We’ll be discussing how this Petipa Giselle – notably the Stepanov notations from 1899 and 1903 – differs from the French ones of 1841, 1842, and the late 1860s, but can we tell whether Perrot changed Giselle significantly once he took it out of Paris? The changes you observe between the French and Russian Giselles: could some of them have begun with him rather than with Petipa?
DF: They could have been, yes. But it’s hard for me to say, not having access to sources held by the Maryinsky. Beyond changes to the score and mentions in reviews or other writings, I’m not certain how we could know. Comparing Justamant with Stepanov/Sergueyev, many of the significant changes are in the ensemble dances.
14.
AM: What about Adolphe Adam’s score? I assume that exists in at least two main versions: the Paris 1841 one and the Mariinsky one. Can you first tell me about Adam’s original?
Many ballets scores of that era were patchworks of multiple known items, stitched together like composite scores for silent movies. (Those for La Fille mal gardée and Napoli are good examples.) But Giselle, like the Schneitszhoeffer score for the 1832 La Sylphide, was almost entirely original. I’ve listed its few borrowings in section 1 above. (Actually, although the music for one dance was recognised as taken from Weber’s Euryanthe, I hear an echo from Weber’s more famous Der Freischütz, which entered the Paris Opera repertory in 1841. And, at least in some arrangements, Albert’s entrance in Act Two can evoke that of Gluck’s Orphée into the Elysian Fields.)
DF: Regarding Adam’s original—where to start? It closely follows the action of the libretto. Marian is the expert there. There were a number of passages that appear to have been omitted from early performances. A piano reduction was published, but the orchestral score was not; this means when Giselle was produced in other cities, the score was likely re-orchestrated, resulting in the loss of Adam’s detailed orchestration choices. Music was deleted from and added to the score in Paris over time, particularly in the 1860s.
MS: There were probably many Giselle scores circulating around Europe in the form of répétiteurs, which, as Doug points out, were likely re-orchestrated when the ballet was produced in different cities. These scores were not systematically preserved, though there may still be a few of them, here and there, in archives or in someone’s attic. The late Alexander Bennett had a photocopy of a nineteenth-century Sylphide répétiteur from Brussels that had been handed down through the generations.
AM: The Peasant pas de deux is apparently by Burgmüller. When was that added?
DF: The “Peasant” pas de deux was added before the première and is part of the original orchestra parts.
MS. Yes, it was added before the premiere.
AM: And various productions provide alternative music for at least one of the female variations in this pas de deux.
DF: Rodney Edgecombe, in his article, “A ragbag of ballet music oddments” (https://ausdance.org.au/articles/details/a-ragbag-of-ballet-music-oddments), discusses this variation, which was apparently added to Giselle by Vaganova in 1932. He suggests it’s from the ballet Cupid’s Prank, which was choreographed by Ivanov to music by Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Friedman. The Wikipedia article on Giselle states the variation was first added to Giselle in 1886 for Emma Bessone (dancing the title role) with music by Drigo. There are two problems with the Wiki assertion. One: Bessone made her St. Petersburg debut in Giselle on 12 April 1887 (O.S.), The other: the citation provided is from a 1929 biography of Drigo that 1) doesn’t mention Giselle, and 2) doesn’t have a page 74, the page listed in the citation. This situation illustrates some common problems with Giselle scholarship—lack of confirmed information and misinformation.
15.
AM: Adam’s score also has a number of motifs or reminiscences. These have been called leitmotifs, using the term associated with Wagner’s music-dramas: we could spend a lot of time on this nomenclature. My understanding is that there is a difference between motifs (which are musical reminiscences - a fairly standard dramatic device in mid-nineteenth-century opera) and leitmotifs (which are symphonically developed to establish a web of underlying psychological suggestions). Giselle’s Mad Scene quotes musical moments from earlier in the act just as the heroine of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) quotes earlier moments in her own Mad Scene: but that’s not a leitmotif.
There are clear musical motifs for Giselle, Albert, Hilarion, the Courland hunting party, and the wilis: they don’t change much, and I wouldn’t call them leitmotifs. How new or standard was this kind of musical characterization in 1841?
MS: As I have argued elsewhere, ballet composers used a variety of dramatic devices, and the recurring melody was one of them. It was used fairly commonly; for instanced, Manon (1830), La Sylphide (1832), Les Mohicans (1837). Wagner attended Giselle early in its first run in Paris and wrote a rather derisive review of it, but was very likely to have been influenced by Adam’s use of recurring melodies in it.
Some of Adam’s recurring melodies in Giselle do undergo transformations: for instance, Berthe’s melody and the vinegatherers’ melody. For me, the question is not “How do they compare to Wagner? Are they leitmotifs?” It’s “How effective are they in the theater?”
AM: Good point.
It’s also worth noting that the Act Two music for Giselle the ghost quotes the “He loves me, he loves me not” music from Act One with a mildly symphonic dramatic poetry that is certainly unusual in my knowledge of pre-1850 ballet music. And it’s developed most remarkably in a variation that was added after Adam’s day – Giselle’s final variation. Perhaps this, composed perhaps by Minkus or Pugni, is where we should speak of a leitmotif?
DF: The Act Two quotation is not by Adam. This is in the introduction to a variation added probably in 1866 for Adèle Grantzow.
16.
AM: Unlike some nineteenth-century ballet scores, and indeed unlike most operas of that day, it sustains a remarkable continuity. Breaks for applause are infrequent. How unusual was that in 1841?
MS: I don’t think it was unusual. The idea of these ballets was: drama punctuated by dance scenes and full-blown danced numbers from time to time. The libretti make this clear by recounting the stories in prose, in great detail, and inserting the word “ballet” or “dance” as necessary.
Seeing Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake is akin to the experience of the Paris ballet-goer of 1841, I believe: lots of action, no spoken text, some dance numbers, and an audience that’s following the story.
17.
AM: The Justamant documentation for Giselle tells us of the Paris production. But Giselle soon passed out of Paris repertory, yes? Can you remind me precisely when?
MS: Giselle fell out of the Opéra's repertory in 1868, and did not appear again at that house until 1910.
AM: And the 1910 production was Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe rather than one by the Opéra company, yes? Am I right that the Paris company only re-acquired “Giselle” in 1932?
DF: Yes, the 1910 production was the Ballets Russes production. Nikolai Sergueyev restaged Giselle for the Paris Opéra in 1924 with Spessivtseva in the title role. This marked the return of Giselle to the Opéra repertory.
18.
AM: As we’ve said, Giselle was kept going, in Russia alone, through the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century; Marius Petipa - brother of Lucien Petipa, the original Albert – maintained it in Russian repertory. Am I right to presume that the Stepanov notation records Marius Petipa’s revisions to the ballet? Or do you suspect it records the work of other ballet masters too?
DF: Yes, I presume the Stepanov notation records Petipa’s revisions to Giselle as it was performed at the Maryinsky Theatre in St Petersburg circa 1899-1903. We believe Petipa kept a number of elements (choreography, mime, staging) from earlier French versions, with which he was no doubt familiar.
In his memoirs, Alexander Shiryaev states he was the ballet master in charge of the 1903 staging of Giselle at the Maryinsky and that he staged the production from memory. I assume he staged the ballet as it had been performed in earlier Maryinsky revivals.
19.
AM: So this perhaps is a good moment to ask about the elements that you believe Petipa was drawing from the Paris production. His brother Lucien had created the role of Albert; Perrot, under whom he worked in St Petersburg, had been involved in both the Paris and St Petersburg stagings.
We often read that Petipa made extensive changes to Giselle (and other ballets). Doubtless he did; but we also know that Perrot took him to court in Paris and successfully sued him for plagiarism.
Where can you detect or suspect signs that he was using (or preserving) earlier Giselle material?
To me, Marius Petipa is an endlessly mysterious figure: original or derivative? Perhaps all choreographic classicists draw from their predecessors while, to their successors, seeming to start a new tradition; but he is, to me, the most enigmatic. Any clues you can give to his character as an artist would be much appreciated!
MS: My impression is that Petipa definitely drew quite a bit from the Paris production (that is, from the production described by Justamant, which we assume was the Paris production). We know, at the very least, that Petipa knew details of the first act from a very early version, because he notated a printed piano score of Giselle with many details that are found in Titus's répétiteur (1842). This score is at the Theatre Museum in St. Petersburg. (For your information, some scholars now doubt the attribution to the manuscript notes to Petipa.)
Doug is doing a systematic comparison of the Justamant and Stepanov notations. It will be quite revealing, and will likely show that historians have been mistaken in telling us that Petipa's Giselle was a complete overhaul of the ballet. Petipa never intended it to be completely new — he was a genius at what he did, and could take a ballet and adjust it as he saw fit. We already know (just by examining the music) that he greatly expanded the second-act pas de deux, in keeping with the custom of St. Petersburg in the 1880s. Soon, we will know more details about what Petipa drew from his predecessors.
DF: This is one of the million-dollar Petipa questions: When reviving a Parisian ballet, or any ballet first choreographed by another, what did Petipa keep and what did he add?
The Justamant Giselle notation is a key document, allowing us to delve into the answer. Petipa was familiar with the Paris Giselle, which premiered in 1841. He danced it in Spain and after he moved to St. Petersburg in 1847, he danced in the St. Petersburg production staged by Titus in 1842. Perrot’s Petersburg stagings followed in 1850 and finally Petipa restaged the ballet in 1884. That the ballet had gone through so many hands, yet still retained many similarities with what we know of Paris productions, suggests that choreographers, in re-staging existing ballets, were not averse to keeping some or even many details, both of mise-en-scène and choreography.
A cursory comparison of the Justamant and Stepanov notations of Giselle reveals the following similarities:
ACT ONE
- Albert’s first entrance and conversation with Wilfride
- Scène dansante:
o Counterclockwise, circular ground plan for Giselle’s first entrance
o Downstage left position of bench outside of Albert’s hut
o Giselle and Albert perform multiple glissades as they make their way toward the bench
o Game of he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not
- First confrontation with Hilarion
- Waltz:
o Semicircular position of corps women around Giselle at beginning
o Groupings of corps women in circle (Justamant)/pinwheel (Stepanov) formations involving Giselle and Albert
o Two rows of corps women on the diagonal at stage right. Women in one row exchange places with their counterparts in the other row. Giselle and Albert dance along the diagonal (patterns and steps differ between the two notations)
o Long line of dancers forms near end of waltz, with Giselle and Albert at either end. Dancers hold each by the waist as the line turns in a circular pattern. [MS: This formation is also notated in a margin in the Titus manuscript, the only bit of choreographic notation in that manuscript. So it goes back to 1842, at the latest.]
o Next, corps women form two vertical lines at center stage and move together downstage
o Waltz concludes in opening semicircular formation with Giselle and Albert downstage right (Justamant)/center (Stepanov)
- Pas de deux: Coda (Justamant)/Pas de deux for Giselle and Albert (Stepanov). Many of the steps in this dance are performed in tandem by Giselle and Albert. Similar steps and patterns include:
o Multiple ballonné jetés in a zigzag patterm
o Traveling upstage or downstage performing a turning combination in a mirror image of the other
o The conclusion of the dance, in which Giselle and Albert repeatedly cross each other at center stage
- Spacing and some content of Berthe’s prediction
- Hilarion breaking into Loys’ house
- General spacing and content of hunting party scene
- Hilarion’s discovery: in Titus, Justamant, and Stepanov, the items are a word and a necklace/gold chain
- March choreographed for ensemble couples and female coryphees
- Peasant pas de deux:
o The ground plans of the two female solos are similar
o When the man joins the woman in the coda, several patterns are similar: the two cross and re-cross each other with a turning step, then travel upstage opposite one another
- Galop:
o Giselle and Albert travel down centerstage at end, just before being split apart by Hilarion
- The sword-dragging, recollection of the game of he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not, and other aspects of the mad scene
ACT TWO
- Opening scene of Act Two with Hilarion and the hunters
- Myrtha:
o Myrtha enters via a “trap” in the stage floor and traverses/flies across the stage on a mechanism (called a “chariot” in Justamant)
o Myrtha bourrées around the stage, though not nearly as much as in modern productions
o Myrtha throws flowers at stage left and stage right
- Wilis make their first entrance from both sides of the stage
- Wilis’ dances feature two solo dancers in addition to Myrtha
- Wilis form a diagonal line when Myrtha is initiating Giselle
- Giselle first entrance:
o Giselle rises out of a “trap” in the stage floor
o After Myrtha touches her with a branch, Giselle turns in place en arabesque followed by steps taking her in a zigzag pattern back and forth across the stage.
- First pas de deux:
o Giselle first appears to Albert by peeking through the reeds at stage right
o Giselle crosses upstage stage left to right on a flying mechanism
o Giselle later circles the kneeling Albert, then evades his grasp
- Hilarion’s death:
o Hilarion tries to escape at various corners of the stage and is blocked each time by small groups of Wilis
o Wilis form circles around Hilarion
o Wilis form a diagonal line toward the end of this scene
o Wilis throw Hilarion into the water at upstage right
o Following Hilarion’s death, Wilis travel across the stage in lines of four (different patterns in each notation)
- Giselle and Albert’s refuge at the grave/cross
- Grand pas de deux:
o Opens with a solo for Giselle that includes an entrechat six and arabesque
o Giselle and Albert cross to opposite sides of the stage in a zigzag pattern as they implore the Wilis to help
o Similar ground plan for Giselle and Albert’s final passages together in the coda of the pas de deux
- At the end of the ballet, Albert lays Giselle down on his side of the stage
(stage left), rather than in her grave (stage right)
Certain similarities are difficult to identify simply because of the differences between the notations: the Justamant is very thorough, whereas the Stepanov is generally spare in narrative detail and sporadic in its level of detail in the choreography.
AM: How remarkable to find the extent to which Petipa was surely working in the footsteps of his Parisian predecessors. Let’s keep this in mind as we carry on this discussion.
Alexei, you’ve worked on a number of ballets by Marius Petipa, who revised Giselle in Russia; and you’ve begun to modify or challenge our idea of Petipa style. Do you feel he made Giselle more classical?
AR: Obviously Petipa was very influenced by Giselle: you can see this in La Bayadere, Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake. You can feel him changing Giselle by adding the solo for her to the first act: we believe that solo comes from the 1880s.
If we talk about the choreography and steps and presentation, specifically, then I would say that, in Petipa’s own ballets, there are more pure-dance sections. In Giselle, you don’t find that. (Almost never: maybe a little in the peasant pas de deux and maybe in Giselle’s first-act solo, though you can argue that there she just purely expresses her character.)
The peasant pas de deux, it’s really hard to say; but it looks as if that contains a lot of material from the choreographer Arthur Saint-Léon.
Where we can feel that the dances are by Petipa - for example, in the corps dances of Act Two - they became geometrically simpler and more square, more classical and a bit more like what we know from other Petipa ballets. Justamant’s notations make the corps of wilis a bit more like Bournonville’s sylphides. So that was changed. It’s amazing how much one can recognise Sergueyev’s version in today’s productions of Giselle: formations, positions, even some steps.
20.
AM: During these email discussions - and during other research - I’ve noticed some difference about nomenclature. Giselle, Bathilde, Berthe, all seem to have the same names in most or all treatments. But we find Albert or Albrecht; Wilfred or Wilfride; Myrthe, Myrta and other variants.
I assume this is because Giselle has been produced in so many countries, but were there alternatives in 1841? When was the name Albrecht first used rather than Albert?
DF: Bathilde is Mathilde in some productions; Hilarion is Hans in Russia; in other productions, characters don’t have names, only descriptive titles—mother, prince, etc.
AM: Albert is pronounced the French way, with the emphasis on the second syllable and the “t” silent”, as in Javert.
21.
AM: The role of Giselle has been as open to reinterpretation as Albert or more so. Again, what do you feel are the acceptable perameters?
MS: Yes: how and when did Giselle get to be so jittery in Act One? She was a strong young woman in the Justamant manuscript (1860s). Yes, according to her mother, Giselle’s doctor said she should take it easy; but Giselle was lively, active, and the most popular girl in the village. She stood up to most everyone in Act One: Hilarion, Albert, Berthe, and Bathilde (“He’s mine!”). (And then, of course, she stood up to the fearsome Myrtha in Act Two. Thus her strong will is on display in both acts, and her defiance of Myrthe is consistent with her first-act character.) She knew how to be polite when the aristocrats came calling in the village, but she was not a shy, skittish person. She was willful, in fact.
But now the shy, skittish, sickly Giselle now seems to have taken over. The most extreme example I know on video is that of Laetitia Pujol, in the Paris Opéra Ballet DVD from 2006.
DF: Lynn Garafola has put me onto Nijinska’s coaching of Markova in the role and I currently suspect this is when the change occurred.
AM: Markova certainly became the dominant Giselle of the era 1934-59, even though some critics felt she passed her prime after 1944. She herself admired Olga Spessivtseva above all others (she often spoke of Spessivtseva to my friend the critic Clement Crisp) - and yet the differences between their ways with Act One, as seen on film, are very striking. Spessivtseva wears a short skirt ending above the knee (it’s remarkable that Pavlova and she made greater costume departures from convention than almost any subsequent ballerina), she wears her hair in a single braid down her back throughout Act One, her extensions are remarkably high, and her legwork has terrific power. Markova is more porcelain-exquisite. They also differ on several steps.
DF: The heroines of the Parisian ballets I’ve researched are strong characters with plenty of verve: Giselle, Paquita, Medora.
AM: I know as yet of no film of any Soviet Giselle before Ulanova’s. Hers exemplified the Stanislavskian realism of the Leonid Lavrovsky approach to Giselle; we watched it in July 2016.
But her approach is not one we see now from Russian Giselles. The meek, wilting, penitential approach to Giselle was dominant when I first saw the Kirov Giselle in the 1980s; and some Bolshoi interpreters showed it too.
Do you know the Raritan essay that Nancy Goldner wrote c.2014 about Violette Verdy's Giselle? She hopes to publish it with her 2015 essay on Apollo (also published in Raritan), as part of a book on the importance of libretto/scenario. Her point here is that Verdy's Giselle was the most complete Giselle she ever saw - and the most complete in realizing the issues in the libretto. (She feels the same about the two films she knows of D'Amboise as Apollo.)
I happen to think she greatly overlooks the importance of Act Two - but (for me) that's also true of the great majority of Giselle productions.
What's interesting is that she saw Verdy's Giselle in the 1960s, and wrote an essay at the time, which was never published. Some forty years later, she discovered a film of Verdy's performance, and felt it confirmed all her original thoughts. Hence her recent essay.
There is a copy of the Verdy film, however, at the New York Public Library; I admire it. If I don’t find it as admirable as Nancy, that’s because my Giselle experience (largely with British and Russian companies in London and Paris) has been different from hers. The issue of how Giselle can best fulfil all the elements of the scenario is important; and I find that especially important in Act Two.
AR: I’ve certainly studied the various films of Kirov, Bolshoi, Cuban, and Royal Ballet productions. Galina Ulanova in the film of Leonid Lavrovsky’s production is very remarkable, very spontaneous, very much in accordance with the original, I think.
For some reason, this style of dancing Giselle has disappeared. The character has become so classical, so reserved, and so melancholic. It’s very hard to understand how Giselle would argue with her mother or with Myrthe, how she would break into Albert’s conversation with Bathilde. If she is that shy, she wouldn’t do that.
22.
AM: Alexei, you’ve been staging a number of historically informed productions of nineteenth-century ballets for years. Giselle is the oldest of these. Is it also the most truly Romantic?
AR: Yes. This is surely because it’s conceived by a poet, Gautier, at the peak of the Romantic ballet. There are elements of Romanticism in La Bayadère, Swan Lake, Paquita, Le Corsaire, all of which I’ve staged. But Giselle is far more entirely Romantic.
AM: So a big issue about both Giselle the heroine and Giselle the ballet has often been Romantic style and/or period style. I have seen productions – notably Mary Skeaping’s for London Festival Ballet (now English National Ballet) - that tried to reproduce “Carlotta Grisi”-type ports de bras, soft and rounded, where possible. Was this important to Marius Petipa? Is this important to you, Doug?
DF: I’d like to think this was important to Petipa and stemmed from his training, which molded his aesthetic. A few years ago in Rome, Francesca Falcone explained the concept of “tutto tondo”—the idea of the body as sculptural, rounded, spherical, being seen as balanced from every angle, 360 degrees—and how that relates to 19th-century ballet movement and positions, in which torso, head, arms, and legs create balanced positions.
This concept is borne out in those Stepanov notations that provide complete positions for the entire body. Arms are rarely notated as directly above the body, but rather raised 135 degrees, i.e., held in front of the body. They might be balanced by a leg and foot raised 45 degrees behind the body and bent at the knee. Épaulement was in constant use, as were bent and twisted torsos and necks, and even flexed wrists that were twisted inward rather than “winged” outward. Instead of keeping the body erect and stretching limbs to make oneself as “big” as possible, the dancer focused on creating balanced, spherical shapes with the entire body, shapes that would be pleasing seen from any angle, not just from the audience’s perspective.
AM: Maina, I know that Romantic style concerns you very greatly.
MG: Everything Doug mentions here - “the idea of the body as sculptural, rounded, spherical”; “in which torso head arms and legs create balanced position”; “arms raised 135 degrees i.e. held in front of the body”; “épaulement in constant use”, “shapes that would be pleasing seen from any angle” - is what seems to be so sadly lacking in most productions of Giselle, the sense of style and period of the piece - except in Mary Skeaping's version, as said here. The only company where this is still usually in evidence when it’s restaged is English National Ballet. Sadly, the Cubans, who I only recently learned also did and still purport to do her production, have distorted a great deal of it to become a bit of a parody of itself….
In my production - for the Australian Ballet and wherever else I have staged it - I really strive to bring this back entirely in Act Two, as I believe not only is it important traditionally but if understood and digested by the dancers, it really gives that floating ghostly look to the wilis….
AM: Just the oldest films of four Giselles – Spessivtseva, Markova, Fonteyn, Ulanova – show such a wide range of style that it becomes very hard to say if any of them is stylistically “right”. Yet the ballet has now developed a yet greater assortment of styles: some far slower than those of the pre-1960 era.
AR: When you look at images from the time of Giselle, there are certain characteristic positions that I’ve tried to pursue, notably for the ladies. One has the arms crossed across the body – it’s called “bras adoré” by the Danes – where I feel it should be much higher than the ladies are used to, across the chest, almost covering the shoulders rather than the stomach. That’s what I see in images of the time.
The other is very specific: according to Danish terminology, it’s “bras allongé (elongated arms)”, where the two arms are stretched out in one direct direction. And here also there is a very specific line, so the lower arms should not cover the chest so much.
In footwork, there’s a lot of batterie. The body position for this should be over the hips: that position helps the footwork and batterie – it makes the entrechats more visible, more precise, more pronounced.
23.
AM: It’s interesting to consider which choreographers may have helped to establish twentieth-century (and now twentyfirst-century) styles and texts for Giselle.
Fokine, who supervised the 1910 Diaghilev production, is a modernist, but his Les Sylphides did much to establish Romantic ballet style for audiences in the next seventy years. Since 1980, it’s played a far smaller part in the repertory.
MG: Fokine and Les Sylphides: My understanding is that Fokine was looking for a freedom of movement à la Isadora even in Les Sylphides, and not a romantic look or style of dancing. This I heard from both Rosella Hightower and Irina Baronova, who were coached by him at various times. (He also - like most choreographers worthy of the name - changed here and there, some parts of his choreography to suit the dancers he was working with…)
AM: I think Fokine contradicted himself a lot about his sources for Les Sylphides. At times he dogmatically denied ever being influenced by Isadora (especially when Diaghilev claimed Fokine was completely Duncanist!); but the evidence shows he even borrowed the same movements to the same Chopin dances she’d used. Still, he also claims in his memoirs that in Les Sylphides he was trying to take ballet back to the expressive non-bravura simplicity that it had had in the age of Chopin, Taglioni, and Grisi.
MG: Interesting!
24.
AM: Interestingly, Markova, in her book Giselle and I, cities only three important people who influenced her way of dancing Giselle: Spessivtseva, Nicholas Sergueyev (who staged the 1934 Vic-Wells production from the Stepanov notation), and Bronislava Nijinska, who coached the 1935 Markova-Dolin Company production and made useful suggestions. We don’t usually think of Nijinska as someone connected to Romantic ballet; Giselle is light-years from Les Nocesand Les Biches. Lynn Garafola tells me that Nijinska danced Myrthe in Monte Carlo in the years before World War I.
Frederick Ashton had played Hilarion to the Giselles of Spessitseva, Markova, and Fonteyn between 1932 and the 1940s. He later supervised the Royal Ballet Giselle in 1960, and added a new variation for the woman in the Peasant pas de deux (still danced there). As I’ll mention later, he consulted Karsavina about the whole ballet and about Bathilde’s mime in particular. He also restored the ending of Act Two with Bathilde reclaiming Albert (though this didn’t last long).
George Balanchine also supervised the productions at Ballet Theatre (in 1946) and at the Paris Opera (in 1947), though his work seems not to have had any lasting influence on either.
I’m interested in all these. Too many of the modern directors of Giselle (Peter Wright, for example, in several stagings) have imposed what they consider to be dramatic logic at the expense of structure and style.
DF: I don’t have enough experience with particular productions to comment with specificity. But I think stagers create new narrative content where they have gaps in traditional content, don’t like the traditional content, want to test out an idea, or simply want to make their own contribution. I’d guess that few are content to stage another’s work without adding something of their own. (Petipa wasn’t!)
The beauty of the sources is their great amount of content: they provide details that have been lost or changed. They provide insight into the minds of the creators of these works. Stagers using these sources are required to guess less, and when they do need to act as editors, they have much more context within which to make decisions.
MS: Like Doug, I can't comment with specificity on particular productions. I agree with him that there are various reasons for creating new content. And I agree, too, that it's terrific to have the sources, so we can find out what the creators of these works had in mind. They were experts, seasoned dramatists who know well what worked on the stage!
I would also add, that by imposing seeming “dramatic logic” at the expense of structure and style overlooks the fact that the old structures and style could serve the dramatic logic very well indeed. (The rather comical “lost” scenes in Act Two, for instance, strengthened the overall story arc.)
AM: Maina, you particularly refer to the Giselle staging of Mary Skeaping (English National Ballet) and to the tuition you received from Anton Dolin. Did you study Giselle with Dolin chiefly in 1980 at the Old Vic? I remember his contribution to your 1980 Steps, Notes, and Squeaks production – a “day in the life of a dancer” in which he coached you in Giselle. (At other performances, Robert Helpmann coached you in Swan Lake, and Svetlana Beriosova coached you in The Sleeping Beauty.) And how much did you work directly with Skeaping?
MG: It’s difficult to say when/where I acquired my understanding of Dolin’s Giselle... as I knew him for when I was ten years old, going to Poppea Vanda’s tea parties on Sundays with Karsavina, so there were probably already things about Giselle being discussed at those. I also did pas de deux classes with him at Rosella Hightower’s Centre de Danse many summers. And I rehearsed Giselle with him also - but after having first danced it when I was coached by Rosella, who herself was much influenced by Alonso and Markova as well as by Dolin.
And then my next was the Skeaping version with London Festival. Yes, I worked with Skeaping on the roles of both Giselle and Myrtha.
.
25.
AM: We’ve mentioned the daisy that Giselle plucks. As we see it today, flowers are a recurrent image in the ballet, in some cases a symbol. How much does this go back to nineteenth-century sources?
DF: Here’s a document I prepared on “Giselle flowers”:
MYRTLE
Myrtha: from the Latin “myrtus” meaning “myrtle.”
Myrtle is a flowering plant that symbolizes love, love in absence, and remembrance.
According to European custom, myrtle was often used in wedding bouquets. “Creeping myrtle” is also called the “flower of death.”
The Wilis are to wear myrtle. http://www.gogardennow.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/v/i/vinca-minor-alba-4web_1.jpg
ROSEMARY
Myrtha carries a wand of rosemary. But it is also referred to as “flowery.” (Libretto, 1841 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Koeh-258.jpg )
Rosemary symbolizes remembrance and, when used in wedding bouquets, symbolizes fidelity.
From Wikipedia: In the Middle Ages, rosemary was associated with wedding ceremonies - the bride would wear a rosemary headpiece and the groom and wedding guests would all wear a sprig of rosemary, and from this association with weddings, rosemary evolved into a love charm. Newly wed couples would plant a branch of rosemary on their wedding day.
Other wand materials:
Cypress bough (Beauties of the Opera and Ballet, p. 11 (1845)
DAISIES/MARGUERITES
Giselle plays “He loves me, he loves me not” with daisies/marguerites in Act I (Libretto, 1841; Gautier, The Romantic Ballet, p. 52, 1841)
ASPHODEL and VERBENA
Giselle’s Act II headpiece is a garland of asphodel and verbena (Gautier, The Romantic Ballet, p. 56, 1841)
STARS
All wilis have stars on their foreheads (Gautier, The Romantic Ballet, p. 56, 1841)
MS: I add the following points to each of Doug’s flowers:
MYRTLE
In classical mythology (according to a nineteenth-century flower handbook by Charlotte de la Tour), the myrtle was the tree of Venus (the goddess of love). [Charlotte de la Tour, Le Langage des Fleurs, 7th ed. Paris: Garnier, 1858. Paris, Audot, 1819.]
Myrtle is also associated, of course, with death.
ROSEMARY
Rosemary does flower.
The Rosemary can mean “remembrance.” In the nineteenth century, it could also mean “your presence revives me”, which is appropriate when Myrthe uses her magical rosemary sceptre to bring the Wilis forth from their graves after midnight.
Other flora: In Robert le diable, the ghostly nuns wear crowns of cypress. Also, as Helena Spencer points out, there is a cypress branch on the tomb of St. Rosalie and "Hélène [Taglioni] and the nuns convince Robert to commit sacrilege by stealing it."
DAISIES/MARGUERITES
Margeret (Gretchen) had done the same to see if Faust loved her in Goethe's Faust. So it was a motif likely recognizable to audiences.
AM: No lilies on your list, however! In some productions of Act Two, lilies are the most striking flower symbol of all. Albert enters with a sheaf of them; Giselle already has some ready to rain on him as she leans over from a branch (according to the production); Giselle throws two over her shoulder at him while he’s pursuing her; and, in Soviet productions and a few others, Giselle’s last entrance, a final supplication to Myrthe, is made with another bouquet of lilies, which Myrthe rejects and which Giselle drops or throws despairingly. Please tell me which of these lilies, if any, were in nineteenth-century productions.
DF: We don't know when lilies became part of Giselle (they weren't named in the early sources, though rosemary, myrtle, cypress, and daises were). Lilies aren’t mentioned in the Stepanov notation.
MS: According to the Titus 1842 manuscript, Albert and Wilfride walk, slowly and sadly, to Giselle’s grave site. Then, after dispatching Wilfride from the scene, Albert “prend des fleurs et les jette sur la tombe de Giselle.” But Titus doesn’t say what sort of flowers.
AM: Giselle with no lilies? I’m shocked! The nineteenth century is not what I had been led to expect. And now I see that Alexei Ratmansky’s 2019 Bolshoi production has Albert enter in Act Two with an armful not of lilies but of red roses. What a shock!
II.
Questions 26-52: Act One of Giselle
Act One
26.
AM: Am I right to assume that the music theatre of the nineteenth century intended overtures to be overtures, performed with the curtain down? In recent decades, the fashion has been to raise the curtain during the overture and start the stage action during music never intended for stage action. The Anglo-American critic Dale Harris, who died in 1996, loved to remark “If they stage the overture, leave”.
And several Giselle productions have started the story during the overture. The unfortunate current Royal Ballet production, directed by Peter Wright, brings Albert/Albrecht on during the overture, dressed as a nobleman, somehow expecting that nobody in the village will spot him before he changes into peasant attire. To me, the music immediately tells me this is wrong.
But when the overture does end - when the curtain should rise - what’s the first action we should see?
MS: Yes: curtain is not supposed to go up until the overture is over. Yes; it's musically wrong to have Albert entering during the overture.
In Titus, remarkably, shortly after curtain-up, lords and ladies (but not Albert) cross the stage going one way; peasants cross the stage going the other way. I think this is a preview of the two groups that will play a part in the aciton of Act One; it is not meant to be realistic action. No mention of this in Justamant.
MS: And surely you've seen those productions wherein, to that sweet, serene, wistful music of the overture’s second half, Hilarion comes in with a dead game animal and hangs it on Giselle's front door!
27.
AM: I’m afraid I find that, in both acts of this ballet, Albert/Albrecht makes first entrances, as we see them now, that are thoroughly stagey. (I’ll address the second one later on; it’s become a stale routine - probably hammed up by Lifar, Nureyev, et al. over the years).) In Act One, today, he usually rushes on greeting the audience - and only then does he turn to the cottage. It’s as if he’s saying to the audience “Yes, my public, it is I! I whom you all rightly adore! (Oh, yes. and, now I happen to think of it, here's the cottage where my sweetheart lives.)” And then Wilfride catches up with him.
Do we have any idea how he made this first Act One entrance in various nineteenth-century productions? In Peter Wright’s 1985 Royal Ballet production, still in repertory, Albert/Albrecht is the first person seen in the ballet: he enters during the overture in his cloak and aristocratic attire, then goes into the cottage where he changes to become Loys.
MS: In the 1842 score, Albert (dressed as Loys) and Wilfride enter together, and soon thereafter Wilfrid asks his master, “What are you doing in this costume?” The bright sound and wide range of the music in the opening measures of this scene suggest an argument; a clash between the two men; the latest episode in a disagreement between them. Then you can hear them going back and forth in a contentious dialogue. (Some productions actually keep Wilfrid off the stage for part of this musical dialogue, instead of making use of it.)
The clash drives the scene in the Justamant version, too. Albert leaves his cottage, obviously in a vexed mood. Wilfrid follows him, saying “Listen to me, my lord.” The two then have quite a disagreement. By bursting onto the stage in the middle of a quarrel, they have helped set up the action. And it's just more interesting to have an assertive Wilfride. Moreover, Wilfride and Albert repeat this argument in the second act, only in a far sadder situation: Albert wishes to visit Giselle’s grave (also at stage right); Wilfride tries, in vain, to talk his master into leaving. (Later, I’ll say more about echoes of Act One in Act Two.)
DF: In the sources, Giselle and Hilarion address the audience, but Albert does not.
AM: Tell that to the Alberts/Albrechts of today!
MS: It’s so important that Giselle and Hilarion address the audience directly. It draws in the audience very effectively.
DF: The Stepanov rubrics state, “Albert comes out of the house and looks tenderly at Giselle’s [house]. Wilfride enters and says, “Your fiancée will see you in this outfit.” Albert replies, “I love this peasant girl and I won’t go anywhere.” Wilfride says, “Listen to me,” but Albrecht “disagrees and asks him to leave.”
Also, Giselle’s entrance is the beginning of a scène dansante that combines mime and dance, rather a mime scene like Albert’s entrance.
MG: I love the disagreement between Albert and Wilfride – it makes a lot of sense. Tom Whitehead (Royal Ballet, today) was the best Wilfride I have ever seen, really made sense of him. Wilfride’s such an important character - the only one who knows what is truly happening throughout the first act.
28.
AM: The role of Albert has been very variously played over the decades - and that’s a well-known part of the fascination of Giselle. How specific are the nineteenth-century sources about his age, his intention, his character, the success with which he appears to be a peasant, the degree to which he is conscious about deceiving Giselle? Are there any interpretations of Albert that you feel are in some way wrong?
DF: Marian has done an analysis of all the main characters in the ballet, but I will offer here that the Stepanov gives little description of characters or motivation for their actions. Justamant, however, provides much more insight. From that manuscript, we see Albert very conscious of his deception, although idealistic in his belief that he can have a relationship with a peasant.
Later in the act, after Berthe’s prediction and the hunting horn sounds from a distance, Justamant tells us: “Loys recognizes the prince’s hunt. He comes downstage, worried. He doesn’t know what to do. All of a sudden, an idea comes to him—he runs to his door and gets out his key…then he goes toward Giselle and says, ‘It’s a hunt which comes this way, and after you go back I’ll lead the young girls to work.’”
He’s worried and therefore very careful to be sure Giselle doesn’t see the hunting party and that the hunting party doesn’t seem him.
MS: Yes, as Doug points out, there is a telling scene in which Albert is careful to shoo the village girls away to stage right (upstage) before the hunting party arrives stage left. Albrecht is quite nervous here.
I'm convinced that Albert really does love Giselle but is thinking more of himself that of anyone else, and hasn't considered the consequences of his deception. He's young, he's not committed yet to fulfilling the duties of his station, he's impulsive. I do think that, as you say, part of the fascination of the ballet is that we are not entirely sure of Albrecht, just as his fellow characters aren't.
29.
AM: How interesting a character was Wilfride in the nineteenth century? I have seen him played reasonably with sense and force at the Royal Ballet. Until recently at ABT, he’s been dismal, a wimp who says (in both acts) “Oooh, sir, please let’s go away! you really shouldn’t be here at all, let alone dressed like that! Sir, we’ll get into awful trouble!”
Do the period sources give any indication here?
MS: It's true that Wilfride warns Albert away from Giselle in both acts. His entreaties are just about the same in both cases: you must not do this; it is a bad idea. But he seems to be somebody with discretion, common sense, and even wisdom. In Act Two (according to both the 1842 and Justamant versions), Wilfride is with Albert during most of the sad and soulful “aria” of Albert, who is grief-stricken as he finds Giselle's grave. In the loud “B” section of the aria, Wilfride entreats his master to "leave this place" and Albert refuses, sending Wilfride away. Justamant's drawings and descriptions convey tenderness in this scene between the two men: Wilfride bends over to his master, who is kneeling at Giselle's grave, takes him by the waist and arm and lifts him up, then walks him diagonally upstage still with one arm around his master's waist and the other holding his master's arm.
Here's something else the manuscripts tell us: Wilfride tries to warn Albert away from pursuing Giselle fourtimes, not just twice. Toward the end of Act One, Wilfride tries to get his master to flee the scene after Hilarion has set up the big confrontation by summoning the noble hunting party with a horn call. Wilfrid knows what's coming and urges Albert to get out of there. Then, toward the end of Act Two, he comes rushing back in just as Giselle is sinking into her floral grave; he tries to pull Albert away, and then he summons the rest of the noble hunting party, including Bathilde, whom the Prince leads to the heartsick Albert. Wilfride is an instigator; someone who helps move the plot forward at crucial times, and also a foil for Albert. The two men's running disagreement about Giselle of course helps to demonstrate Albert's motivations and feelings.
30.
AM: In Nikolai Sergueyev’s Western stagings of the 1930s, Hilarion was always presented as a bearded, unattractive villain. (Ashton, though actually he hated playing the role, did so - opposite Spessivtseva, Markova, and Fonteyn - right up into the Second World War.) Does this view of Hilarion go back to the nineteenth century and is it there in all the Paris and Petersburg versions?
Today he is cleaned up and made very reasonable, which - despite some good moments with great Hilarions (the Royal’s Stephen Jefferies, the Bolshoi’s Gadiminas Taranda) - sometimes unhinges the larger romantic drama.
MS: Yes, I have seen Hilarion depicted as a bearded, unappealing villain, a man older than Giselle. (I think it was in the Kirov version with Galina Mezentseva and Konstantin Zaklinsky, recorded in 1982.) I don't know how old the original Hilarion was—you can't tell from the manuscripts. But the manuscripts do depict him as a somewhat sympathetic, even though he is hot-headed and spies on Giselle. He is truly confused, frustrated, and heart-broken and he makes his private feelings known to the audience; he takes us into his confidence. All of this makes him much more than a cardboard cut-out. When he is a more interesting character, the whole story is more interesting.
A notation, “bad man”, was written into a violin part over one of Hilarion's passages of music in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo score collection (at the NYPL). So he must've looked like a villain in that production, at least to one violinist.
DF: The Stepanov - whose often coarse mise en scène descriptions have a propensity for violence - gives a mixed, almost conflicting impression of Hilarion, recorded in the performance of Pavel Gerdt, circa 1903.
No opening monologue is recorded for Hilarion. When he interrupts Giselle and Albert’s scène dansante, he is angry and jealous: (to Giselle) “Well! You are hugging him and he kisses your hands!” In a jealous rage, he attacks her with his fists. She is scared but gets up right away, folds her arms, and attacks him back. He says, “Listen! I love you!” She says, “I despise you, you are disgusting.” Albert “grabs him by the shoulder, turns him away, and sends him away. …The forester leaves angrily, sending threats.”
Hilarion’s second monologue presents him as a potentially sympathetic character: “Some power takes me here. I love her. She refuses to talk to me. She loves another, abandoned me, but I will try to talk to her and I will beg her for her love.”
After finding Albert’s sword and chain, the two damning items in the Petersburg production, Hilarion says, “He is a duke… He wants to deceive her.” The notation continues, “Gerdt laughs gloatingly. ‘He will abandon her and never marry her.’ He runs behind the house threateningly.”
Later, during Giselle’s madness, the notation instructs, “Gerdt prays,” and “The forester drops to his knees and prays to God for mercy.” In the second act, with the hunters in the forest by Giselle’s grave, he says, “I killed her” and he “drops on the grave, crying.”
The earlier French sources depict Hilarion as an upstanding and successful citizen, a leader in the community, and an obvious choice for Giselle. His tragedy is that Giselle simply doesn’t love him. Whereas, in La Sylphide, Gurn ends up getting Effie simply by being in the right place at the right time, Hilarion takes matters into his own hands - and ends up dead at the hands of the wilis.
MG: There is reference to Albrecht’s sword and chain ????
MS: The chain is the necklace (another sign of his noble status).
AM: How remarkable to find that Gerdt, so famous for his long career in heroic roles, also played Hilarion. I hadn’t known.
In Giselle and I, Alicia Markova notes moments in the 1950s when Hilarion began to be presented more sympathetically. Even so, she always thinks of him as bearded (and therefore unattractive to Giselle). How often have any of us seen a bearded Hilarion? I remember, by contrast, a terrible Kirov revival when Hilarion and Albrecht seemed to have visited the same beautician that morning: same blonde hair, same bright make-up.
DF: Here is a Benois design for a red-bearded Hilarion: http://art.famsf.org/sites/default/files/artwork/benois/3328201308170015.jpg. Jérôme Kaplan also suggested a red beard for Hilarion when designing PNB’s production.
31.
AM: Giselle’s entrance is as satisfying as Albert’s is ghastly. You’ve mentioned the scène dansante that includes this first appearance: it combines dance and mime with wonderful fluency. She comes out of the cottage door; immediately circuits the stage with little dancing jumps, looking for Albert; stops to mime “I heard knocking – where is he?” Then she shrugs and does what she loves most: dance! This goes on into her first love scene with Albert, which also connects dancing and mime.
Are there any important divergencies between this as we now see it and the scene in the old sources?
DF: The Titus répétiteur shows Giselle as stronger and more decisive and opinionated than we see now: “She says ‘Loys should have come, however he isn't there. He's naughty (bad) I'm leaving.’”
MS: In Justamant, she also says “He will pay.”
DF: The interaction between Loys and Giselle is flirtatious sparring between equals. Giselle is no wallflower. She is a match for Loys and then some.
32.
AM: Giselle then introduces Albert/Loys to her girlfriends. The women dance; Albert joins in. As in the earlier part of the scène dansante, the steps look relatively simple. Does that mean they derive from the 1840s? What do the sources tell us?
DF: The Justamant and Stepanov waltzes have much in common structurally.
AR: Albert lifts Giselle a couple of times here, but she is vertical.
33.
AM: During this scene, Giselle first shows signs of a weak heart. We’ll come later to whether this causes her death, but can we establish now how this heart problem was shown in the nineteenth century?
DF: Neither Justamant nor the Stepanov include Giselle’s heart episode during the waltz.
MS: There’s nothing about it in the Titus 1842 manuscript either.
AM: How remarkable. It’s a standard part of Giselle performance. I wonder when it was added.
34.
AM: The Mary Skeaping production for London Festival Ballet restored an entire pas de deux for Giselle and Albert in Act One. (Was this pas de deux retained when the production was revived for English National Ballet this century? I’m not sure.) As I remember, the dance style was pseudo-Bournonville: the steps pleasant but forgettable.
Am I right that the music for this pas de deux was part of the 1841 original? How long did it remain in the Paris production? Was it part of Perrot’s subsequent “Giselle” productions in London, Milan, or St. Petersburg? At precisely what point in the action did it occur? Has any production other than Skeaping’s tried to restore it?
MS: Sorry to say, I don't know what music Skeaping used for this Act One pas de deux. Like Doug, I can't comment with specificity on particular productions. I agree with him that there are various reasons for creating new content. And I agree, too, that it's terrific to have the sources, so we can find out what the creators of these works had in mind. They were experts, seasoned dramatists who know well what worked on the stage!
I would also add, that to impose seeming “dramatic logic” at the expense of structure and style is to overlook the fact that the old structures and style could serve the dramatic logic very well indeed. (The rather comical “lost” scenes in Act Two, for instance, strengthened the overall story arc.)
MG: Yes, in the Mary Skeaping production, the extra pas de deux was retained for ENB. I presume it still is now under Rojo’s directorship. I too would love to know if the music was part of the 1841 original…
DF: A pas de deux for Giselle and Albert set to the original pas de deux music is included in Justamant.
35.
AM: In 1960, for Ashton’s revised production of the Royal Ballet’s very traditional production, Karsavina taught the full mime she had known Berthe do about the wilis. Gerd Larsen was the first Royal Berthe, and she did it again when the Royal revived the mime scene in 1980. Since then, the Royal has always retained it. If memory serves, her speech goes: “Oh, beware! There, in the forest where the branches cross overhead, are graves. From them, spirits rise, with wings. A carefree young man enters the forest - but then he meets a wili. She tells him ‘Dance!’ He pleads with her. But she is implacable: ‘Dance till you die.’ My tragic story is true.” You can see this in DVDs of the current Royal production, staged in 1985 by Peter Wright and still being danced today.
Is this recorded in the Stepanov notation, though? Does it go back any further?
DF: Our Berthe prediction is taken from the 1842 répétiteur as written out in the Titus MS:
Berthe (to the vine-gatherer women): “What are you doing down there?...You are harvesting grapes...” (to her daughter) “You poor thing; you will exhaust yourself. With dancing, you are not thinking that this way, you could die. On your back will grow wings.”
Giselle: “I won't notice the wings.”
Berthe: “You won't notice them, yes…”(to everyone) “Listen well. Over there, over there, in the dark night…the earth opens up and phantoms come out. They’re covered in shrouds. On their backs are wings. They surround those whom they meet and force them to dance till death.”
Giselle: “I don't believe all that.” She crosses the stage, dancing.
The Stepanov notation includes the following prose:
Mother says hello and asks them where her daughter is. They point out and she comes up to Giselle. Kisses her, wipes her face with handkerchief and says, “Tell me, what were you doing?”
Giselle: “I am dancing here with my friends.”
Mother: “You dance, you die.”
Mother’s story-telling
Mother comes up to girlfriends and says: “Listen what I have to say. When it is a sundown and night begins, one beautiful who is in love will die. She will rise from her grave and when one visits he will be captured and tortured until he dies.”
Girlfriends laugh, saying it is nonsense.
Mother says “—it’s true.”
She tells them to take their baskets and leave. …
Mother takes Giselle’s hand and takes her inside home.
MS: I’ve seen that Karsavina version of the mime scene and I've heard that it was created for the Ballets Russes revival, but I don’t know if that’s true. But whoever devised this version…
DF: The Ballets Russes Giselle piano scores are full of annotations.
MS: …was careful to use the jaunty music toward the end – it’s used to show a carefree young man walking in the forest.
In the 1842 score, this jaunty bit of music music expresses Giselle’s nonchalance and carefree attitude as she dances upstage. The notes say at this point: “Giselle: ‘I don't believe all that.’ She crosses the stage, dancing.”
I love the old version because it shows Giselle’s rebellious attitude. She boldly rejects her mother’s worries.
Note, too, that the mother/daughter battle continues in the action that follows immediately after Berthe's big mime scene; Berthe insists that Giselle come back to the house with her. By this point the hunting horns are sounding and all the village girls are getting terribly excited. They run up upstage left , hoping to see the hunting party. Giselle wants to go with them, but Berthe won't let her.
It’s a wonderful stage-emptying transition from Berthe’s big mime scene to the next scene. It demonstrates Giselle’s feisty personality, Albrecht’s concerns about being caught in his ruse, and Berthe's protective attitude. And it really keeps the action moving forward — something you must do cleverly in a story ballet. I never saw this transitional action until we did it in Seattle.
36.
AM: The chief logistic problem in Act One (it seems to me) is to do with its having too many entrances and exits.
Hilarion comes and goes several times, on one occasion secreting himself in Loys’s cottage – whether briefly or at length.
Albert and Giselle each have a number of entrances and exits.
Bathilde and the Courland hunting party enter twice. Usually Bathilde and the Duke go inside Giselle’s cottage to rest after their first scene, which raises two questions: Where do the other nobles go? And how much rest can Bathilde get when so much (the Festival of the Vine) is happening outside the cottage’s front door? Nothing bothers them until Hilarion blows the horn.
This, however, is better than the (largely excellent) ABT production, where Bathilde and all the nobles simply go off, presumably never intending to return, until Hilarion’s horn-call summons them and they turn out after all not to have been hunting but only a few yards away.
Other questions concern the two main dances. For whom does Giselle perform her chief variation and at what point in the action? (And when was this added?) And for whom is the Peasant pas de deux (sometimes turned into a pas de six, as in Peter Wright’s production, or a pas de huit in Vladimir Vassiliev’s) performed and when? (I ask again about these dances later.)
Can we solve any of these implausibilities by checking the various nineteenth-century scenarios?
MS: Yes, Hilarion comes and goes and Albert and Giselle do have a number of entrances and exits. But I don't see this as a problem – it is typical of ballets and operas during this period, and makes sense in a story ballet. Things are happening and characters come and go. And if Hilarion is treated as a character who is vexed and trying to solve a mystery, it makes sense.
And yes, all of those festivities are going on while Bathilde and her father are inside the cottage resting. I suppose it wasn't very relaxing!
When those nobles go off, they are intending to return. They're just out there hunting and of course the plan is to return when the prince summons them. Little do they know that it's Hilarion who will blow the horn.
DF: Marian has pointed out that it was customary in Parisian productions to have “his” and “hers” sides of the stage. The Justamant notation of Giselle makes this clear, as does the placement of the buildings in Act One: Giselle’s is stage right and Albert’s is stage left. Likewise in Act Two, Giselle’s grave is on stage right, Hilarion is killed on stage right, Albrecht enters from stage left, and he lays Giselle to rest on stage left. Were all of these distinctions observed in modern productions, the result could be greater clarity.
MG: Dolin definitely had Giselle dancing her solo for Albert just after she has been crowned. Peter Wright, I think, has her dance it as a thankyou for the necklace Bathilde has given her, in front of the Hunting Party. I am not sure I remember correctly but think also Mary Skeaping’s does.
The little solo for Albert going into kissing diagonal, is by Dolin used as a sort of coda after Giselle solo, while in other versions it comes after the waltz (Dolin brings Berthe out of the House and her mime there).
37.
AM: The Paris Opéra brought their production, with Alexandre Benois designs, to New York in 2011. Most people loved it more than I. It included a bit of business when the Duke of Courland and Berthe seemed to recognize each other. A number of local balletomanes went into overdrive speculating that he might have been Giselle’s father.
Is there any nineteenth-century or indeed twentieth-century precedent for this peculiar twist?
MS: Not that I’ve ever heard of.
38.
AM: Giselle and Bathilde: what's their relationship/friendship? Do the nineteenth-century sources differ on this?
To me, the friendship that quickly builds up between the peasant girl and the noblewoman is one that transcends class to a remarkable degree. One feature of it includes Bathilde and the Prince/Duke going into Berthe's cottage to rest (which doesn’t happen in ABT’s production, but which happens in almost every other one I’ve seen). This sometimes leads to some degree of embarrassed compassion on Bathilde's part, when she sees that her new girlfriend is more Albert’s victim than she is herself. (At ABT, however, Bathilde is just a classy bitch. She’s fairly supercilious in her friendship with Giselle; she regards Giselle’s moment of claiming Albrecht as appalling effrontery; and then she snubs Albrecht as if his worst crime was in having an affair with a mere commoner.)
Your Seattle presentation of Bathilde was quite a change. Can you explain which sources say what about her?
MS: The Titus and Justamant scores make it clear that Bathilde is a kind, generous-hearted person; a kindly aristocrat. (Maybe she became a cold ruling-class snob during the Soviet era; I don't know.) According to the 1842 Titus score, for instance, Bathilde finds Giselle charming when they first meet, asks Giselle how she occupies her time, and then continues the conversation with her even after Berthe has intervened by proclaiming worriedly that Giselle dances too much.
Then, in the Act One finale, when Albert asks her forgiveness (having just been exposed as a deceiver), Bathilde pushes him aside and rushes directly to Giselle. And in the final scene of the whole ballet, after Albert has just spent a long night being danced nearly to death by the Wilis and then saying his final goodbyes to Giselle, Bathilde reappears on the scene to take him back.
The Justamant score from the 1860s shows, similarly, that Bathilde likes Giselle and is kind to her. When Bathilde seeks to continue the conversation with Giselle at the time of their first meeting, she takes her by the hand, puts her other arm around Giselle's waist, and leads her downstage. There, apart from the crowd, she asks “Has your heart spoken?” Bathilde is creating a female-to-female girl-bond. Such bonding happens in comic operas, of course, and here it is in Giselle.
During the mad scene, according to Justamant, when Giselle drags the sword around, Bathilde approaches her and touches her arm. Giselle pushes her away with a “somber air” and looks about with “brusque movements”. Giselle's insanity is made obvious in part by her failure to recognize Bathilde. A few moments later, after Giselle has died and Wilfrid is endeavoring to lead Albert away, Bathilde begs the prince to take her away “far away from this spectacle.” (She thus spares herself the sight of Albert embracing the body of the dead Giselle.) This score thus depicts a Bathilde who tried to intervene and help Giselle, and is thoroughly traumatized.
AM: There’s a lithograph from 1841 that seems to show Bathilde onstage at the end of Act One, halfway between the dead Giselle and the anguished Albert. Your views?
MS: At the end of the ballet, as Justamant tells us, Bathilde stands at center stage, flanked by Wilfride on her right and the Prince on her left. The prince is supporting the exhausted Albert, who (on his knees) reaches his hand out to Bathilde's extended hand shortly before the curtain falls.
39.
AM: And how does the Giselle-Bathilde dialogue go, in the various nineteenth-century sources?
Natalia Makarova, in A Dance Autobiography(p.121), tells a marvelous story of talking to Maria Callas about one gesture here. “I recall saying to her once that in classical ballet, particularly in the West, very few can use their hands expressively and make them speak. With most dancers, the whole arm moves from the shoulder without the palm opening, which it should, at the end of the movement. The final release of the hands is the dot on the i – while using her arms, the ballerina seems to be testing the density of air between them and her body. This is crucial for beautiful port de bras, since the final hand movement is extraordinarily expressive. Used correctly, it can express a great range of emotional shadings, almost an entire character. Maya Plisetskaya often spoke of this in her interviews. For instance, in Giselle almost no one van render Bathilde’s gesture at that moment when Giselle, with simple-hearted delight, pats the hem of her gold-threaded dress. This gesture should be regal and, at the same time a casual ‘turning with the hand’ to Giselle, as if to ask, ‘What is the matter?’ Usually it looks trivial, theatricalized because the hands and wrists of Western dancers are not utilized properly, ‘I’m sure you could do this gesture easily,’ I said to Callas, who instantly performed the very movement with such sovereign grace and simplicity that I was stunned. The turn of the head, the neck, the expression in her eyes – everything came of itself and was absolutely right.”
I'm especially curious about how and why Giselle decides to tell Bathilde "I love to dance." What question from Bathilde is she answering? Usually she seems to announce her dance-mania out of the blue, which seems a bit sudden or a bit dotty. (In Peter Wright’s 1985 production for the Royal Ballet, still performed there, the music is re-arranged so that Giselle then does her variation for Bathilde and the hunting party. We then have to go back to the rest of the mime scene between the two women, however, which feels musically and stylistically awkward straight after that big solo.)
The musicality of the scene also varies. There’s one little crisis or frenzy of the music that I associate with Giselle’s amazed and fervent gratitude to Bathilde for the gift of the necklace. But at ABT Bathilde and the hunting party have already moved across the stage by now, and Giselle is getting ready to introduce her two friends who will dance the Peasant pas de deux; the Lanchbery arrangement of the score stitches two different bits of music together there.
MS: No, Giselle is not dotty! When you see what sorts of details were imparted in these scenes, you can see that real conversations were had. Bathilde has asked Giselle about herself; what she does. (In the libretto she “asks Giselle about her work and her pleasures.” Giselle responds that “she is happy! she has neither sorrows nor cares; in the morning, work; in the evening, dancing.”)
Here's what the 1842 Titus score tells us. (Bear in mind that these are instructions for the performers and it is clear that Giselle is saying “I like to dance” when she dances.)
Giselle is approached by Wilfride and she greets him. Berthe says “You're wrong – it's the Lord and Lady he wants.” Bathilde says she needs something; Giselle hurries and goes into the house; Wilfride follows her.
Then they come back out.
Giselle and Berthe: “Here are the refreshments.”
Bathilde: “This girl is pretty!”
Berthe invites her into the house.
Bathilde refuses; she prefers to stay in the shade.
The prince gives his hand to his daughter. They are going to sit at the table. Bathilde to the left; the Prince in the middle; Wilfride to the right, standing.
Berthe invites the Lord and his suite to drink. The princess sits down in the chair for a moment. Giselle is standing up to the second reprise; the second time Bathilde offers her a necklace.
Giselle wants to refuse. Bathilde insists.
Giselle accepts.
oh, but she is happy. instruction in the music un peu plus animé) Giselle says “In the morning I work; I spin when the sun goes down"
Giselle starts dancing.
“Yes,” says Berthe “It's crazy – dancing, all the time, all the time.”
Bathilde smiles and asks her (Giselle) if she loves somebody.
“Yes,” answers Giselle, “It's him; we love each other; he is as handsome as the day. He will be my husband.” She runs toward her mother. “Isn't that true, that we are going to get married?”
Berthe says “Yes.”
Bathilde says “She is charming.” She speaks to Giselle and tells her that she, too, she will be married – to a grand Seigneur. She asks her if she would like to come to her wedding. Giselle shows her joy in being able to dance, and kisses her hand. The princess goes back into the house.
The Justamant score gives us more details, as you can see here:
Giselle admires Bathilde's dress. She advances a little and can't resist the pleasure of touching it. She bends down, believing that Bathilde doesn't see her; she touches the fabric of the dress. Bathilde turns around, smiling, takes the hand of Giselle, who is very abashed, and has her come downstage with her.
“Why are you looking at my dress?”
Giselle: “Ah, Madame, it is so pretty and it looks so beautiful on you.”
Bathilde: “But you, too, you are charming in your dress.”
Giselle: “Ah, but it's not the same thing.”
Bathilde takes off her gold chain from her neck and puts it around Giselle's neck and says to her: “You are like me, I am giving it to you.”
Giselle looks at it with joy and astonishment.
“Oh, but you are so good.” (Aside: “What happiness!”)
The prince is chatting with Wilfride.
Bathilde: “Tell me, how to you spend your time?”
Giselle: “In the daytime I spin, but when night falls - ” she goes upstage a little and says, while designating on all sides -- “my friends and I, we [gather] here and we dance." She makes turns, waltzing, to say that they dance.
DF: Sergeyev refers to Bathilde as the “Duchess.” As in the other sources, she is friendly and kind to Giselle, thanking her when she offers a seat at the table and saying to the Prince (referred to in the Stepanov as the “Duke”), “How beautiful Giselle is!”
When she notices Giselle touching the fabric of her dress (“Giselle examines her train”), she asks if Giselle likes it. After Giselle answers, “Yes, very much,” Bathilde takes her by the waist and leads her aside, saying, “Tell me what your heart says.” Giselle answers, “I weave. I love one. And when evening comes, I dance.”
In the mad scene, very little is recorded for Bathilde.
40.
AM: Some productions have the Peasant pas de deux danced for the noble visitors. To me, it belongs in the Festival of the Vine. In what context(s) did it occur in the nineteenth century?
DF: The peasant pas de deux is part of the vine festival in all the sources we’ve consulted (see below). PNB’s peasant pas is danced for the hunting party.
AM: Can we be sure where it occurred in the French and/or Russian productions? I ask because this pas de deux in particular gets moved about a lot within the tim structure of Act One, as does Giselle’s solo somewhat.
MS: The original Burgmüller interpolation appeared during the village festival. It occurs after the A-flat major “Allegro un peu louré” (2/4 meter) composed by Adam that ends the set of dances labelled “pas de deux". The first page of the Burgmüller says “Pas de deux” at the top, and “Polacca” at the bottom. After the set of Burgmüller numbers comes the galop by Adam, labelled “No. 5 du Divertissement - Final” in A major and originally intended to end the variations composed by Adam. (It is not labelled as a galop, I confess, but it isone, and thus serves the function of closing out a divertisssement — incidentally, galops in ballroom bals did the same thing.)
DF: The peasant pas isn’t included in the Titus.
In the Justamant, it is is danced for the vine-gatherers. After the hunt has retired and Bathilde, the Prince, and Wilfride go into Giselle’s house, the wine festival begins. The vine-gatherers enter with a statue of Bacchus on a litter. They’re preceded by a group of women, who go into Giselle’s house. (It must be a very large house!) As part of the march, the women bring Giselle out of her house and crown her Queen of the Vintage, lifting her onto the litter in place of Bacchus. A pas de deux for Giselle and Albert follows (see above) and next is the peasant pas de deux followed by the galop.
In the Stepanov, the peasant pas de deux immediately follows Giselle’s variation and is danced the vine-gatherers as part of their festivities, as it is in the Justamant. The galop follows.
41.
AM. Alexei, you’ve said you think the Peasant pas de deux may well contain plenty of material by Saint-Léon.
AR. Yes. This is guesswork on my part. I’m not crediting him as one of the choreographers in the Bolshoi programme.
There are a few moments, not many, when my production has high lifts: we have one in the Peasant pas de deux.
42.
AM: Can I check that Bathilde and her papa do indeed go inside Berthe’s cottage to rest? (They don’t at ABT.)
And if they do, to what music? At the Royal and in other productions, I’m used to seeing them go into the cottage to the music that continues from the Giselle-Bathilde mime scene. Bathilde indicates she’s fatigued; Berthe and Giselle immediately offer their cottage.
MS: Yes, both Bathilde and her father go into Berthe's cottage to rest. Interestingly enough, Bathilde has asked Giselle to come with her into the cottage, and Giselle follows her happily. And, by the way, Wilfrid goes in there too; he's the last one. But before he goes in, the rest of the noble hunting party departs (lords and ladies, gardes chasse, pages, the whole bunch) upstage left.
So the hunting party is off hunting during the village festival. It doesn't reappear until the finale, when all the trouble begins. (And, yes, the festivities were probably a bit noisy, as Bathilde and her father and the others were resting in the house!)
DF: See my answer above. Also, in the Stepanov, Wilfride doesn’t go with Bathilde and the Prince into Giselle’s house. The Prince tells Wilfride, “Take care of everyone’s rest” and “I am going to rest. But in case something bad happens, blow the horn three times.”
43.
AM. At three points in most “Giselle” productions, the traditional choreography gives us intersecting horizontal lines of ensemble:
(a) in the coda of the Peasant pas de deux, woman and man, each dancing sauts de basque, travel pas each other and back again (right-left and left-right, then vice versa);
(b) in the ensemble of vine-gatherers just before the Mad Scene, Giselle’s six friends (in repeated temps levés) cross the stage, three going left-right, three right-left, then back again; I think in some productions other corps dancers follow suit;
(c) in the grand pas des wilis, the corps all do arabesques voyagées past and through each other, then back again.
I don't remember seeing such intersections in any other ballet, certainly not recurrently.
So I wonder whether here they're part of a plan. If so, is it Petipa's plan? And what's the intention?
If not, is it the result of successive ballet masters redeploying one another's “Giselle” formulae?
DF: In the Stepanov, these intersections all are notated and include the entire corps, as well as the demi women, crossing each other near the end of the galop. Earlier in Act One, the waltz corps cross, each performing successive glissades. Giselle and Albrecht cross each other at the end of their interpolated pas de deux that follows the waltz, performing entrechat cinq, followed by a step backward as they turn and step into a low piqué attitude. The couple also crosses each other multiple times in their first Act Two pas de deux.
Some of these crossings are found in the corresponding passages of the Justamant: the waltz girls crossing each other, Giselle and Albrecht crossing each other in their Act One pas de deux, the peasant pas couple crossing each other in their coda. No such crossings are found in Act Two of the Justamant.
I can’t speak to Petipa’s intentions here, but there are certainly many crossings and intersections in this ballet.
44.
AM: The Pacific Northwest Giselle does her Act One solo at the climax of the Vine Festival while the Duke and Bathilde are resting inside her cottage.
(I think this is right, even though it begs the questions: Won't they ask questions about her absence? What kind of attendance is she paying to their lordships inside? How much rest can Bathilde get with an entire Vine Festival just outside the door?)
Now, when do you think this solo was added? It's been called Petipa-Minkus; it’s been called Petipa-Drigo; and a large school of thought claims it was made for Spessivtseva (after Petipa’s death, by some unknown choreographer and composer.
DF: In the Stepanov, Giselle’s Act One variation comes after a shortened version of the peasant march. Bathilde and the Prince are in Giselle’s house. The hunt has departed for the time being. The vine-gatherers enter for the wine festival. They say to Berthe, “We want to see Giselle.” Berthe brings Giselle outside. Everyone says hello to Giselle and asks her to dance. Berthe replies, “Oh! She keeps dancing. How terrible! But okay, this is the last time.” Then Giselle dances for her friends.
We know a lot about this variation now—that it was first added to Fiammetta for Elena Cornalba in 1887, and then added to Giselle as early as 1888 but at least by 1903. We can reliably attribute the music to Riccardo Drigo, who composed for Cornalba. The choreography, reliably attributable to Petipa, includes features we associate with Italian technique. Two variants of the final diagonal are preserved in Stepanov notation. Spessivtseva, as seen on the 1932 film, danced the more difficult of the two.
I wonder if the structure of this variation informed Aurora’s Act One variation in The Sleeping Beauty.
AM: Yes, for years I’ve seen a parallel between the Act One solos for Giselle and Aurora, whichever was choreographed first. They both begin with a zigzag punctuated by piquées arabesques. Giselle’s usually go into penchées, usually while descending from point; and, according to Pamela May, Nicholas Sergueyev, staging Beautyfor the Vic-Wells Ballet in 1939, taught Fonteyn and May as Aurora to do piquée penchée - which some photos suggest they indeed did. Both variations feature several exposed double pirouettes; both have a crucial long diagonal of one repeated step; and both end with a sequence of turns.
That said, the differences between the variations are also interesting. In the Royal tradition of Giselle, which goes back to at least Fonteyn in 1937, Giselle does her piquées arabesques with arms en couronne, which to my mind beautifully matches the full orchestral staccato chord. This is what Spessivtseva does in the 1932 silent film of her, with the Camargo Society at London’s Savoy Theatre. So it’s probably what Markova did with the Vic-Wells in 1934; she was Fonteyn’s direct model. Yet the photos and films of her show her doing the arabesque with high first-arabesque arms. I’ve never found photographs of her in this arabesque in her 1934-35 performances with the Vic-Wells, though. So I’d guess she changed the arms later, perhaps as a result of Nijinska’s coaching, with the Markova-Dolin Ballet in 1935. Anyway, Giselle’s arabesques usually go down into penchée, while descending off point. (Some modern Giselles stay on point. A few omit the penchée.)
Cynthia Harvey was coached by Fonteyn as Giselle for American Ballet Theatre’s production around 1990. She has recently remembered that Fonteyn insisted that the arabesque should have arms en couronne – “en haut,” in her words. Harvey and others find this both more musical and less difficult.
Alexei, where do you have Giselle’s arms here?
AR: En couronne!
AM: It interests me that one print of Carlotta Grisi’s Giselle shows her in arabesque with arms en couronne (or en haut or in fifth). Now she never danced this variation. Maybe Petipa was evoking a memory of her.
Curiously, Markova writes in Giselle and I (p.35) that she and Nicholas Sergueyev looked at alternative notated versions of the dances, especially in this variation:-
“Much work was involved in learning the choreography of this Maryinsky production. For example, there would sometimes be two different versions of one particular manège, or group of steps. Both were equally valid, and both had been popularized by famous ballerinas. Which should I use? Giselle’s variation in the first act was a case in point. Tamara Karsavina had danced one version, Olga Spessivtseva another. Sergueeff gave me my choice here, and I adopted Spessivtseva’s.”
And there has long been a belief (an erroneous belief, we now realise) that the variation we see, with the hops on point, was made for Spessivtseva. Anton Dolin, her Albrecht in the 1932 London Camargo Society production, says this in a TV documentary.
DF: Giselle’s variation is notated only once in the Harvard collection, but two variants are given for the final combination. Because the notation appears to record Anna Pavlova’s 1903 performance, it pre-dates the Giselles of Karsavina and Spessivtseva.
MG: Some versions have her doing first enchaînements with glissade piquée arabesque - penchée or not - into reverse (often a ‘lost’ step now), repeated to the same side. The Dolin and Skeaping versions have her do these always right and left, leading straight into attitudes piqué pirouettes …
The preparation for piqué attitude pirouette has become grossly distorted, almost everywhere now. It should be a simple dancey chassé, not a trial of whether the pointe shoe will hold out (!), or an extra step in itself, as a piqué to pass back, then coupé into attitudes…. This loses the effect of the meat of the enchaînements: the attitude pirouette begins the focus, and correct dynamics are totally lost.
AM: One feature we often find in this variation is that Giselle does a double pirouette on point to the right, then one to the left (or she tries to). I know of no unsupported double pirouettes on point to both left and right anywhere else in nineteenth-century choreography. So is this an accretion added by twentieth-century ballerinas?
MG: I strongly doubt that twentieth-century ballerinas put in the right- then left- ended as pirouettes - (curiously almost always left in), as nobody really likes doing these. And symmetry is there throughout the original version of the entire ballet - not just Petipa.
AM: Sorry, but in recent years I’ve seen precisely this happen in the Balanchine Nutcracker. The Sugarplum has a pair of unsupported double pirouettes during the adagio: they used both to go to the right. Since Balanchine’s death, especially during this century, a number of ballerinas have done one double to the right, one to the left. (John Clifford, a leading Balanchine traditionalist, says that this is just what Balanchine would have dismissed as “buttering the bacon”.)
Kschessinskaya’s memoirs suggest that unsupported double pirouettes were still a sensational step in the 1890s, so I doubt anyone in her or Petipa’s day then tried making one of the Giselle Act One doubles go the other way. Maybe this was something new Spessivtseva did do with that solo in the 1920s and 1930s? Ah well, we’ll never know now.
MG: I can’t visualise Balanchine’s Sugar Plum pirouettes. I imagine the Giselle ones were originally singles, perhaps then became double to the right and single to left...?
AM: Well, often doubles both ways. Doug, what does the Stepanov notation say?
DF: The Stepanov has doubles pirouettes in each direction: glissade, double pirouette en dehors to the right, close fifth, glissade, double pirouettes en dehors to the left, close fitfh.
The hops on point are also included in the variation: 30 hops on the left pointe while the right foot does single ronds de jambe.
MG: The hops on pointe appear to have and have had variants: ballonnés rather then ronds de jambe (I suspect originally), doing the entire enchaînement as one unbroken diagonal of ballonnés/ronds, with only the arms getting freer as it goes along – or breaking up the ballonnés/ronds with hops in attitude front croisé still on the left leg.
Other versions including Natalia Osipova’s circling hops in between. (Were those another ballerina’s before? They’re like the circling hops on point done by Royal Ballet Swanildas in the Coppélia Act One theme and variations dance.)
45.
AM: Can you remind me how the Pacific Northwest Giselle does her final sequence, after the hops on point? Most Giselles everywhere (except Seattle) now seem to do the Mariinsky manège of piqué turns. But actually the Royal used to do a much more tightly-wound diagonal of turns here - less spectacular but probably much harder. The Spessivtseva film shows her ending with a diagonal of turns, not a circuit around the stage. As Cynthia Harvey also recently recalled, Fonteyn coached the diagonal: “a whirlwind of turns.” I remember many Royal dancers doing this.
DF: The first option for the final sequence is: Traveling downstage on the diagonal: From fifth position, coupé-relevé on the right foot turning half a circle to the right, followed by another coupé-relevé on the left foot turning half a circle to the right, then two single pirouettes from fifth on the left foot, and a double pirouette from fifth on the left foot. Perform this combination three times total, then four chaînés turns on demi-pointe, finishing in effacé, left foot tendu derrière.
The second option is: Traveling downstage on the diagonal: double en dedans pirouette on the right foot, stepping into a single en dehors pirouette on the left foot, then six step-up turns on the left foot; repeat the double en dedans pirouette, stepping into a single en dehors pirouette, then chaîné turns en pointe. No finishing pose is given.
PNB’s Giselles essentially follow the second option. No arms, head, or torso are given for these combinations.
MG: In the last diagonal - as opposed to a manège - the Skeaping version and, I think, all other versions prior to Soviet one (which became a manège) was a similar version to one en dedans relevé turn stepping without coming down into one en dehors, into two “lame ducks”. Sometimes a double added on one or other of the turns - done three times into chains.
The end varies. Some go to the knee, some (Markova?) to pas de chat.
AM: Alexei, how much interpretative freedom do you give them? Do you give them options? In your previous Petipa stagings, you do.
AR: There are options: three versions notated for the end of the end of Giselle’s Act One solo. They are all diagonal: there is no circle. But the diagonal can be done in three different ways. I say to the dancers “This one is Pavlova, this is a different ballerina, this one is yet another version – so choose!” They all seem to prefer one version, which is the same as Spessivtseva is doing with the exception of one little step.
AM: Regrettably, the main Russian companies have been doing the simpler and more expansive circle of piqué turns for decades. More regrettably, most Western companies have now been following suit since the the 1980s or 1990s; I’m most troubled here about the Royal Ballet here, since it used to take trouble to be the leading custodian of the older texts of the nineteenth-century classics. Cynthia Harvey - who danced Giselle with both American Ballet Theatre (where her partners were Kevin McKenzie, Robert LaFosse, Guillaume Griffin, Ricardo Bustamante, Julio Bocca, and Wes Chapman) and the Royal (where she was partnered by Mark Silver) in the 1980s, and was coached by Fonteyn here.
CH: <July 2023> I don’t know what happened after I left ABT, but even the Royal - Yasmine Naghdi and Marianela Nuñez, for example - do piqué turns dedans en manége. Yes, the diagonal IS harder, especially because it shouldn’t be slowed down getting into the start of it. That first down beat for orchestra and dancer is a challenge, but a well worth one.
“Once I understood the idea of what Giselle says and thinks there (in the theatre of her mind), I could not go back to a simple manége.”
AM. That’s a marvellous phrase, “the theatre of her mind”. Cynthia, does that whirlwind diagonal of tight turns suggest that the initial exhilaration of that variation has built into something nearer the edge for Giselle?
CH: You’re right- it makes sense to create the momentum that will take the story to its conclusion. Some might argue that piqué turns could have a similar effect, I suppose, by the sheer repetition of them, and I get why people might think that that also could represent a whirlpool (circling the stage) of emotion. But I think a whirlWIND of emotion and the staging going towards her mother who allowed her to dance in the first place, is also significant.
“Here are some thoughts which I hope make some sense.
“Giselle is not just in love. She’s deeply, madly, and blindly in love. To make sense of the mad scene that comes after her solo, there has to be a build up or culmination of emotions as well as events. We know that on that day, she has what one could describe as all her Christmases at once! She comes out of her home, all aflutter, to find this man whom she has met, this man of her dreams. He tells her that he loves her. She, being a superstitious and naive young thing, says, No - we must find out if you REALLY love me with the marguerite. (He loves me, loves me not.) Owing to Albrecht’s deception of pulling out a petal, it seems to Giselle that he really does love her! IT WORKED. She totally believes in this love. It’s verifiable!
“That day she also meets the beautiful aristocratic lady from the castle over yonder, who gives her a stunning piece of jewellery when she hears the great news that she is in love. Later the same day, she is crowned Queen of the harvest - wow! Life is unimaginably good for this peasant girl!
“Giselle is captivated by all the wonderful things happening to her. AND, to top it off, her mother allows her to dance. She loves to dance so much, and she loves Albrecht. She dances for love. What could be more appropriate than her dizzying turns of ecstasy to represent those feelings of love? Anyone who has felt those emotions, or who can imagine them, can understand how one could become all wrapped up in the whirlwind of those feelings. (Think Diana, Princess of Wales).
“Simple piqué turns, in a way, to me, I’d describe as cute - maybe even coy. They’re not difficult. THIS is not a moment to make something look easy. The diagonal of en dedans/en dehors turns is hard. ( I might have done a double en dedans to begin, then the two single dehors piqués and repeated the sequence three times before the ending. I don’t mention that as a way to blow my own horn, but to say that rhythmically, down up, up-down up, down up - requires a good start and it is very active with the feet. The busy nature of the footwork represents the tingling of excitement to me. That diagonal has something on each beat of the music. Like when one is nervous, the energy can make one tremble. Giselle’s heart is beating so fast at this point, she’s all nerves and energy. She is thinking that she is the luckiest girl in the world. I feel, at this moment, there are overwhelming feelings of euphoria. If Giselle does not allow herself to be totally enraptured as it builds to the end of the solo, the madness that follows is diminished in terms of story line.
“I’ve gone on way too long. And I’m not sure if I’ve even answered your question of what is in the theatre of her mind, but probably it would be more appropriate to suggest that it’s what is in her heart that is important. That is what affects her mind.”
46.
AM. We know that by 1841 there had already been many Mad Scenes for the heroines of opera. The first Giselle, Carlotta Grisi - who came from a family of singers, and was skilled as both soprano and ballerina - had already sung at least one scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), which has the most famous Mad Scene in opera. In Bellini’s opera I Puritani (1835), her cousin Giulia Grisi had created the role of Elvira, who has not one Mad Scene but two.
The ballet Nina (1813, Louis Milon choreography), recently revived in the 1830s for Fanny Elssler, had also featured a mad scene (its subtitle is ou la folle par amour – or the woman made mad by love. I think another Milon ballet had a mad scene too: Clari(1820). (Milon is interesting. He and P.Gardel co-choreographed a comic Don Quixote ballet called Les Noces de Gamache that was revived as late as 1841. Presumably it was a major influence on M.Petipa’s Don Quixote.)
Some of this vogue for stage madness was due to the cult of Romantic sensibility; some of it derived from nineteenth-century Europe’s discovery of Shakespeare, whose Ophelia (Hamlet) and Lear made great impressions. Hamlet had made a great impression in Paris in 1827.
Today, the Giselle Mad Scene is a big deal. How important an ingredient of Giselle was it in the nineteenth century? Did it change significantly between 1841 and 1910? We know Fanny Elssler made it more powerful than Grisi in the 1840s. What of other Giselles? How different was it from what we now see?
MS: I think the Mad Scene was quite an important ingredient of Giselle in the era of the ballet's first production. Its connections to Lucia di Lammermoor are hard to miss, and it seems likely that Lucia's delusional enactment of her own wedding in her mad scene inspired Adolphe Adam to compose prayer music for the heart of Giselle's mad scene so that she, too, could have a phantom wedding – though this prayer music was discarded before the ballet's premiere.
47.
AM. A colleague draws to my attention that the original libretto describes one vital detail omitted from more or less every Giselle production: Albert tries to kill himself.
DF. I can only say that in our work with performance source material, we've sometimes found that not every detail in libretti seems to have made it to the stage.
48.
AM. She also observes that Justamant describes Giselle cursing Albert at the start of the Mad Scene.
DF. I’ve looked at the Justamant again. Giselle does curse Albert, but just before the Scène de Folie, not at the beginning of it. The last thing Giselle says (to Albert) before the mad scene is, “I curse you” (Justamant, page 112; the mad scene begins on page 113, where it is titled “Scène de Folie”).
49.
AM. Much of the “business” in the Mad Scene today is pretty fixed in most versions – but you gave us a version that was largely unfamiliar in Seattle. Is the one we usually see close to the Petipa Mariinsky one? Is yours taken from the Justamant?
At the Royal Ballet, I’m used to seeing Giselle, after her last dance step, standing still and feeling the chills of death going up her body. Then she goes wild and runs right through the crowd, looking for we know not what. At Ballet Theater, there are no chills of death, and the run is simplified. Do either of these have nineteenth-century precedent?
MS: I don't know about any “chills of death,” but in the early sources you do find her pleading and pleading. It is so sad! Here's what the 1842 Titus score says:
The orchestra waits to start till Hilarion puts the horn to his mouth.
He blows the horn.
The cortege starts to file by. Everybody takes the same position as at the [indistinct; beginning?] of the hunt scene.
[indistinct] Wilfride is still restraining Albert and wants [indistinct].
The prince appears. He finds himself face to face with Hilarion. All of his suite leans in.
The prince asks what's going on. Hilarion points out Albert to him. The prince recognizes Albert. Albert removes his hat. Everybody salutes him (greets him).
Satisfaction of Hilarion.
The prince causes Albert to come downstage and asks him to explain his disguise.
Loys recommends that he be silent.
Bathilde enters. Hilarion to Giselle: “I told you that it was a Prince, a great Lord”.
"But that's my fiancé," says Bathilde. Giselle: "YOUR fiancé?"
"Yes, mine."
Albert tries in vain to keep her from speaking.
Giselle separates them and curses them.
Albert asks Bathilde for her pardon.
She pushes him away and runs toward Giselle.
Giselle falls into the arms of her mother.
[bottom of page] General movement; the crowd in a semi-circle (chartron), the peasants to the actor's left (i.e. stage left), the nobles to the right.
[side margin] Hilarion is to the right, then Berthe and Giselle in her arms. A, B [Albert, Bathilde] the prince and Wilfrid on the same line. The sword remains on the ground. Giselle during her mad scene takes the sword.
Giselle becomes mad; she takes Albert makes him turn while saying "It's not him"; she goes up the middle of the stage.
She calls over there [I think she's looking for him?] “It must be the one I love.”
“He has broken my heart.”
Everybody listens.
She goes toward her mother, coming back to the center; goes down on her knees, de-petals the daisies puts them to her heart.
She takes the sword; plays with it; while she wants to throw herself on the sword. Albert rushes toward [her].
[bottom of page] General movement of dread/fear.
Hilarion [indistinct] comes via the back of the stage near Wilfrid. He accuses the prince of making Giselle go mad. The actors occupy the stage very slowly.
Berthe and Bathilde help Giselle get up [or go upstage].
[Giselle] is backing away, laughing.
“Leave me alone.”
She runs to the left up to the footlights; then to the right.
She dances.
It appears that she is going to die while dancing.
The orchestra must make a rallentando, watching the actress.
She comes back to her senses, remembers all that has just happened. She suffers; she is still suffering. She calls, pleading to everybody; she is still pleading; she continues to plead. Always follow Giselle's movements. [instruction to the orchestra]
She continues to plead. She dies in the arms of her mother. [Note at top of page] When Giselle is dead. Albert throws himself toward her, taking her hand; he touches her heart, saying “It is not beating anymore.”
DF: The Pacific Northwest Giselle mad scene is taken mostly from Justamant with elements from Titus. An important element in both, and also implied in the Stepanov, is the return of Giselle’s reason just before she dies. This is accompanied by a rising sequence in the music that suggests an awakening.
Justamant tells us:
Giselle appears to emerge from a dream; she passes her hand over her forehead and lets her hair loose. She recognizes her mother and throws herself at her mother's neck [throws herself at her mother], embracing her effusively.
Everybody believes that she has come back to her senses.
Giselle also perceives Loys, lets out a cry, and throws herself towards him and [and embraces him?] and leading him looking at him happily.
Loys appears to be happy.
Giselle her suffering expression returns, and she says, “You whom I loved so much, pray to God for me because I am going to die.”
Loys: “Ah, non, no, don't believe it.”
Giselle pulls back en fléchissant (bending backward?) and says to Loys “Adieu! Adieu! I will never see [you] again.”
Loys despairs, and follows her, taking her hands.
Berthe goes towards her daughter and receives her into her arms.
Loys kneels near her.
Giselle seeks him with her hands and lui tenant la tête[holding her head] she goes to embrace him but her life force is lacking and she reverses herself, going backward / renverse en arrière sending with her hands a last kiss to Loys and falls dead in the arms of her mother.
The Stepanov states, “Giselle calls Albert. Albert runs up to her and takes her hand. Giselle says, ‘I bless you.’ Weakness and she dies. Falls down. Mother and Albert try to revive her.”
AM: Alexei, how different is your Bolshoi Mad Scene from what we usually see?
AR: A little different because, coming back to the two notations, Justamant has much more detail than Sergueyev: much more detailed in all the mise-en-scène, in all the descriptions of what the characters feel, of their situations, and of what actually happens onstage. Thanks to him, Bathilde is a much more interesting character in our production, much more forgiving, and very sympathetic to Giselle. She stays until the end of the first act; she trembles and she cries when Giselle dies.
50.
AM: Anton Dolin writes somewhere that Giselle's last gesture was to say to Albert “You will visit my grave”: have you ever encountered any source for this?
MS: I have not encountered this.
51.
AM: Here’s perhaps the most obvious question of all: What causes Giselle’s death? A broken heart? Suicide by the sword? Madness? Dancing too much? Which of the nineteenth century sources say what?
MS: I think she dies of because her heart gets broken by Albert. Somehow a weak heart and excessive dancing are supposed to be a part of it too – at least Berthe has been telling everyone that Giselle has a weak heart.
The incongruity of having several plausible causes of death may be found by looking at the genesis of this libretto. You have to consider the two literary works that inspired Gautier in the first place – Victor Hugo's Fantômes, about a fifteen-year-old Spanish girl who loved to dance but died after catching a chill after a ball, and Heinrich Heine's De l'Allemagne, in which he described Wilis as ghosts of young dance-loving brides-to-be who died before their weddings (for unspecified reasons) and cannot rest peacefully in their graves. At midnight they rise from their graves and dance in the moonlight.
In Gautier's initial sketch, Giselle is like the Spanish teenager in Fantômes: she dances in a prince's ballroom all night long and is surprised by the morning chill. Then the Wili queen, who of course is from Heine's story, places an icy hand on Giselle's heart. After Gautier teamed up with the experienced librettist Vernoi de St. Georges to turn the sketch into a full-fledged libretto (which was published in 1841 at the time of the premiere), Giselle's death seemed to have been caused by a broken heart after Albert’s true identity is exposed. She did get close to stabbing herself with a sword in the mad scene - but, according to the libretto, her mother takes the sword away.
It's a bit confusing because, frankly, excessive dancing just doesn't seem to figure into her death, even though Berthe keeps fearing that dancing will kill her daughter.
Another complication is that in Gautier's “Letter to Heine”, published in La Presse on July 5, 1841 (after the ballet’s premiere), he actually says that Giselle does kill herself with the sword. Albert snatches the sword away from Giselle, but not before “its point had already found its mark”. It had “pierced Giselle's heart, and she dies.”
That is, Gautier makes a big change, saying that Giselle stabbed herself, whereas in the libretto she did not. The scholar Jennifer Fisher has actually held an inquest to determine the cause of Giselle's death. I can see why.
DF: Giselle does not stab herself in the Stepanov.
AM: Ekaterina Vazem, writing of dancing Giselle in 1878, mentions Giselle’s “death from grief when his” <Duke Albert’s> “betrayal was revealed”.
AR: There is no suicide in the music, in my opinion; I don't hear it. Adam usually illustrates literally everything that goes on onstage, so I assume Gautier's idea didn't find its way to the stage.
AM: The historian Susan Au sums up the complexity of the causes of Giselle’s death well in her entry on this ballet in the International Encyclopedia of Dance (2004):
“Giselle’s death may be caused by an actual wound from Albrecht’s sword, inflicted upon herself in her madness (an interpretation that Gautier seems to support); or by the effects of shock and sorrow on a weak heart. According to Frank Ries, Petipa used the latter version because suicide was not acceptable on the nineteenth-century Russian stage. In recording a hand-wiping gesture that Giselle makes, as though to get rid of blood, the English ballerina Moira Shearer states that Karsavina confirmed, ‘Oh yes, she stabs herself. It’s the sword that kills her’ (Newman, 1982). In 1945, Edwin Denby described Alicia Alonso’s Giselle as ‘no tubercular ballerina-peasant but a spirited girl who stabs herself.’”
That suggests that Karsavina chose a death opposite from the one chosen by Petipa. It also suggests that Alonso chose a death from her great ballerina predecessor Alicia Markova, who insisted that Giselle dies of heartbreak.
AR: <2021> She dies of a broken heart. She does try to commit suicide with Albert’s sword, but she’s saved by Albert. It’s interesting that in Gautier’s letter with the synopsis, it was the mother who took the sword from Giselle. Then, in the Soviet productions, Hilarion took it, because he, a villager rather than an aristocrat, had to be much more positive. But in both notations, Justamant and Sergueyev, it’s Albert who decides, Albert who takes the sword from her.
I have consulted six 19th-century rehearsal scores: the so-called “Petipa” and “Titus” 1840s (?) scores from St Petersburg’s Theater Museum, the Bolshoi's 1857 score, a Danish 1862 score that belonged to Gustave Carey, who worked with Grisi, the Sergeev Harvard score, and the one with Cecchetti stamp that belonged to Pavlova. All of them have musically precise action descriptions written between the notes.
There are no discrepancies: it is a suicide attempt - she throws herself on the sword - but Albert takes the sword away in time.
In one of the versions it is Bertha who takes the sword, but it is never Hilarion. I do believe that Gautier's description is an afterthought or may be an idea that he was fond of but that was not used in the actual production.
52.
AM: So all you historians, after extensive research amid a range of nineteenth-century sources, concur that Giselle dies of heartbreak. Yet in the Royal Ballet’s 2021 programme for Giselle, the veteran director Peter Wright, while speaking of his own research into the ballet (research conducted in 1966), says in an interview with the critic Mark Monahan:
“I am insistent that Giselle actually kills herself as in the original production, which is why she is buried in unhallowed ground. Suicide was a mortal sin and so she was denied a Christian burial in hallowed ground, where she would be protected from the evil Wilis. It states very clearly in one of the historian Ivor Guest’s books, which gives an account of the first performance, that ‘Carlotta Grisi, as Giselle, takes Albrecht’s sword, plunges it into her heart and dies.’ Over the years, this has often been debated - especially in Victorian times, when it became unfashionable for a woman to kill herself on the stage. I was quite appalled when I discovered that in Wikipedia’s lengthy account of Giselle, no mention is made of her being a suicide.”
So much for Wright’s research: he’s merely relying on secondary sources here, Ivor Guest and Wikipedia. And this is part of an interview about a production where he himself has elsewhere changed the music, changed the story, revised the traditional choreography, and disregarded strong evidence of what happened in the 1841 original. The Ivor Guest book he quotes here is The Romantic Ballet in Paris (1966), on page 208: “When Hilarion accuses Albrecht of duplicity, Giselle loses her reason and in a final, faltering dance, snatches her lover’s sword and plunges it into her heart.”
MS: Yes, that’s in Ivor's book, and Ivor surely got it from Gautier himself, who wrote three separate accounts of Giselle's death. No blood is drawn in account in the actual libretto. But Gautier, poet and novelist that he was, wrote a piece for La Presse after the premiere, and then later an essay for Les Beautés de l'Opéra, in which she manages to stab herself. Again, the Titus and Justamant manuscripts make it very clear that Giselle did not stab herself in performance.
AM: We’re all indebted to Ivor’s many books for so much interesting detail. It’s disconcerting on those occasions - this is one - where he simply didn’t initially check his assertions well enough. In 1986, twenty years after The Romantic Ballet in Paris, he published Gautier on Dance, his translation of, and commentary on, a selection of Gautier’s writings on dance. This includes the letter to Heinrich Heine that Gautier published in La Presse a week after Giselle’s premiere. As Ivor notes (p.96), this is the first occasion on which the ballet’s hero is named Albrecht rather than Albert. Gautier describes how the sword’s point pierces Giselle’s heart, before “Albrecht” rapidly snatches the weapon away. Here Ivor adds this footnote:
“There has been some controversy about whether Giselle dies from falling on the sword or of a broken heart. On the strength of this description and Gautier’s other account in Les Beautés de l’Opéra, it is clear that his understanding was that the sword found its mark before being snatched away by Albrecht. The incident was arranged so as to be over in a flash, and perhaps the audience was intended to be left in some doubt.” (p.98)
Not only the audience: the other makers of the ballet never depicted this as suicide. Wright is wrong about a number of other points. Above all, Gautier at no point speaks of Giselle being buried in unhallowed ground. He waxes poetic about the forest and the wilis; Act Two was, as he planned, the ballet’s triumph.
(It may also be worth observing that Victorians accepted onstage suicides in such successful operas as Verdi’s Il Trovatore (1853), in which Leonora takes poison onstage and dies of it; Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (1876), whose heroine Brünnhilde sets light to the hall and then rides into the flames, greeting her dead lover as she joins him; and Massenet’s Werther (1892), whose title character shoots himself in the head just before the final act, in which he dies in the heroine’s arms. (Werther was based on Goethe’s famous 1774 novella, The Sorrows of Young Werther, which actually prompted a wave of real-life suicides.) There were several operatic versions of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, notably Gounod’s internationally popular 1867 one, in which the heroine died by stabbing herself. Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1891) shoots herself at the play’s end; she was not Ibsen’s only leading character to take her life.
III.
Questions 53-96. Act Two
53.
AM: Why is Giselle is buried in unconsecrated ground?
Recently, when I asked the Royal Ballet press officer why the company is now stating in its synopsis of Giselle that Giselle kills herself, he replied “Having spoken to the wider team, it seems that by taking her life Giselle cannot be buried in consecrated ground and so is buried in the woods.”
I’ve often heard this explanation before. But I should add that many Royal Giselles, going back to Markova in 1934, have in fact died of a weak or broken heart. Lynn Seymour wanted to commit suicide but was not allowed to by the Royal Ballet. So this new announcement of suicide is a relatively recent decision by either Peter Wright (directing the current production) or Kevin O’Hare (director of the Royal Ballet). One longterm Royal performer confirms that almost all the many Royal Giselles she observed in 1980-2015 died of a weak/broken heart, something she found especially fine with Alina Cojocaru.
Those of you who believe Giselle dies of a weak or broken heart , can you say why she is buried in the forest?
MS: There is nothing in the original sources, or any of the commentary, that suggests Giselle was deliberately buried in unconsecrated ground. One might characterize this “unconsecrated” bit as “fan fiction.”
I would add that the image of someone clutching a cross was something that had been etched into the minds of audiences in Robert le diable. I surmise that the creators of Giselle were very mindful of that popular image, and found a way to make the most of it. A big, lone cross - instead of a bunch of them in a cemetery - works better.
Further, on the matter of Giselle's weak heart: Gautier was inspired by Hugo's poem about the fifteen-year old Spanish girl who died after dancing all night; she took a chill, apparently, and was killed by it (as you know from reading the poem). At the same time, Gautier was inspired by the story of the Wilis. He and Saint-Georges put these two stories together very well, but I consider the weakness of Giselle's heart to be a leftover from Hugo that didn't figure in the plot in a coherent way. Apparently in the early stagings, it was ignored (except for what Berthe says briefly). And certainly elements of a ballet libretto were sometimes jettisoned as choreography was devised, rehearsed, and refined. (For instance, as you know, the "character wilis" in the libretto never made it to the stage as such, at least according to my study of the costumes materials.)
As for suicide by sword: the original libretto does say plainly that the sword is taken away from her before she falls on it. And the early stagings reflect that approach. (Yes, Gautier changed it in a later press write-up, as he did his description of the sensuous atmosphere of the second act.)
AM: I myself - you may differ - feel it is valid to give each ballerina the choice; Gautier seems only to have asked for “une jolie mort” (“a pretty death”), implying he did not think the direct cause of death very important.
But the Royal likes to make itself the custodian of the nineteenth-century classics, so this is something worth pursuing. Before I do, however, I would like your opinions on why Giselle is not buried in a churchyard.
MS: There’s nothing wrong with changing the death-by-broken-heart to death-by-suicide. Still, if the Royal is still making itself the custodian of nineteenth-century classics, as you say, I hope they're not laboring under the impression that suicide by sword reflects the original production.
DF: I concur with Marian on all counts here!
AM: What’s daft is that the stage action and the music make suicide look wholly implausible. A Giselle who plunges the sword into her heart has then to spend a very busy final minute, running around the stage and dancing several phrases, including jumps. In what world do women have that kind of energy after stabbing themselves? In Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet - performed at Covent Garden by many of the same women who play Wright’s Giselle - has very little physical energy left after stabbing herself with Romeo’s dagger.
And Wright hasn’t convinced all his own dancers. I asked one ballerina with extensive experience of dancing Giselle for Wright. I won’t give her name to spare some civil war in the Royal; here’s what she wrote:
“I think fundamentally, Giselle dies of a broken heart. You’re right, Peter always insisted that she stabs herself with the sword and, during the mad section, he did emphasise this point after her last jeté forward at the front of the stage. After this moment in Peter’s version, when she then walks backwards after holding her heart, I used to look down at my hands, see some blood, hide what I saw, before the very last dash around the group. The question is.. did she see blood? Was she imagining death? Was she frightened that her mother would get cross, not only for falling in love with Albrecht but for spoiling her dress?? Many questions filtered through my mind over the years about what was racing through Giselle’s mind at that point.
“Being young, over protected by her superstitious mother, madly in love, feeling guilty by letting her mother down and obviously very fragile - all of the above works for a ballerina, but above all, for me, the portrayal only works if the audience are completely absorbed - that she has taken the audience on her journey to her death….”
54.
AM. Some Giselles have grander graves than others. Photographs in Markova’s Giselle and I of a 1947 production show Markova-Giselle descending steps from her grave to join the wilis, as if she were buried in an imposing monument.
Where on stage was Giselle's grave in 1841 and or in later French/Russian stagings? Downstage or upstage? Stage right or stage center? I've seen 'em all. For me, the action works best if it's downstage right.
MS: The question about where the grave should be is a very good one. Short answer: Giselle is originally buried at far stage right - but then at the very end of the ballet Albrecht moves her to a grave at far stage left (a flowery grave). Let’s come to that later.
DF: In Justamant’s stage layout for Act Two, Giselle's grave is all the way downstage right. The Stepanov diagrams don't indicate where the wings are, but the grave is also downstage right, I'd guess in the first or second wing. At PNB, ours is between the first and second wing, extended from the leg that separates the two. Giselle accesses it from the top of the second wing. This allows for exits downstage of the grave.
AM: The Royal Ballet, otherwise so fond of tradition, is used to Giselle’s grave being placed at the back. This works well for one section before Giselle’s first appearance: the sequence when the wilis kneel and all do grand port de bras as if summoning her. If her grave is behind them, it looks as if that’s why they’re doing the gesture. Let’s come to that in due course.
AR: While we’re talking of the geometries of the stage – something to which we’ll return - in Sergeev's notations, both Hilarion and Albert, followed by Wilfrid, enter in Act II from the same upstage left corner.
In Justamant (which may or may not reflect Coralli's original), Hilarion enters from upstage right, Albert with Wilfrid from upstage left.
DF: The Justamant is in keeping with “his and her” sides of the stage.
55.
AM: Do any of the nineteenth-century versions place any other graves in this part of the forest? (ABT has some old ones across the stage from Giselle’s new one. This is logical, if you accept Berthe’s mime that the wilis rise from the graves.)
On the other hand, doesn’t Gautier’s original scenario suggest a remarkably international gathering of wilis, presumably convening globally to welcome Giselle to the sisterhood? If so, few if any of them are buried around Giselle’s village.
And is this hallowed or unhallowed ground? Is Giselle buried in the forest rather than the churchyard because she committed suicide?
MS: I don't know about graves other than Giselle's. In Justamant's drawing, the only grave is Giselle's.
It's true the other wilis appear every night to dance, and then lose their powers and fade away at sunrise. But I know of no indication that there is a whole cemetery.
And yes, Gautier's original scenario, as well as the official libretto of 1841 that he wrote with St.-Georges, does feature a remarkably international gathering of wilis, in native costumes! I don't think it was ever performed with the native costumes, though – I looked in the list of fabrics used for wili costumes and couldn't find anything listed for character costumes like those mentioned in the libretto. There is a lithograph showing character wilis in their native garb, however. I assume the artist was inspired by the libretto.
56.
AM: How does Act Two begin? Mary Skeaping’s historically informed production for London Festival Ballet, still performed by English National Ballet, commenced the second act with the scene you’ve described, Marian, in answer to question 1 above : Hilarion and other male peasants are in the forest at night; the other men are playing dice and have been carousing with alcohol; the wilis are seen.
MS. Yes, we restored that scene in Seattle. As i’ve said, the element of comedy actually heightens the poignancy of the main body of the second act.
AR. In Moscow in 2019, I simply showed Hilarion alone in the forest with the visions of the wilis frightening him. But for the United Ukrainian Ballet in 2022, I’m restoring the whole scene with the peasants.
57.
AM: Did all the nineteenth-century sources regard Myrthe and the wilis as ambiguous creatures? - both death-dealing spectral villainesses and beautiful embodiments (and former victims) of dance-mania?
To me, Myrthe’s dances - at least the ones I’m used to seeing in the “traditional” versions (they’re especially effective in ABT’s staging, but I have loved the Kirov’s and the 1980-86 Royal one too) - have several elements of dance-mania or dance enthusiasm about them; she’s not just a figure of man-hating vengeance. But what did the nineteenth century sources say?
MS: The music gives us our best information here, and there is no question that Myrtha is not just a one-sided character, and moreover that she is closely connected to nature. The manuscripts tell us about the choreography; the music tells us the aspects of her character. Her opening scene features sounds of the forest, and she emerges from the flowers.
The context of the 1840s is important too. For when all of the Wilis gather together, they are engaging in a popular scene type of the day: the all-female ensemble gathering, which typically featured a group of attractive women engaging in some sort of activity for their own pleasure. Such activities could include stretching, bathing, brushing their hair, playing with lengths of fabric, and so forth. (An example is the bathing scene in Act Two of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots.) The musicologist Helena Spencer is working on a book about these scenes now. In Giselle, you see the wilis having fun together in the woods and then, after a while you come to see that these attractive females have a mean, vicious side.
AM: That’s why there were ballets set in harems or seraglios (Filippo Taglioni’s La Révolte au Sérail, where Marie Taglioni’s character was called Zulme); that’s why Ingres painted a seraglio bathing scene; and that’s why the harem scene comes round again in Le Corsaire. All that feminine pulchritude!
DF: I’d like to see more productions of Giselle that play up the duality of the Wilis. I don’t think it's enough to present them simply as robotic, cruel zombies. They're more interesting than that. I think audiences of the 1840s probably appreciated seeing a pleasant female-ensemble scene turn into a murder scene! It's great theater, especially when the conventions of the day led the audience to expect something sweet and innocuous. The music gives no indication of the dark side of the Wilis (at least not while they’re on stage) until the scene with the old man and the peasants.
Justamant suggests the Wilis’ backstory through Myrtha’s mime. When she first summons the Wilis, she says, “All you who sleep in the earth and who like me died from love, I your queen, I want you at the sound of my voice to come out of your tombs.” Later, when she summons Giselle, she says to the Wilis, “There…a young girl who like you and like me has died from love, I am going to have her come here.” All of them loved so passionately that the loss of that love caused them to die.
AM: That’s close to the words sung by the devil Bertram in Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable (1831) before summoning the nuns from their graves for the famous ballet. “Nonnes qui reposez sous cette froide pierre, m’entendez-vous?... Relevez-vous! … Roi des enfers, c’est moi qui vous appèle! Moi, damné comme vous…” : “Nuns who rest beneath this cold stone, do you hear me?... Arise!... It is, king of hell, who calls you! I, damned like you…” The difference is that the nuns and he are damned: Robert le diable is about perdition and redemption.
AR: If you compare the wilis to the sylphides, they’re very different animals. The sylphides are like butterflies: they dance, and they get a bit upset when their sister is killed. But the wilis - I love Gautier’s description of them - have a complex history: before they died they loved dancing, they have not married. Their need to hunt man and their love for dancing give a very interesting colour to them.
Maya Plisetskaya once remarked that, when the Bolshoi goes on tour, the company at home in Moscow goes on dancing, usually Giselle and Chopiniana. We don’t even need to change the costumes, she said! So the company has long traditions in these ballets that nobody has questioned for a long time. But we’re working with the corps on characterisation and changing quite a few details.
58.
AM: I wonder when the tradition began of having Myrthe make her first entrance just bourréeing, veiled, across the stage and off again, her head and arms motionless - the Woman in White, spectral immobile apart from those string-of-pearls bourrées. Any idea?
At ABT, she enters that way but then extends one arm dramatically as she exits. To me, that actually diminishes her mystery considerably. It works much better if we think “Who in the world was that mysterious apparition?” - a question she begins to answer only when she returns to the stage.
AR: Myrtha appears veiled in Justamant; Sergeev does not say. But her veil disappears as soon as Myrtha steps on stage from the elevator. (According to the notations, nobody does any dancing while wearing a veil, I am afraid to say!)
MS: The notations in the 1842 score tell us that “Myrthe emerges from the flowers” as we hear the harp arpeggios in Eb. In the 6th measure “She is unveiled” and when the muted violins start playing, “She dances.”
It is easier to find out details in the Justamant score, which shows that she appears (in her veil) rising up on a trap stage left. As soon as she arrives at stage level, the veil “disappears below”. Then she bourrées “making a turn” upstage right, and then back around, raising her arm gradually as she goes. Then the poses start.
DF: In the Stepanov, Myrtha rises out of a trap in the stage floor, walks forward, turns right and continues walking toward her arabesque promenade just right of center. Only after the promenade and pose, she bourrées in a counterclockwise circle around the stage, finally arriving at center (page 3, upper right box). The notation gives no information about her veil.
AM: You’re breaking my heart about the veil-less-ness.
Myrthe's first dance - which (in most versions) is all bourrées crossing the stage and then revolving (on one spot after another) in further bourrées - this is very similar to the first section of Raymonda's Act III solo, is it not?
Is it danced in Seattle (I forget), and do we know for whom it was choreographed?
DF: In the Stepanov, “Wili [Myrtha] rises out of the hatch / quiet with motif [referring to the music] /.” The ground plan rubric states “walk” as she travels from center to stage right. After the arabesques en tournant, she bourrées in a large circle back to center (page 3, upper right box).
Next, she “runs” to upstage right, where she mounts a piece of stagecraft that carries her across upstage (“rides by on a cart”) to stage left where she dismounts and “runs out” to begin her second dance in 3/4 time. Justamant also shows that Myrtha bourrées in a large circle to center (clockwise this time, “…et en pas de bouré continue sur les orteils”, page 135, paragraph two) before crossing the stage from right to left on the stage machinery. So, both early notations indicate a passage of bourrées, but neither appear as extensive as what is done today. Some of that time was taken up with the stage machinery involved in Myrtha’s initial appearance.
AR: In both Sergeev and Justamant, Myrtha appears upstage left from under the stage (as in the Kirov production), does couple of steps and runs off (no bourrées on point!) to place herself on the cart to cross the stage from right to left standing on it in arabesque.
AM: I think we have a discrepancy here between Doug and Alexei about whether Myrthe does or doesn’t bourrée.
But it certainly seems that the extensive bourrées that have been such a thrilling feature with many Myrthes are actually a post-Petipa addition.
DF: The Giselle notation also includes passages of travelling bourrées for the Wilis.
MG: I remember a tour to China around 1965, when I was performing Myrtha - and the first bourrée across with veil was greeted with hysterical laughter everywhere we went! (Maybe their Myrtha just did not wear a veil?)
MS: That brings something to mind: I saw ABT's Giselle in Minneapolis around 1978, and Myrthe's first bourrée acorss with veil was greeted with a big stir and laughter.
AR: She then comes back for her first solo. She appears veiled (in Justamant; Sergeev does not say), but the veil disappears as soon as Myrtha steps on stage from the elevator.
AM: What kind of mechanism brings her onto the stage? At the Kirov in the 1980s, Myrthe used to fly through the air high above the stage in one part of this dance.
59.
AM: Myrthe's dances as seen in Seattle: are they all from the 1899 notation?
DF: Myrtha's dances are mostly from Stepanov notation, circa 1899, with the exception of parts of the opening dance, primarily because the notation calls for Myrtha to ride a mechanism across the stage from right to left, and we weren’t able to do that.
Peter took inspiration for the ground plan of Myrtha’s entrance Beaumont’s description and the current Paris production, in which she bourrées across upstage with veil on, then enters again stage left sans veil. In place of the flying, we again consulted Beaumont and Paris.
AR: You can see how current practise shows many slight modifications since the Sergeev notation was made. Various breaks have been inserted over the years.
In our version, Myrthe has mostly the same steps – entrechat-six, grands jetés, sauts de basque – but the notation gives her no breaks: she doesn’t breathe, she doesn’t run from one corner to another. She keeps on dancing, constantly: it’s much more difficult.
60.
AM: Unlike Giselle or Albert, Myrthe gets to announce herself with a three-part solo scene like an operatic scena: recitative (sustained bourrées to and fro around the stage), aria (the arabesques voyagées), cabaletta (the faster sequel, with jumps and side-to-side steps). How is this operatic-like structure shown in Adam’s score?
MS: He doesn't mention the terms “recitative” or “cabaletta”, but of course those sections are there, and I think people would have recognized them. After all, opera and ballet were shown together at the Paris Opéra and audiences were acquainted with both genres, and there were many shared conventions. Giselle was almost always performed on the same bill with an opera or opera act. (On the night of Giselle's première, an act of Rossini's Moïse was performed.)
DF: I love Myrtha’s progression. If you think of her doing this each night, you can envision her quiet, contemplative state during the first solo, her simple, controlled movements in the second, building to the abandon (even joy, freedom!) she evinces during the third, as though she is fully alive again. Only then is she ready to summon the other Wilis, who follow her as they progress through their own nightly awakening.
61.
AM: Myrthe's first step center stage after the bourrées or opening appearance: what is it?
I think that usually we see her do arabesque, then circle around on the spot in that arabesque, arch back in port de bras cambré. Somewhere we see her do penchée and then port de bras cambré back. This forward/backward sequence - what the Russians sometimes call arabesque renversée - is a variation on what the Bayadère Shades do again and again in their famous entrance - arabesque forward, port de bras backward. It’s surely very Petipa.
Does the notation suggest any resemblance between Myrthe's phrase and the Shades'?
DF: The Stepanov gives: Glissade to the left, stepping into a flat-footed arabesque (90 degrees with stretched knees) turning a full circle to the left (counter clockwise); close fifth position right foot back; then développé through coup de pied to tendu front with the left foot, body first leaning forward then arching back with the torso twisted to the right. No arms are given. This entire combination is repeated to the other side.
I’m looking again at the Bayadère Shades’ entrance from December 1900. They perform a step forward onto a flat right foot, left leg extended behind 90 degrees with a 45 degree bend in the knee (a “long” attitude). Closing fifth is not given. The next step show the right foot tendu front, then three steps forward, the first onto the extended right foot. So, yes, similar, but not identical.
AM: And this same sequence of (a) arabesque aiming forward (with full circle on flat foot) (b) port de bras backward is also what Petipa’s Swanilda does when first convincing Coppélius that she is Coppélia come to life.
62.
AM: I was amazed by how unlike some of Myrthe’s steps in the Pacific Northwest version are to those we’re used to seeing. Since the dances we see for Myrthe at both the Royal Ballet (deriving in theory from Nicholas Sergueyev) and the Russian companies have more or less the same steps, this suggests someone early in the twentieth century re-choreographed the role. Do you have any ideas about this?
DF: That appears to be the case, but I have no concrete knowledge about who or when. Many passages of petit allegro in Petipa ballets were altered or re-choreographed in the 20th century.
63.
AM: What about veils for the wili corps? Do they all appear with veils? Do they start to dance while wearing veils? When do the veils vanish? This varies according to the production.
AR: In both Sergeev and Justamant, the corps ladies appear veiled from the wings, then Myrtha tells them to get rid of it, then they make their first formation and start dancing. No one is dancing under the veil, I am afraid!
AM: What about Moyna and Zulma? Veiled on first entry?
DF: In Stepanov, no veils are mentioned for the entrance of Moyna (Egorova) or Zulme (Pavlova).
64.
AM: Are there any hints or possibilities in the notation that Petipa or his predecessors intended a parallel between the peasant corps in Act One and the wili corps in Act Two?
As I’ve mentioned, some productions show the Act One peasants dividing into left/right groups and then intermesh in temps levés not so very unlike the wilis’ cow-hops or arabesques voyagées (but brighter, and more upward). One of two other steps sometimes pre-echo the wilis, too: a side-to-side alternation of tendu positions, for example, from left to right and back again.
MS: Yes, there are other similarities, and they make for a potent mirroring effect, as do the temps levés and cow-hops. Here are two of them:
(a) In Act One, Albert seeks a relationship with Giselle, and is drawn to her cottage, and therefore he crosses from stage left to stage right. Wilfride follows and tries to convince him to depart, but Albert holds fast. After some discussion Albert – who has positioned himself closer to Giselle's cottage stage right – orders Wilfrid away. Wilfrid assents and departs upstage right.
In Act Two, Albert is again making an approach to Giselle's dwelling place stage right, only now it is a grave. He kneels at the grave, and after a while Wilfrid tries to pull him away toward stage left; after some discussion Albrecht orders him away. Wilfrid assents and departs, upstage left.
(b) Early in Act One, Giselle looks for Albert light-heartedly in their opening scene together; Albrecht is hiding upstage right; he is behind a door. Giselle and Albert finally make contact at mid-stage. In Act Two, it is Albert who is looking for Giselle, and desperately so. And now she's the one who is hiding upstage right; she is behind some bullrushes. They finally make contact – of sorts – at mid-stage.
65.
AM: Throughout Act Two, we see steps recurring: the arabesque voyagée, the ceremonious pas de bourrée (with feet passing through retiré), the saut de basque, the triple rond de jambe en l'air (sometimes as part of a développé à la seconde, I think, but I may be misremembering). Are these all in the Stepanov notation?
If so, do they become a shared language between Myrthe, the wilis, and Giselle? And is it too fancy to see them as signs of a theme-and-variations mentality in Petipa (and/or his Giselle predecessors)?
DF: In the Stepanov, the feet rarely reach retiré, rather coup de pied. Ronds de jambe are notated as single or double—double ronds de jambe have the knee bent 130 degrees, at retiré level. These steps recur and the vocabulary is fairly restricted, so I agree the steps seem to be thematic in Giselle.
AM: Alexei, when the wilis do their famous hops across the stage in Act Two, where are their heads?
AR: The line of the heads and upper torsos is up. We’re tried it down, but we all prefer it up. I’m afraid I have to disappoint you.
AM: Again, you break my heart. But I can tell you from long experience: the drama deepens when the wilis address the floor in those hops.
They’re similar to the hops performed by the swan-maidens in the first lakeside scene of Swan Lake, especially during the adagio. (I suspect Ivanov took a lot of ideas from Giselle Act Two.) But the Giselle wili hops, when they addressing the floor, have a particularly dark insistence. When they’re done with erect spines and heads raised, they become merely academicist. If they win applause, it’s for good form, but not for tightening the dramatic tension.
On YouTube, the 1979 film of the Bavarian State Ballet Giselle with Lynn Seymour, Rudolf Nureyev, and Monica Mason a fast tempo for the wilis’ arabesques voyagées, but the downward angle of their heads and eyes are just as both companies of the Royal Ballet and most Western companies (including, I believe, the Ballets Russes) used to be until the 1980s.
66.
AM: Do we see this as theme-and-variations choreography? Petipa’s choreography for the “grand pas des wilis” has been dated as 1884, yes? If so, that’s the same date as his St Petersburg production of Coppélia, where there’s a theme-and-variations for Swanilda and her eight girlfriends in Act One. (Around the year 1940, Balanchine told Edwin Denby that the Coppélia number was the inspiration for all his own choreography; Arlene Croce once claimed that all his ballets used the idea of variations on a theme, and certainly he kept returning to that format.) The principal theme step of Petipa’s Coppélia number is Swanilda’s explosive jump from fifth position to piquée arabesque. Now, Petipa took his theme-and-variations from the Delibes music: the score calls it “theme slave varié (Slav theme and variations).” Possibly Petipa took his choreographic idea from some theme and variations in the Paris Coppélia. But it’s interesting that, around the same year, 1884, Petipa is again using something like a theme-and-variations format for Myrtha and the wilis without the music prompting it.
67.
AM: On the other hand, Petipa – whose vocabulary can be so varied, as for the six fairy godmothers in The Sleeping Beauty – here chooses a generally restricted and very emphatic array of steps. Perhaps “theme-and-variations” is wrong; there isn’t much variation here, it’s more like an echo-chamber effect. But these are the wilis’ few steps. Petipa’s vocabulary is sometimes so wide, but not here. There’s something obsessive about it: a kind of relentless expressionist force, which percolates the act. When the wilis are waiting for Albert to return for his last big dance, and the music builds in a Rossinian crescendo, they do (at least at American Ballet Theatre) a phrase on the spot that includes saut de basque – the step that Myrthe did en manège around the stage early on.
A very striking jump, seen in Russian and some Western productions, is the temps levé with a demi-fouetté, so that the body pivots in the air while the limbs maintain their outstretched line. The wilis do it en masse, flinging their arms up at certain points; and in some productions Hilarion does it when they’re dancing him to death. Something about that demi-fouetté sauté looks twentieth-century to me, though. What jumps occurs for the corps in the Stepanov notation?
DF: Jumps notated for the wilis include: temps levé with back leg in low attitude, grand fouetté sauté with leg extended 90 degrees (Wilis pas); also demi fouetté sauté with leg extended 45 degrees (death of Hilarion); jeté with front leg extended 45 degrees and back leg extended 90 degrees with a 45-degree bend of the knee (after Hilarion’s death).
68.
AM: The Petipa dances for Myrthe, the wilis, and Giselle date from when?
Most of the same steps - certainly the arabesque voyagée and ronds de jambe en l'air (as part of a développé à la seconde) - recur in the Ivanov 1895 lakeside dances for the swans and Odette. Do you see these as Ivanov taking ideas from Petipa's wilis? I do.
DF: I date the notation of Act Two circa 1899 or after because Pavlova is named in the notation for Zulme’s role and she first danced that part in 1899. The steps may date back to the 1884 production or earlier.
Maybe Ivanov was copying the Wilis in Swan Lake. There are many female corps de ballet scenes in the notated ballets: Le jardin animé, Swans, Wilis, Bayadères, Naiads, etc. It would be necessary to identify the notated steps for all these groups and compare them, rather than using the steps into which the earlier steps morphed, which— I have found, in general—became more homogenous between ballets as time went on, skewing the data, if you will.
AM: Well, I think Ivanov with his swan-maidens was deliberately using an even more restricted vocabulary than Petipa was for the wilis - and I think he was taking the wilis as his model. (The Ivanov swan-maidens feel different today because the upper body has become so heroic, but I strongly suspect many of the swan-maiden movements for arms and torso weren’t there before 1920.)
69.
AM: Near the end of their dance, the wilis all kneel and do a grand port de bras. How is that notated? At the Royal Ballet, where the grave is at the back of the stage, they seem to be summoning Giselle. At American Ballet Theatre, where her grave is on stage right and with other productions, the two groups of wilis, left and right, seem to be addressing an empty space behind them: why?
DF: In Stepanov, the Wilis kneel in three horizontal lines facing upstage. They bow forward with their arms crossed on their chests. In Justamant, the Wilis finish their dance in four vertical rows with Myrtha, Moyna and Zulme downstage of them. The plié in fourth position facing stage right, then “all turn very slowly to the right [facing upstage as they turn] by raising the right arm and arrive with the right shoulder a little to the public [facing stage left].”
70.
AM: Shouldn’t Giselle also be veiled on her first appearance? In most productions, Myrthe and the wilis wear veils when we first see them – but almost no Giselle does so any more. In the past, I’ve seen Giselle enter with a veil, which Myrthe then whips off. This makes complete sense to me. But what evidence for veils is there with any of them?
AR: In Sergeev, when Myrtha touches her with her magical branch, Giselle steps down from the elevator and the stagehands from under the stage pull the veil down.
Now, Justamant has the diagonal lines of wilis for this first appearance of Giselle as well as later in the act.
AM: How very interesting. I don’t remember seeing that diagonal until the wilis are presenting Hilarion to Myrtha.
71.
AM. For Markova, it was crucial that Giselle had wings - which snapped up as she first bowed in homage to Myrtha. (I’m not sure, however, that the films of her show them snapping up.) There are photographs of Spessivtseva and Fonteyn both wearing wings in Act Two.
Remind me if the Pacific Northwest staging gave wings to Giselle. If not, would you like them?
And what about wings for all the wilis?
DF: Giselle and all the PNB Wilis have wings, but we don’t have a mechanism for making them appear/open during Giselle’s initiation scene.
AR: Both Justamant and Sergeev have this moment of the opening of Giselle's wings. I have never seen it on stage. I’ll definitely try it at the Bolshoi.
AM: I’ve heard that some Giselles would tug a cord in their bodice as they bowed to Myrthe; the cord made the wings pop up. I’d love to see this: I assume it made Giselle the wili seem transformed from chrysalis to butterfly, so to speak.
MG: The cord which is referred to making wings pop up - this is done always in “La Sylphide”, but to make the wings drop off in that case, rather then pop up.
AR: The same is done to Giselle (in Sergeev) - when Myrtha touches her with her magical branch, Giselle steps down from the elevator and the stagehands from under the stage pull the veil down. The corps de ballet ladies (in both Sergeev and Justamant) appear veiled from the wings, then Myrtha tells them to get rid of it, then they make their first formation and start dancing. No one is dancing under the veil I am afraid. According to the notations.
AM: I’ve just checked with Monica Mason, who danced Myrtha with the Royal Ballet from the 1960s to the 1980s. She replied “I’m sure I‘be always had wings. The trick is to prevent the veil catching on them on the first entrance. The same applies to the corps.”
MG: The reason why wings are often omitted for Giselle in Act Two is practical. They’re very much in the way of partnering, as I recently found when coaching a young couple in the lead roles.
72.
AM: Does the Stepanov notation show her bowing in reverence to Myrtha and then hopping rapidly on the spot, as we always now see? If so, in what position is her leg during those hops? Usually today it’s an elongated attitude (what the British used to call “attibesque”).
And then do the notations show her flying in jumps that eventually lead her offstage in a diagonal?
It’s hard here for me not to see this dance along chrysalis-into-butterfly lines. She was motionless. Suddenly she hops rapidly, excitingly, on the spot; but she still seems locked in reverence to Myrtha. Then suddenly she takes to the air. The other wilis jump, but none of them seem as airborne as she. Is that part of the nineteenth-century view of her, both French and Russian?
DF: The Stepanov doesn’t give the bowing detail, but the notation provides little detail in this passage. The hops are notated, turning clockwise with the right leg extended 90 degrees and bent 45 degrees at the knee. Giselle next performs sissonnes, extending both legs to the side 90 degrees before landing à la seconde. Each sissonne is followed by a jeté, landing with the front foot in cou-de-pied, and an assemblé. The combination of sissonne, jeté, assemblé is performed four times as Giselle traces a zigzag pattern across the stage, travelling upstage. She runs to the upstage left corner and begins a diagonal of pas de bourrée en tournant on demi-pointe followed by a jeté with both legs extended 45 degrees (the back leg is bent 45 degrees at the knee). She performs this combination four times, then the notation suggests turns on demi pointe, finishing in arabesque on a flat right foot, no plié, left leg stretched 90 degrees. She runs offstage.
In the Justamant, after the hops in arabesque, Giselle says “I’ll flit” or “fly” (“Moi je vais voltiger”) and then zigzags across the stage, but here she performs a grand sissonne double rond de jambe en l’air en dehor, followed by an assemble derriere. The combination is performed three times, followed by a grand pirouette à la seconde at centerstage, finishing en pointe (“en deux pointes”) in fifth position. Sandra Noll Hammond has suggested “pointe” may refer to demi-pointe (with “sur les orteils” referring to full pointe).
MG: I’m mystified by reference to Justamant’s “grand pirouette à la seconde centerstage finishing en pointe in fifth position”. I wonder what that looked like!
73.
AM: Giselle’s entrance solo here has much in common with the entrance solo of Nikiya in the first act of La Bayadère. Nikiya ends the way Giselle begins – hopping around on the spot in an extended low attitude, though less fast. Nikiya is in thrall to the High Brahmin and the temple; Giselle is in thrall to Myrthe and her wili calling.
Probably Petipa modeled aspects of Nikiya, Solor, and the Shades on Giselle, Albrecht, and the wilis. In both, the atmosphere becomes Orphic: the hero enters the realm of the dead in search of the woman he still loves. And in both the dead spirits are dancers, whether wilis or ghostly bayadères. The Shades and wilis share certain steps, notably the arabesque allongée stretching forward in space, and a demi-fouetté sauté with arm up-flung.
Yet we think of the Bayadère Shades scene as classical, Giselle as Romantic. They’re different partly because the Bayadère scene is calm, Elysian, timeless, whereas the wilis’ scene has terrific narrative suspense. Still, Andre Levinson, who saw Pavlova dance both ballets, called them both Romantic. How closely related do you find the scenes? Have they grown more unalike over the decades?
DF: The moment in the Shades coda where Nikiya sautés across the stage ahead of Solor, who follows then catches her for a vertical lift (I think the entire passage is partnered today), seems very Romantic. He’s chasing the elusive sylph.
74.
AM: Now Albert makes his mournful, diagonal, entrance with cloak and lilies. I’m not the first to guess is that this, in 1841, was on based on Orpheus (Orphée) in Gluck’s opera, entering the Elysian fields in the aria “Quel nouveau ciel” with cloak and lyre.
(My hero Adolphe Nourrit - the pre-eminent important Orphée of the 1820s and 1830s and pre-eminent tenor of all the Gluck opera in French in that era - had devised the scenario of the 1832 La Sylphide, whose Schneitzhoeffer score has an Orphée quote. I believe Nourrit – the foremost star of the Opéra from the early 1820s until 1837 – haunted opera and ballet after his death by suicide in 1839. Bournonville, who worshipped him, evokes him in Napoli, where Gennaro – Bournonville’s own role – is closely based on Nourrit’s role as Masaniello in the 1828 opera La Muette de Portici.)
Does the notation or Justamant's description suggest any floor pattern for Albrecht's entrance in Act Two?These days, Albert, when not staged in Seattle, tends to do (a) the pious slow diagonal from upstage left with the lilies (b) a meaningless rush around the stage to show how prettily his cloak can billow out behind him (c) a final return to piety as he sees her grave, downstage right, and slowly advances to it. This entry has become a bad cliché, but I suspect (b) is an addition of recent decades.
DF: The Justamant notation is very specific and clear. Albert enters from “his” side of the stage: stage left. We first see him, with Wilfride, on a raised pathway at far stage left. That path leads them offstage, then they re-appear down a ramp from further downstage left (the stage was very deep). Albert crosses downstage diagonally directly to Giselle’s grave.
The Stepanov has Albert and Wilfride entering upstage left and crossing the stage diagonally: “they look at where is Giselle’s grave.”
At PNB, Albert and Wilfride enter down the stage right ramp (we don’t have a stage left ramp), cross upstage to stage left, then diagonally downstage to Giselle’s grave.
AM: You said earlier that there’s no nineteenth-century evidence for lilies in “Giselle”. Do you know how Albert may have made his entrance? Was he cloaked? Was he carrying anything?
DF: In Justamant, we get some reference to attire: “arriving at the foot of the tomb he [Albert] takes his hat off, lets his cape fall and kneels, and lets his head fall into his hands”.
MS: I can’t tell if he was carrying flowers or not. Later, in this scene, he puits flowers on Giselle’s grave, but he might pick those flowers himself when the time comes. (See my comments above about his entrance with Wilfride. Remember that the libretto calls for a very lush setting with flowers and plants; he wouldn’t have to bring flowers with him,
AM: Maina, as you said on January 3, 2019, Dolin seems to have changed his Albert a bit over the decades. I suspect that, with an intelligent dancer like yourself, he would have enjoyed recalling Spessivtseva as best he could – though I confess I’m wary of Dolin, who certainly seems to have fabricated several versions of dance history here and there.
Anthony Dowell recalled in November 2018 that Michael Somes in the 1960s tried to give him the entrance that Somes had learnt from Anton Dolin. Albert had a mime scene, saying “There is the grave of the woman I loved” and so on; Dowell found it too dated, and chose to do the mimeless entrance that Nureyev had recently instated. But this isn’t the version that Dolin taught you….
MG: I never heard or saw Dolin show that mime speech - I know I would have remembered!
75.
AM: Giselle now makes two fleeting appearances Albert doesn’t know whether he’s dreaming her or seeing her. At this point, he often runs ardently around the stage, seeking her in vain. Then, fairly centrally, he kneels, as if praying for the vision to return. This run, this kneeling: is there any nineteenth-century authority for them?
AR: The running is a later addition. It’s not in Justamant, not in Sergeev. But Justamant has Albert kneeling by her grave; Sergeev does not say.
MG: Here is where I very well remember Dolin doing a longer mime scene, just before he kneels and before Giselle comes on for the circling in centre bit. “Please, please, stay with me - don’t fly away.” But other men felt silly doing that, so it disappeared.
DF: In Justamant, Albert first sees Giselle twice peeking through the reeds upstage of her grave. She runs across the stage and returns “flying” back across the stage on a mechanism. Albert thinks he’s losing his mind and falls to one knee.
In both sources, Albert tries to catch Giselle, but he doesn't run around. He ends the sequence kneeling in both as well.
In Sergeev, Albert sees Giselle in the reeds upstage right. He runs toward her from centerstage and wants to embrace her, but she disappears. She re-appears and runs past him, does a tour, jete, and exits stage left. The she traverses left to right on a flying mechanism. Albert says. "She flies here, but this is my fantasy [dream]. I will pray to God." He kneels and she re-enters from up right and runs around him, finishing to his right.
Here is the Justamant account:
Giselle
Appears behind the reeds which she parts, and near the tomb, she looks at Albrecht
[very vivid clear drawing here of Giselle peeking thru the rushes !!]
Albert
at the sound of the rustling of the reeds turns his head to the right and perceives Giselle, runs toward her
Giselle
soon disappears
Albert
arrives near the reeds and doesn't see anything. Stops himself, surprised, and upward [?], then he pulls back, looking, and says
"It seemed to me that I saw the face of Giselle! Oh! It's an illusion"
Giselle
appears in the middle of the second bunch of reeds
Albert
at the new noise of the reeds turns left, back to the audience, and runs toward Giselle
Giselle
closes the reeds [which she had parted] and dashes upstage toward stage left
Albert
seeing nothing looks among the reeds which he half-opens, then pulling back, surprised, he says
"But this time I saw her well [clearly] amongst the reeds. It was certainly her."
He comes downstage looking on all sides
[p. 171]
Giselle
is lying on a char [stage machinery, above according to the picture] across the stage and disappears in the wings
Albert
Facing stage left perceives her; staying in place and following the movement (mouvent) and points with his left hand
He runs to the side where she disappeared and says
"She left". He comes downstage talking
"But it's certainly her. But God allows this to those who lie in the earth to leave [their graves] to appear? No, it's impossible. It's a vision."
[p. 172]
Giselle
appears behind the second clump of reeds
Albert continuing to speak
It's my head, [I'm losing my mind] he carries his other hand to his heart "It's my heart which suffers. Oh my God, have mercy on me"
[Giselle]
She advances a little
[Albert]
He falls to his knees, his head lowered in one of his hands.
76.
AM: The pas de deux when Giselle the ghost first appears to Albert is, today, often so slow and so mannered. (At ABT, Giselle’s first step on entrance is to do the slowest arabesque in history, through two or more mini-phrases of the music: it gradually becomes a penchée. The whole pas de deux tends to be Mannerist from then on, though I dimly remember some yet more exaggerated and slow accounts decades ago with other companies.)
I’m not sure which sources you used in Seattle, but the brisker tempi were pleasure throughout.
I do remember that Peter Boal interpolated the Bolshoi overhead lift (which not even all Western stagings use - it's generally not used at the Royal to this day, I believe).
What can you tell me about the choreography for this pas de deux in the various nineteenth-century versions? Karsavina writes rather obsessively about certain linking steps here in one of her books, with Beriosova demonstrating in photographs: do you know this one?
DF: Now Giselle enters from the reeds and passes behind him and poses in arabesque. She circles around him with jetés en tournant and blows him a kiss, which he somehow feels. As he reaches for her, she evades his grasp and dances away from him. Finally, he takes her by the wings. Giselle raises her right leg in front of her and leans back; Albert, still hanging onto Giselle’s wings, performs an arabesque as she leans forward.
AM: What a remarkable touch: I’m sure several Alberts today would love to restore that!
DF: They separate and Albert moves toward her as she picks flowers at stage left. They travel together around the stage in a clockwise circle. Giselle throws the flowers and Albert picks them up. She continues to dance around him as he falls to his knees and begs her, extending both hands. After several more dance sequences, she passes beneath his grasp and exits upstage left.
In the Stepanov, Giselle also appears in the reeds. Albert runs to her, but she disappears. She runs out again and poses, right foot tendu back, then performs a tour jeté and runs across the stage, exiting left. As in Justamant, she traverses the staging, left to right, “flying” on a mechanism.
AM: As with Myrthe, does this mechanism take her across the floor (like the Sugar Plum Fairy in Balanchine’s Nutcracker) or through the air (which was done by the Kirov in the early 1980s, at least in its home theatre)?
DF: Albert also holds her by the wings in the Stepanov, Giselle performing three low piqués attitudes en pointe. She passes in front of him and he lifts her by the waist as she performs a tour jeté. This is repeated. (This is the step that became the held overhead lift.)
AM: I believe that a number of Giselles and Alberts at the Royal Ballet went on doing the tour jeté lift into at least the 1980s.
DF: Next, they both perform sous-sus, plié, five steps, plié, assemblé, crossing each other at center stage. The notation is unclear, but the musical timing suggests this combination is danced four times.
Giselle exits stage left (here, the tempo changes to “allegro”), re-enters, “picks flowers from a bush,” and both perform assemblé and demi tour jeté (i.e., legs raised only 45 degrees) four times, crossing each other each time. Giselle performs two relevé arabesques, then both run to the upstage left corner. Giselle travels on the diagonal, performs a large jeté, “throws the flower back over the head,” and repeats the diagonal. She runs off stage right.
Albert picks up the flowers, kisses them, and says, “She gave the flower.”
Giselle is “swung on a branch 2 times” above her grave and drops flowers (here, the tempo is marked “plus lent” or “more slowly”).
Albert “gathers the flowers off the floor and admires them.” He says, “She flew away,” and looks for her.
Giselle enters and stands on her grave.
“Albert sees Giselle and runs toward her and wants to catch her,” but she “falls through her grave,” descending through a trap. “Albert cries on Giselle’s grave.” Hearing a noise, he says, “Someone is coming,” and he runs off stage right.
MG: For the first pas de deux, Rachel Cameron – Karsavina’s assistant - said the circling step around him was always supposed to be a huge jump fouetté, not a little careful slide around as almost everywhere now.
I don’t remember Dolin’s take on this - except the lift instead of swallow dive lift, which was just in passé back with a quick turn in the lift.
The crossing step I have only ever seen everywhere as soussous, chassé pas de bourrée, sustained landing port de bras into again on other side, four times, though, the last time, instead of assembles, Giselle runs out or does a piquée arabesque.
AM: Maina, the circling step Giselle does around Albert in the first pas de deux in Act Two, about which you recall Rachel Cameron: I think Karsavina herself writes of this in one of her books, based on essays she did for Dancing Times (with Beriosova in the photographs): do you know this?
How, how, how, I wish I had asked Rachel Cameron a thousand times more when we both taught at the Royal Academy of Dance. How callow I was.
MG: Yes, Rachel was a fountain of knowledge. I do have a book of Karsavina’s with Beriosova in a lot of photographs – I’ll have to look at it again.
DF: I really dislike when the steps are merely walked through, performed á terre. The choreography is erased.
MG: The next section - with branches that Giselle brings on, with jetés entrelacés - has a special dynamic and feeling which Skeaping showed, I always try to respect this, as it’s lovely to watch and do. Giselle and Albert jump face to face with each other, and are respectively pulled away and brought back towards each other.
The Royal do use the Bolshoi overhead lift, I think, with all casts nowadays.
AR: In our Bolshoi production, Albert lifts her up here, but it’s more like a diagonal, similar to what Markova and Dolin do in the film.
77.
AM: Next. Hilarion is caught by the wilis.
Inevitably, I have seen at least one production (Vladimir Vasiliev’s Bolshoi one) where Hilarion did quite a bit of dancing in Act One and several where he could do several virtuoso steps in Act Two. Please, please tell me there is no nineteenth-century precedent for this!
MS: There is nothing in Justamant to suggest anything like this. It would just not make any sense. In fact, when the Wilis are grabbing ahold of him in Act Two, he "jumps and dances" against his will.
DF: The Stepanov includes no dancing for Hilarion in the ballet other than a few steps during his death scene. The first of these are indicated only by the ground-plan — a diagonal that includes two turns, likely en l’air. After the wilis spin him upstage along their diagonal line, he returns downstage “jump[ing] in exhaustion.” The notated steps here are low jetés, with the back leg bent 45 degrees.
AM: The point should surely always be that Hilarion is a non-dancer. Dance is part of the bond between Giselle and Albert, part of the dichotomy between Giselle and Hilarion. By making Hilarion dance, the wilis immediately take him out of what he is able to do.
78.
AM: The diagonal line, like a glamorous feminine wall, that the wilis form between the lake and Myrthe: is this described in Justamant?
MS: Yes.
AR: Justamant, having shown the diagonal for Giselle's first appearance, now re-introduces it for the death of Hilarion.
Sergeev has those two uses of the wilis’ diagonal plus one more for the entrance of Albert before the pas de deux. (This might be Petipa's addition).
So these diagonals are probably original. There are other similarities between Justamant and Petipa's Act Two, leading us back to the original Coralli choreography, I believe.
AM: Does Justamant record any other such diagonal corps formations? To us today, the wilis’ diagonal resembles the one in the Paquita grand pas classique. I don’t know who devised the one in Paquita – today, it’s attributed to Petipa – but were there other ballets that featured this?
DF: In the Justamant Corsaire MS, the female corps form a diagonal line before Medora’s solo in the grotto Pas d’eventails. In Petipa’s Le jardin animé, as notated in Stepanov, the entire corps forms a similar diagonal, along with Medora dances. In Giselle Act One, the vine gatherer women also form this diagonal during the waltzm, both in Justamant and Stepanov.
79.
AM: After they’ve polished off Hilarion, Myrthe seems to scent new prey. I’m very fond of the little hunting-parties that follow her off in grands jetés en attitude. Is this recorded or described in Justamant?
DF: They do something similar: the wilis follow Myrtha and the two wili soloists, in a counter-clockwise circle around the stage, in lines of four, performing pas de bourrée and small jumps. But they don’t exit before Albert is seen by Myrtha, who exits upstage right and return with her captive. All the wilis then form a single, slightly curved line across the upstage space, rather than returning to the diagonal line.
In the Stepanov, the wilis make the same formation but travel clockwise around the stage, performing a repeating combination of glissade/jeté twice, followed by two bigger jetés. They exit upstage right before returning immediately, having caught Albert.
80.
AM: And that diagonal wall of wilis: especially in Russian productions, it makes one sensation after another as it reacts, domino-like, to the successive entrances of Albert and Giselle. Or rather it ripples. But I suspect this marvelous effect is a twentieth-century one. What does the evidence suggest?
MS: Doug, remember we tried the Justamant version for a few days? The dancers in the line peeled off and came back around to re-form the line. Wasn't it rather like Balanchine’s Serenade? It made me wonder if Balanchine had seen that version and put it into Serenade - just as he re-used, in Baiser de la fée, the four wilis pulling the two lovers apart.
DF: Yes, the Justamant has the diagonal and instructs: “The 1st wilis [Moyna and Zulme] push Hilarion, the second likewise, and the next, and soon the first [I read these as both M & Z] turns to the left to go to the other end of the line and follows the others [I read this as they go to the end of the line upstage].”
This way, Moyna and Zulme can apprehend Hilarion at the upstage end of the line, where they take Hilarion, who “has totally lost his mind,” up the ramp and throw him into the water, where he drowns.
The Stepanov also has the diagonal line of Wilis at this point, with the rubrics, “Every one, one by one, turns the forester,” as he travels upstage along the line. Then the “wilis [four Wilis are shown on the ground plan] push the forester into the water and he dies. All Wilis laugh.”
MG: I think in Cuba the wilis still laugh when Hilarion is got rid of!
MS: I’m glad to hear that the wilis in Cuba still laugh when Hilarion is “got rid of.” Adam wrote int into the score at that moment: “satanical laughter.”
AM: But Alexei, you’ve found that Justamant doesn’t reiterate the diagonal when Albert is discovered?
AR: It’s Sergeyev who gives us the diagonal that we see in Petipa’s production when Albert is discovered. Justamant gives us a semi-circle. And Giselle is blocked by wilis, blocked from helping Albert. She runs behind, like a bird, like Odette behind the ballroom window in Swan Lake.
AM: Like so many dance moments, it can be poetic or a cliché. When it’s primarily acrobatic, it can be a really annoying cliché. But some Giselles truly make it poetic: I remember Galina Samsova, with Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet in 1978, continuing to arch her upper body and legs up into the air. It seemed as if Albrecht (Desmond Kelly) was holding her down while her form was still trying to elude him by taking off into the air.
81.
AM: The ballet’s most dramatically crucial scene occurs now: (a) Giselle tells Albert to take sanctuary at the cross; (b) he does so, with her standing valiantly, defiantly, in front; (c) Myrthe tries her power over them but in vain; (d) Myrthe, however, can and does command Giselle to leave the sanctuary and dance; (e) Giselle does so; (f) Albert chooses to leave the sanctuary and to partner her.
How clearly do Justamant and/or Stepanov here indicate (a) the drama /motivation (b) the movement?
AR: Giselle breaks through that semi-circle of wilis. She grabs Albert, and they run to the other side, followed by the wilis and Myrthe. Originally they did slide, on a pallet, from one side of the stage to another, as if by magic, towards the cross. We can’t reproduce that stage effect, but we will try to imitate it: he will just be carrying her. They both finish holding onto the cross.
At the end of the grand pas de deux in the second act, in presence of the wilis: Justamant ends it with Albert kissing the forehead of Giselle. He’s facing her. But she then turns around and covers her face as if she’s crying. It’s very poetic, just beautiful.
DF: The action, including the hanging on to the cross, is very clear in the Justamant. Both Justamant and the 1842 répétiteur refer to a “trap” that Giselle and Albert slide on to move toward the cross, as though they are magically taken there. (The Stepanov instructs: “Giselle and Albert run to the grave.”)
AR: Then she breaks through, grabs Albert, and they run to the other side, followed by the wilis and Myrtha. Originally, they did slide, on a pallet, from one side of the stage to another, as if by magic, towards the cross. We can’t reproduce that stage effect, but we will try to imitate it: he will just be carrying her. They both finish holding onto the cross.
AM: Why doesn't Seattle's Albert hug the cross as in some pictures of 1841?
DF: We wish he did! Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Giselle grave has no cross; it’s modeled after the grave designed for the Dutch National, which is a tombstone sans cross. I also think this element was thought of as “too religious” in Seattle and therefore disregarded. I like it especially because it shows a vampire characteristic of the Wilis: they cannot approach a cross.
82.
AM: Mary Skeaping’s production, which I haven’t seen for several years, restored the fugue for the wilis, which is part of Adam’s score. (I used to find it a strangely baroque musical effect.)
Can you tell me about this? Where in the action does it (did it) occur? How long did it remain part of the working score of Adam’s music?
MS: It occurs shortly after the Wilis have just killed Hilarion. They're on the attack again, having caught sight of Albert and chased him down. In this fugue scene, the Wilis try to harm him, but become terribly frustrated because they are actually repelled as though hitting a glass wall.
The cross (to which Albert clings desperately, as had his predecessor Robert in Robert le diable) is more powerful than the Wilis. Its superior strength, of course, is what motivated Giselle to lead Albert over to the cross in the first place.
What happens after the fugue is important: Myrthe is furious, and realizes that she's been had. So she forces Giselle to inveigle Albert away from the cross. That's why Giselle does her adagio. And sure enough, it works: Giselle, compelled by Myrthe's evil power, does dance; Albert leaves the cross, and once again he becomes vulnerable to the Wilis' attack.
AR: We don’t know for sure if the fugue was used in nineteenth-century productions or not. The music is in all the scores from Russia, but in a couple of scores it’s crossed out. So it’s very difficult to say when it was cut.
What happens here is not notated in the Justamant or the Sergueyev. So I have choreographed a new one for our Bolshoi production.
83.
AM: Why does no staging make a big deal of Albert's decision to leave the cross? I can give you one answer: the music seems not to make a big deal of it.
Still, does the score or any notation/description tell us precisely when and how he steps away from the sanctuary of the cross?
There are several turns of the screw in the drama of Giselle Act Two, but surely this moment, this choice of his to step out of sanctuary and into the wilis’ domain, should be the most crucial. As it is, most of the audience assumes that either he’s clueless (just another ballet ninny) or the makers of the ballet were clueless (they needed him to dance, so forgot about the idea of sanctuary immediately after making it an issue.)
DF: In the 1842 Paris version recorded by Titus, Albert then leaves the cross of his own accord once Giselle begins to dance. But in Justamant, he “believes that Giselle is calling him to quit the cross” and he leaves it and goes to her. The Justamant is incredible for providing a great deal of emotional motivation for the characters. I think modern producers may shy away from staging the Christian/religious aspect of the cross and its power, which is why it is minimized. Either that or they don’t know the details.
At Pacific Northwest Ballet, there was reluctance to fully stage this part of the action.
MG: It always bothers me that Albert is not able to touch the cross as directed by Giselle…
A big deal, however, is made of his leaving the cross, I think in both the Dolin and Skeaping versions. When Giselle is forced by Myrtha to start dancing - and does a couple of steps towards her - Albert starts to follow her, but Giselle signals him that he must go back so that he stays protected. It is only after her solo adagio that he cannot resist going to her and dancing with her.
Giselle is forced by Myrtha at all times to lure him to dance with her.
AR: Albert has to be conscious that to leave the cross is like a suicide for him. But it seems like he doesn’t care. When Wilfride, earlier on, leaves him in the forest at night, Albert says “I want to be with you (Giselle) now. I don’t want to go anywhere.” So when he discovers he can communicate with Giselle and be with her, he wants to be with her in death. So he does make this decision. And Giselle sees that, and she reacts to his leaving the cross.
84.
AM: And does any version tell us if Giselle's adagio solo here has wili/siren qualities to it?
Presumably she must be dancing in her wili capacity to some degree, luring him, from the first, yes? Only when he joins her does she have cause to change side and dance to save him from exhaustion and death.
Perhaps I'm wanting the action to be too dramatically lucid, but usually it's not remotely lucid enough.
DF: Yes, I believe Giselle acts as a Wili here, but because Myrtha requires her to do so. This is what Justamant suggests.
MS: I agree with Doug that Giselle acts as a Wili here, only because Myrtha requires her to do so, because the cross strategy was the last straw for Myrtha.
AM: I agree in theory. In practice, I wish that were somehow clearer to most of the audience. As I’ve said, many people assume he only leaves the sanctuary of the cross because he’s clueless. (There is a 1969 American Ballet Theatre studio film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtOXFN3A1ec of Erik Bruhn with Carla Fracci – and Toni Lander as Myrthe – in which it’s at least fairly clear he makes a choice between the cross and Giselle.)
85.
AM: In the Stepanov notation, what are the steps with which Giselle the wili does alone?
Usually we see a very slow, penitential développé à la seconde, with arms en couronne. Soon, I think, she does another to the other side, but followed by a sharp demi-fouetté into arabesque and, I think, penchée. Are these in the notation?
DF: In Stepanov, she does a développé à la seconde with the right foot (90 degrees), then passes her leg through to to arabesque and a promenade to the right. This much of the dance is notated twice. One notation shows a stretched knee in arabesque; the other notates a 45-degree bend in the knee.
AM: Can we - should we – see her first développé as a gesture in the direction of Albert? It would have a different and lesser effect if she did the same développé with her left leg, on the side opposite him.
DF: To be honest, the left leg is often the standing leg, so I look at it that way!
Giselle makes her promenade to the right, finish facing the downstage right corner (towards Albert and the cross).
AM: A full turn in arabesque: Myrtha’s was counter-clockwise, but nonetheless this seems to be another wili theme step.
DF: She next performs an assemblé back followed by an entrechat six, then a tendu front with the right foot, which then lifts to 90 degrees front.
AM: And the tendu front is another Myrtha step. Maybe I’m making too much of this, though? Swanilda does similar steps for Dr Coppélius when he gives her the looking-glass.
DF: Then she rotates her body to an en face position so her leg is à la seconde. She continues to rotate to face stage left and her leg finishes in arabesque with a stretched knee. In Justamant, her steps are different, but she finishes facing Albert at the cross and reaches her arms toward him.
86.
AM: Likewise does the notation record that bit of supported adagio where Giselle, facing diagonally away from us, holds Albert’s hand while doing développé en avant toward him, then a backbend? and then a sharp fouetté so that she and he both face on the same diagonal? It’s the same opening as for Aurora’s wedding adagio with her prince.
And in the adagio that follows for Giselle with Albert, what lifts are notated? We now routinely see several huge overhead lifts where her raised aims up to the sky; I assume they’re all twentieth-century additions.
DF: Yes. In the Stepanov, this begins with Giselle in fifth position en pointe, facing the upstage left corner and holding Albert’s right hand with her right hand. She does développé devant to 90 degrees (stretched knee), then turns counterclockwise to finish facing the downstage right corner, having brought her leg through à la seconde to arabesque (all at 90 degrees with a stretched knee). Whether this fouetté is sharp or legato and how the arms move or are used during the fouetté is not indicated. This phrase has no accompanying rubrics.
The pas continues with a clockwise promenade in arabesque, then both dancers move toward the upstage left corner, with the rubric, “Carries on the chest, slowly puts down.” Giselle’s position in the air is notated: fifth position effacé with both knees bent 45 degrees, both arms overhead in high fifth position.
AM: “Fifth position effacé with both knees bent 45 degrees, both arms overhead in high fifth position.” When you say “knees bent 45 degrees”, do you mean 45 degrees off vertical, and therefore the thigh making a 90-degree angle to the calf?
That sounds like the lift in the Stepanov notation in the Sleeping Beauty wedding adagio. Alexei (Ratmansky) has tried reconstructing that one way in his 2015 production for ABT; I prefer the version we see on a 1949-56 composite film (Victor Jessen) of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in North America.
DF: Yes, 45 degrees off vertical; would that be 135 degrees from calf to thigh? Anyway, a slight bend. This is a fairly common position of the legs in lifts.
After this, Giselle performs travelling relevé arabesques (90 degrees with a stretched knee), first toward stage right then toward stage left. At the end of each phrase, Albert lifts her by the waist, still in arabesque, as she changes direction.
MG: I can show you exactly the pas de deux that Dolin continued to use as taught to him he said by Spessivtseva. No overhead lifts. One shoulder lift, with her left leg back in arabesque supported by man’s arm. (This is done by all the couples in Raymonda, so was it a Petipa addition?) Lots of développé à la seconde and “airy” balances moving on.
87.
AM. During this supported adagio, four wilis try to separate Giselle and Albert, At first they succeed, but Giselle and Albert manage to shake them off and to rejoin hands. This is always a striking moment: do we know with whom it originated?
DF.This may actually be by Marius Petipa. At any rate, it’s not recorded by Justamant or any earlier version.
88.
AM: Next, it turns into an alternating pas de deux: Her solo; his solo; a partnering section with lifts; and then a bigger solo for her. The steps here seem not to change much between the versions we now see, especially the entrechat-quatre and soubresauts in her second solo.
But what do Justamant and Stepanov tell us?
AR: At the end of the grand pas de deux in the second act, in presence of the wilis: Justamant ends it with Albert kissing the forehead of Giselle. He’s facing her. But she then turns around and covers her face as if she’s crying. It’s very poetic, just beautiful.
MG: About her solo: the entrechat-quatre section. To my knowledge, in all old versions including the Soviet ones, it was always entrechat-quatre, relevé cou-de-pied right and left, followed by four changing feet relevés cou-de-pied (before the long section of entrechat-quatre)….
I am not sure who introduced the jumping passé. (It was certainly before Osipova, as I saw someone do it somewhere I think in the 90s - and I then introduced it for the Giselles who have big jumps in my production.) It is certainly very effective.
DF: In Stepanov, she does double ronds du jambe en l’air then the soubresauts on the diagonal. Albert is next: pas de basque, sauté, assemble, sissonne battu, assemble, three entrechat six, repeat; glissade, sissonne, assemble, etc., grand port de bras, arabesque en tournant, double pirouette opening to a la seconde and continuing to long attitude back. The partnered section follows, then Giselle on her own with the relevés, entrechat-quatres, piquées arabesques and grands fouettés, and finally emboité turns to finish.
In Justamant, she does diagonals of brises, single tour, and ballonnes, then “elle bât une royale en temps d’entrechat sept, assemble derrière” to both sides, “glissades tacteei en arrière” traveling upstage; piqué arabesques and assemblés, traveling downstage, finishing with a grand assemble derrière, and then the same to the other side; the whole finishing with two échappés “sur les orteils” and a pirouette to the knee “or a very low position”.
AM. Her steps are almost entirely aerial, and seemingly effortless; his also are mainly aerial, but we understand they cost him.
She doesn’t seem to be dancing like a Wili in the siren sense, and yet it comes to the same thing: she’s a wili in the sense of weightlessness and in the sense of impelling him to follow her in the dance and in the air. I see her ronds de jambe (à la seconde) sautés as very much a wili step.
Hilarion, a non-dancer, had to take to the air under the wilis’ spell. Now Albert is following suit, but is better equipped to do so.
89.
AM. What steps does the Stepanov notation say Albert does for his big variation, the one with the marziale brass accompaniment? Usually we see lots of cabrioles and double air turns; the final double air turn has him falling bang on the floor.
DF: For Albert's main variation in Act Two, the Stepanov gives:
· Traveling forward on the diagonal: Single cabriole front, two emboîtés derrière, assemblé, three entrechat-six. Repeat.
· Two jetés en tournant, traveling backward on the diagonal. Repeat.
· At this point, he “begs the [stage left line of corps de ballet] wilis” and they reply, “No.”
· Traveling forward again on the diagonal: Two cabrioles derrière without a step in between, then a step, then two more cabrioles derriére, glissade, assemblé battu, four pirouettes to the knee by the grave, the notation stating, “He falls in exhaustion on Giselle’s grave.”
MS: By the way, I think the Spanish-isms of this variation music are interesting. I guess they say "bravura!"
AM: I love that – Spanish indeed. But what a musically curious choice in 1841….
MG: The first enchaînements are done with either temps de poisson after cabriole (single, double, or sustained) or entrechat-six.
The second enchaînements vary: double sauts de basque or double assemblés with usually a stutter to try to hold fifth landing!
The last diagonal with tours: Dolin told a story of the background of “Romantic” right arm surrounding head on chasses. He said it was because Nijinsky, at one performance, was trying to keep his wig on! The Soviets changed the diagonal to add a type of renversé before the tours en l’air…
Vladimir Vassiliev often used to do a la second turn en dehors to finish the solo, falling to the ground from that, not tours en l’air. One also sees attitude turns en dehors.
90.
AM: In what I think is Giselle's penultimate entrance in Act Two, she enters, bearing (in Russian productions and at Ballet Theatre) lilies to placate Myrtha. Do we know when this tradition started?
DF: I don't know when lilies became part of Giselle (they weren't named in the early sources, though rosemary, myrtle, cypress, and daises were) or when the tradition of Giselle bringing lilies to Myrthe began. This isn’t mentioned in the Stepanov notation.
AM: So lilies seem to have been a Soviet Russian addition: an effective one, I must say.
91.
AM: The solo for Giselle that follows - its music, though quoting Adam’s “He loves me, he loves me not” motif, is probably by Minkus or Drigo - follows her plea to Myrtha.
Then, however, the music and she switch into a much faster tempo. To me, this is her sudden switch back into her wili nature: she takes to the air and covers plenty of ground.
MG: The Act Two music for Giselle quotes the “He loves, he loves me not” music. This is the part, just before the big jumping solo of Giselle luring Albrecht to come and to dance with her - and before he does in the coda - when Dolin has, I believe from Spessivtseva, the mime over Albert’s recumbent body saying “Do you remember, when we plucked the marguerite, and danced…”
AR: Other people have suggested that this solo has Saint-Léon’s choreography. In that case, the music would be composed by Cesare Pugni.
DF: The variation has been connected with Adèle Grantzow’s appearance as Giselle in Paris in 1866. Saint-Léon was working with her then on the Paris production of La Source, though she was not first-cast. (We know that Saint-Léon hoped Grantzow would create Swanilda in Coppélia in 1870.) He might have commissioned the music from Ludwig Minkus or even Léo Delibes at that time.
In this final solo (the waltz solo), she begins upstage left with a little chug (bringing the right leg from back to front), tombé, step, low fouetté, chassé (turning clockwise—the turning is indicated only in the ground plan and not in the notation of the steps), grand fouetté.
She travels across the stage during the combination, which she performs three times, moving in a shallow zigzag downstage.
She then travels across the stage a fourth time (stage right to left), performing cabriole devant (right out of the final grand fouetté), pas de bourrée, cabriole devant, pas de bourrée, entrechat quatre.
AM: Her solo - now performed close to the still recumbent Albert – features triple ronds de jambe to either side (yes?), interspersed by entrechat-quatre. To me, those ronds de jambe are, again, a wili step, not least in the close connection they make with the music: a flickering step with a touch of diablerie in their timing.
Then she has (in most versions, anyway) a series of three relevés in the same attitude front croisé. Usually, her arms making a first-position ring above her raised leg (though at Ballet Theater she mimes tears). As a rule, these relevés are phrased as a subtle crescendo, with the raised leg and her arms lifting in the seduction or spell of the dance. With Kolpakova in '82, despite (or because of) her formality and classicism, I felt I was seeing a cauldron (her leg) and her inhaling its steam (her arms) as it rose. (Doubtless it helped that I'd seen a cauldron in the Kirov’s La Sylphide a few days before!)
DF: At downstage, just left of center, she continues with relevé double ronds de jambe, entrechat quatre, relevé double ronds de jambe, then essentially an entrechat cinq that finishes, however, on the left pointe (sic), with the right foot low attitude devant.
AM: You mean an entrechat-cinq landing on the left point, or ending with a relevé onto point?
DF: The literal reading is entrechat-cinq finishing on the left pointe, but I suspect the beats may have been notated as though the dancer were going to land in fifth position (which would be an entrechat-quatre) and repeat the phrase from the beginning rather than going on to relevés.
She relevés several times on the left foot with the right foot changing position with each releve. She closes fifth front and repeats the first half of the combination, beginning with entrechat quatre through the second relevé double ronds de jambe.
MG: The entrechat-quatre relevé ronds de jambe section is, by the way, best done aimed one at Albert and one at Myrtha so that it makes sense…
DF: She runs to stage right toward Albert, where she mimes “You come with me,” and then she “lures him,” etc.
AM: Yes, during this solo, she dances away from the recumbent Albert with piqué retiré steps. In most productions, she also gestures to him, as if to say "Come! Come!" In 2014, the PNB production omitted these. Can you say why?
DF: This detail should have been there, but was changed or left out. In 2011, we included these gestures very intentionally.
The “lures him” rubric is rare for Stepanov, which doesn't generally refer to state of mind or intention. I believe it's there because it refers to arm movements.
AM: Thank you for telling me that the notation for Giselle's final solo says “She lures him”. I'd always felt this, strongly with certain Russian dancers, but it's electrifying to have it confirmed.
Still, when I mentioned this (the “She lures him” gesture in the notation) in my 2014 review of the Pacific Northwest production, Joan Acocella told me that she was sorry to read about that aspect of the Stepanov notation in my review. More recently, Claudia Roth Pierpont has similarly objected to that interpretation of Giselle. If I understand these two distinguished New Yorker writers aright, they like - as do thousands more - the simpler and more standard version whereby Giselle dances unremittingly to save Albert from death. And the only Giselles I have ever asked about this, Antoinette Sibley and Lynn Seymour, are on Joan's and Claudia’s side. So, I'm pretty sure, would Markova and Fonteyn have been.
David Vaughan, in his Ashton book, mentions how the young Seymour danced a Giselle in the early 1960s that showed Giselle the wili's love of dance resurfacing. Yet, interestingly, Seymour seemed unaware of this when I asked her about it in the 1980s. To her, what most mattered was her desire to be allowed to commit suicide with the sword in Act One, which the Royal would not permit. Likewise Markova's views on interpretation were all about details in Act One. (She knew Giselle does not commit suicide.)
Perhaps the word “lures” is ambiguous. Giselle’s gesture says “Come” to Albrecht; but she may not be deliberately summoning him to his doom, just urging him back into the dance, which at least is something they have both loved in the past.
MG: “She lures him”. I think she beckons him to follow her as made to do by Myrthe. Of course, often he does not follow her nowadays, but stays with the wilis until Myrthe forces him to dance
AM: I wish we saw him remain with the wilis in more current productions….
92.
AM: Gautier writes somewhere that Albert, dancing in Act Two, is “but too happy to die for one so dear”. Does the notation indicate Albert's state of mind in any of his solos?
DF: Not in the Stepanov, and the Justamant does not include either of Albert’s solos. However, the Justamant notation of the adagio includes such statements as, “[he] receives her in his right arm and looks at her with love.”
The Justamant coda, which is mostly pantomime, offers more. As the coda begins, “Albrecht feels himself weakening and can’t get a clear sense of what he is up against/what he is experiencing.” Giselle “perceives that he is suffering. She goes toward him with fear and urgency and says to him, ‘What is the matter?’” He says, “My forces are abandoning me.”
And after the coda: “Albrecht can scarcely sustain himself; his legs are giving way; he feels lost; he says to Giselle, ‘I am lost.’ He nearly falls.”
MS: There are a few descriptions of what characters are feeling in the Justamant manuscript. For instance, the Wilis, after killing Hilarion, spot Albrecht in the wings and "make a sign of joy." (More prey!) And in the final scene Albrecht is "overcome with sorrow". You can also tell what characters' emotions are sometimes by the actions described. For instance, Giselle is delighted to have bumped into Albrecht in their opening scene together, but she hides that emotion from him (giving him the cold shoulder), and shares it only with the audience.
AM: Edwin Denby writes in the early 1940s that the “love-death climax” of Giselle had been singularly fine with Serge Lifar. (Probably he was referring to the prestigious performances that Markova and Lifar gave with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo; Alexandra Danilova was their Myrtha.) I imagine that Denby means that Albrecht found a kind of ecstasy as he felt he was approaching death.
Does Justamant’s Albert here express any positive emotion about his approaching death? Gautier suggests he is enthusiastic or exalted about the prospect of dying.
MS: No, Justamant doesn’t. His Albert is thoroughly exhausted.
93.
AM: Probably if we feel that kind of exultation (“but too happy to die for one so dear”) in any Albert today, it’s in the big solo that follows in the coda – but the steps vary considerably. I mean the one where Nureyev and many others (Hallberg, Gomes, Shklyarov, Bolle) do twenty-two (or more) entrechat-six and where most other Russians (and Cornejo, at Ballet Theatre) now do two diagonals of brisés.
Do you know the solo I mean? The music builds a steady crescendo underneath.
DF: The entrechat-six aren’t in the Stepanov. In the Stepanov, the coda begins with the Wilis in two lines on either side of the stage. They dance in place, bourrée upstage, and return downstage. Next, Albert enters upstage right and, traveling in a diagonal to downstage left toward Myrtha, performs tombé, chassé, jeté en tournant with beats, glissade, entrechat cinq. This combination is performed three times, followed by the rubric: “He asks for mercy. She [Myrtha] says no.” Next, he does a clockwise manège, performing multiple temps de flèche.
AM: The entrechat-six were surely unknown before Nureyev, who made a sensation by doing a series of twenty-two of them.
MG: Most Alberts had copied him subsequently. I think it can work, but never with arms in bras bas like a classroom exercise.
The old Dolin and Skeaping versions both had diagonals of brisés (with the wilis in diagonal line), very fast and towards Myrtha.
AM: The brisés – two diagonals, like Swanilda’s in Act One of Coppélia – have been done by most Russian men in recent decades. (In 1977, Baryshnikov’s brisés were so high that London audiences screamed; Vyacheslav Gordeyev’s, in 1986 in Paris, were also amazing.)
MG: The manège after that was the temps de (I’ve forgotten its name!) step that Aurora’s friends do in the coda of Sleeping Beauty Act One, but with heaps of body movement. This is a great step: it shows Albert’s tiredness but still that he is being forced to jump and dance. It’s quite stylised and difficult to do. Not popular with the Alberts of nowadays!
(The “friends” steps I mean is “temps de flèche”-ish, but also resembles a temps de poisson a bit, on a diagonal with chassés in between with arms going in a circle from upstage corner to downstage opposite corner, just before the end of the coda. Albert does the same legs and body and arms - but en manège and with the emphasis on down-movement heavy plié, with his body very far down to upstage corner before the jump, and then again with a heavy chassé to start again.)
AM: Anthony Dowell at the Royal used to do something nearer the Stepanov version you describe than anything we now see. Certainly it was less repetitious than the multiple entrechats or brisés - but in truth I can't remember the technical details.
94.
AM: What happens next can be very remarkable. He’s flagging desperately (though this is seldom well shown) when suddenly Giselle shoots out of the wings into his arms, hopping ahead in arabesque (in profile to the audience) with his hands on her waist. The idea is usually that she is taking the strain, giving him energy to carry on just when he is on the point of losing it. This was very well timed in Seattle: the bit when Albert is flagging at the end of that solo and when suddenly Giselle charges on out of the wings into his arms as if giving him energy and taking the strain. I think she does arabesque voyagée - except lifted.
DF: He finishes upstage left and Giselle enters. Together, they perform her supported hops en arabesque, with the rubric, “Cavalier holds Giselle with two hands by the waist, follows her.” Etc.
He’s flagging and Giselle re-enters for the arabesques voyagées, which helps revive him a bit.
AM: But arabesques voyagées are another wili motif step: the cow hops! And once (1988, with the Kirov in Paris) I saw Altynai Assylmuratova complicate the drama yet further there. She did those arabesque voyagées with such pounding energy and force that you felt it was the wili in her, trying to exhaust him even while trying to save him - both sides of Giselle at once, lover and wili.
DF: I completely agree that Giselle is evidencing both her lover and her Wili characteristics simultaneously. Wonderful.
MS: Yes, it's quite a dichotomy. She's trying to save his life, and at the same time he still has to dance. I personally prefer to think that Giselle is being compelled by Myrtha to make him dance. She must do so, even though her true heart's desire here is to save him. She is definitely torn in two directions, but I think her cruel streak was imposed upon her by Myrtha and is not a true part of her personality.
95.
AM: Nikolai Sergeev took pains to end Giselle’s role by having Albrecht deposit her on a grassy knoll, some distance from her grave, and she then sank into the grass. (The Royal revived this in its 1980-85 production; I remember this well.)
And I’ve been told that Balanchine took pains to add this to the Paris Opera staging in 1947, so he must have remembered the same version N.Sergeev had known.
AR: Yes, this important moment from the original production is in both Justamant and Sergeev: Giselle does not go into her own grave at the end of the ballet, Albert does not let her. He carries her away from it in the hope she won't disappear. He places her on a little grassy hill on the other side of the stage, but she sinks down immediately and is covered by the flowers.
AM: So this is essentially what happened in the 1841 version too?
MS: This way of staging her last appearance is made clear in the drawings in the Justamant MS of the 1860s. I think it happened in the original production too, because the 1842 MS (Titus, used in St. Petersburg for the 1842 production) refers to “the flowery grave.”
Long version: Albert was determined to put Giselle into a grave on stage left. This meant getting her from stage right (where we all see her grave early in Act Two) to stage left, into the nice grave with all the flowers. Of course most companies don’t stage it like that any more. For one thing, it requires a trap and flowers that move around on their stems and eventually collapse over the grave. And why would Albert do such a thing?
Albert's seemingly nonsensical insistence on putting Giselle into a stage-left grave conforms to a longstanding tradition on the French stage, in which stage left was the powerful male side, and stage right was the female side. (In an excellent article, Antonia Banducci argues the case for the right side as the powerful side.) I had thought that the tradition had largely died out by the nineteenth century — after all, stage sets were no longer symmetrical, and so characters’ entrances and exits being left or right no longer had the sort of powerful impact on the spectator that they once had had. (As Banducci argues, the title character in Campra’s Tancrède consistently enters and exits stage left until he is rendered powerless by a magician in Act 4. He loses his power and therefore spends more time on the “weak side”, stage right.)
But of course Giselle does seem to follow some of the traditionally gendered approach to left and right: Giselle’s cottage, her original grave, some of her entrances and exits, are on stage right. Albrecht’s cottage and some of his important entrances and exits are on stage left. Therefore I think the tradition lived on to a certain extent. So it makes sense that he wants to bury Giselle on “his” side; he loves her, wants her to be “his”, and wants her to be away from where the Wilis will have dominion over her.
I imagine the Imperial Ballet was still having Albert bury Giselle on his side of the stage when young Balanchine was there; at least; at least, we do know that Balanchine staged it that way for Ballet Theatre in 1946.
AM: But surely it’s wrong to say he’s placing her into a grave? She has one grave, on stage right. He doesn’t want her to go into any grave, which is why he places her on a grassy knoll on stage left. (I can tell you that I saw this dozens of times at Covent Garden in 1980-1984: it never felt as if he thought he was placing her in a grave – he was just placing her somewhere that seemed safe.)
But the ground opens under her. Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, she is being reclaimed by powerful underground forces neither she nor he cannot resist. At Covent Garden, we all knew where her grave was. In that production, it was at the back of the stage. So the idea was gravitational: even though the two lovers remained devoted, the ground itself was irresistibly sucking her back. In Hamlet, we know that the ghost moves underground (“Art thou there, old mole?” Hamlet cries as the voice travels to a different place beneath the floor); we don’t think the ghost has returned immediately into its grave.
MS: I see what you mean. Yes, he is taking her out of the grave and putting her in another place: a flowery place.
AM: Wasn’t it Adolphe Adam who took pride that the idea of having Albert place her on a grassy knoll originated with him?
DF: Yes. Ivor Guest writes about it in The Romantic Ballet in Paris (page 207).
MS: Yes. I just found http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84377771/f1.item.r=Giselle,%20ballet%20de%20Coralli an 1841 caricature of Albert, aghast, gazing at Giselle as she disappears, into the flowery bank.
DF: Regarding the 1946 Ballet Theatre production, the Balanchine catalog states, “Balanchine, working with Romanoff, arranged the traditional Maryinsky staging of Giselle’s grave scene in Act II: Albert prevents Giselle from disappearing into her grave and lays her on a bed of flowers; but Giselle sinks away, and only the flowers remain. This interpolation lasted in repertory for only a brief time.”
96.
AM: The Paris Opera in the 1840s was celebrated for its stagings of sunrises, which are worked into several French operas (and their scores) for just that reason. ABT and other companies have staged the final dawn scene beautifully: sunrise over the lake seen through the trees, which is right for the music and period.
Dawn apart, ABT ends Giselle the usual way - with Albrecht left alone to mourn. Sometimes Giselle gives him one flower as she departs. Sometimes he strews his lilies in a chain from the grave to center-stage (the Baryshnikov method) or ends up walking slowly forward to the audience, stunned.
But that’s not what happened in the original. Am I right that Bathilde was seen approaching? and that Giselle, before she slipped into the ground, managed to remind Albert that he was engaged to Bathilde and encouraged him to accept the hand of that good woman?
And am I right that Bathilde was sometimes accompanied by Wilfrid and other male retainers?
AR: In Justamant and Sergeev, Giselle’s last gesture is “Go to Bathilde and marry her.”
Bathilde is present in Justamant. In Justamant, Albert falls into the arms of Wilfrid and Bathilde.
DF: (I’m not seeing this gesture in Sergueyev.)
AM: I’m not quite sure when Bathilde was banished from Act Two in most older productions. Cyril Beaumont, in The Ballet Called Giselle (1944) misses the return of Bathilde in Act Two. He has become used to seeing what had evidently become the norm at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet: Albert, alone, fell to the floor, apparently lifeless. And he prints a photograph photo of Robert Helpmann’s Albrecht, presumably in the 1930s or early 1940s, lying as if dead on the ground, discovered by Wilfred and several other men, all in grief.
AR: Bathilde is not present in Sergeev, so it probably was Petipa who cut her last entrance in Russia. I need to check all the period programs to be sure, however. In Sergeev, Wilfrid and four more men find Albert dead and the curtain closes.
AM: In 1960, Ashton reinstated Bathilde, briefly, to his revision of the Royal Ballet’s staging. Either this did not work or such Albrechts as Nureyev soon banished her.
Marian and Doug, you’ve restored Bathilde here! Please tell me more of what the various nineteenth-century sources suggest here.
MS: Yes, the 1842 Titus score does show that Giselle, before she slipped into the ground, did encourage him to marry Bathilde. And yes, Bathilde did approach.
And yes, we do find Albert kissing/embracing some flowers here -- the flowers from the grave that Albert wanted her to be buried in. (Not the grave at stage right.) He was quite determined to get her into the correct grave, or place, stage left.
Here's what the 1842 rehearsal score says:
[p. 151] Finale
Albert falls exhausted; Myrthe triumphs; Giselle supports Albert Myrthe pushes Giselle and orders the wills to make Albert dance till he dies
[p.152]
the Wilis force Albert to dance; Albert falls down Myrtha and Giselle surround him [chiming soon starts]
[p. 153]
sunrise; the Wilis seem to lose their powers and appear to vanish like shadows
Myrtha: "the sun is appearing; we must go back to our graves"
[p. 154]
Myrtha withdraws slowly towards her grave tottering unsteadily and disappears.
At the same time Giselle tells Albert to flee; she goes to her tomb. Albert wants to tear her away from it. He puts her on the flowery grave
Allego [fanfare] 6/8 A-Major
Albert "no, you will not die" Wilfrid appears at the back of the stage Giselle to Albert: "Go! Marry Bathilde."
Albert: "No, no, I love only you." [music is getting loud here]
He hears the noise [of hunting horns I think], sees Wilfride and returns near the place where Giselle just disappeared
[p. 155]
Giselle sinks little by little
Andantino moderato, FM 4/4
Wilfride to Albert: "Let's flee, let's flee Let's leave this place" He tries to lead Albert [away] Albert extracts himself with difficulty and pushes him away
He runs to Giselle who has disappeared entirely
Despair of Albert
He falls on her tomb
At the same time Wilfride goes up the montagne and summons everybody
AM: Can you explain “the montagne”? Does this refer to some stage mountain? Or is this the old stage convention ofa small upward slope at the back of the stage? (Curiously, Balanchine retained this in Jewels.)
MS: Surely the latter.
[p. 156] F-Major/ Cut time
Everyone comes running up. Wilfride leads Bathilde and goes to get Albert, who, as soon as he sees them, returns to the place where Giselle disappeared and pulls up a flower and embraces [or kisses] it with transport
Wilfrid comes to take him and leads him in the direction of the Princess
Tableau pathétique
MS: And here's what Justamant calls for. As you can see, among other things, Giselle does to him to go to Bathilde. (She had already given him that instruction earlier in the second act.)
Giselle is at stage right, kneeling at her tomb. Albert runs to her, takes her by the hand and around her neck while helping her to stage left. Giselle can hardly keep herself going and seems nearly dead. He gently places her before him and puts her in a flowery grave. Her life seems extinguished and she sinks to the ground.
Suddenly Albert hears a fanfare. He is astonished; first he goes upstage to see what it is. Wilfride arrives, in a hurry (upstage right), goes toward his master.
Albert: Who is it?
Wilfride: The duke, with your fiancée.
Albert: Grand dieu. Go, go, and stop them!
Wilfride: I'll try. He runs (upstage)
Albert: Quickly returning toward Giselle
Giselle: has hardly any life left.
Albert: Is struck by her pallor. He leans toward her.
Giselle: is lying down. Says to him: forget me, and go to her whom you must marry. Adieu.
Albert: Never, never. I want to stay here with you.
Giselle starts to disappear into the ground and the flowers on the grave begin to incline toward her and cover her.
Albert: Seeing her disappear, become mad with sorrow and leans closer and closer to her, taking her hands.
She continues to disappear and the flowers are covering her more and more, then her hands glide out of his hands
He gets up and holds his face in his hands, then leans in again and seeks Giselle's hands among the flowers, but cannot see them anymore
The prince and Bathilde arrive (upstage left), preceded by their gardes (presumably, huntsmen) and Wilfrid (8 gardes are depicted)
Albert is in despair, and is plucking some flowers from the tomb where Giselle has just disappeared, and kissing/embracing them transportedly. (He is downstage far left, at the tomb.)
The prince and Bathilde see Albert and go toward him. (They come downstage center.)
Albrecht sees them and stricken with sorrow, falls into the arms of the prince and reaches a hand out to Bathilde. (This occurs in center stage; Albert has come into the center from stage left.)
AM: Well, okay, you’ve shown me that Titus and Justamant call Giselle’s final location a “grave”, but I don’t think it’s a “proper grave” – I think they use the term “grave” to describe the place in the earth into which she has disappeared. There are Romantic heroes from later in the 1840s – Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and Armand in The Lady of the Camellias – who go on communicating more possessively with their dead heroines, but I don’t find Albrecht is controlling in that way.
MS: That’s very interesting. I agree – Albert is not controlling like Heathcliff or Armand.
DF: The Stepanov, with characteristic coarseness and propensity for violence and death (I say that only half-seriously), states succinctly (beginning at the same point as the Justamant excerpt):
Albert runs and calls for anyone to come. [He] returns to Giselle. She is on her grave [i.e., the flowery mound on stage left] and he doesn’t know what to do not to let her disappear again.
Giselle says, “Farewell, Farewell.” [She] slowly goes down on her back and she is closed in her grave gradually.
Albert calls a second time for someone to help. His strength is fading and he falls dead.
The Grandée runs out [accompanied by four other men, not named] and finds Albert to be dead.
MG: I loved Skeaping’s ending. Giselle by turns bourréed towards Albert and back towards the cross, and seemed to disappear bit by bit.
Was it Dolin’s or Skeaping’s version that had the blessing? Albert knelt at Giselles feet, begging forgiveness one more time, and she blessed him just before her last bourrée back to the grave (when her grave is stage right upstage).
DF: Pavlova’s touring production of Giselle, in a staging attributed to Mordkin, also had Albert die at the end.
AR: Yes, the Sergeev notation does say that Wilfred and the huntsman find Albert dead. But I would much rather have – at the Bolshoi we will have - the older version in which Bathilde returns, with Giselle not disappearing into the grave but being carried by Albert to the opposite side, where she sinks into the mound with the flowers. Unfortunately we don’t yet have the proper machines to do that - but we’re building one.
So Bathilde will return. She sees Giselle disappearing. She sees Giselle encouraging Albert to go back and to marry her. Obviously people who love Giselle as a star vehicle are happier with Albert alone onstage at the end. But dramatically I think this ending makes much more sense: it ties into some many more aspects of the story.
97.
AM: So Stepanov actually records Albert dying - and then found dead by others? This explains those photographs of Helpmann discovered by huntsmen: he really has expired. How interesting that Helpmann must have learnt this from Sergeev and the Stepanov notation.
Doug, I’m amused by your phrase about Stepanov’s “characteristic coarseness and propensity for violence and death”. Can you enlarge about “characteristic”? Where else in Stepanov do these things occur?
DF: At the end of the first scene of Corsaire, Conrad hits Lanquedem over the head before escaping with Medora. The physical confrontation between Abderrakhman and Raymonda in the Raymonda dream scene is also described in intense detail.
In general, I’ve found more of what I would think of as slapstick in Stepanov. Overall, it may simply be that the Stepanov notators weren’t trying to make as thorough a documentation of their work than was Henri Justamant. The result may be a perceived coarseness or terseness that may instead simply represent practicality and lack of time rather than intentional severity. This is becoming more my impression as I continue to work with the Stepanov notations.
AM: To end the ballet with Albert’s death does create parallel conclusions for the two acts: Giselle’s unexpected death at the end of the first, Albert’s at the end of the second. It would also imply that Albert finally achieves the death for which he had been hoping with the wili: that he is now one with Giselle.
It would be good to know when this Russian tradition of Albert actually dying at the end began. With Perrot? With Petipa?
If this was Petipa’s idea, he was reviving Giselle in the era when music-drama had been transfigured by Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1865). Tristan only clings onto life until he sees Isolde one last time: for him, death is the realm of love in which he will achieve the fulfillment he craves. Isolde (like Albert at the end of Giselle) is anguished that she is left to live without him, but in fact she gets her wish: she is so fully immersed in the idea of death as the fulfillment of love that she expires over his corpse – the liebestod, love-in-death. Tristan received its first performance in St Petersburg in 1898.
Denby certainly implies a Tristan connection by using the phrase “the love-death climax”; probably Lifar was another Albert who died at the end, and perhaps it was this that Denby found so fine. I know it’s not what the 1841 makers of the ballet had in mind, but the more I think about it, the more I’m interested by it. I’d like to see some Albert trying it today…..
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Susan Au, “Giselle”, entry in International Encyclopedia of Dance, Oxford University Press, 2004
Cyril Beaumont, The Ballet Called Giselle, 1944
Alexander Bland, The Royal Ballet, 1981.
August Bournonville, My Theatre Life. British edition, 1979.
Richard Buckle, Diaghilev, 1979.
Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, Vol. 1.
Arlene Croce, "A New Old 'Giselle'", Going to the Dance, 1982.
Arlene Croce, June 1987 The New Yorker
Edwin Denby (edited by Robert Cornfield), Dance Writings, Dance Books, UK, 1986.
Rodney Edgecombe, “A ragbag of ballet music oddments” (https://ausdance.org.au/articles/details/a-ragbag-of-ballet-music-oddments),
Andrew R. Foster, Tamara Karsavina, Diaghilev’s Ballerina, Foster, U.K. 2010
David Gillard, Beryl Grey, 1977
Giselle, Wikipedia article
Ivor Guest, The Ballet of the Second Empire,
Ivor Guest, Fanny Cerrito.
Ivor Guest, Fanny Elssler,
Ivor Guest, Jules Perrot.
Ivor Guest, The Romantic Ballet in Paris, 1966.
Gautier On Dance, 1986, translated and edited by Ivor Guest.
Théophile Gautier, Les Beautés de l'Opéra.
Goethe, Faust.
Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Nancy Goldner, Leap Before You Look: Honoring the Libretto in Giselle, Raritan, vol. 33, no 3.
Heinrich Heine's De l'Allemagne
Victor Hugo's Fantômes,
Boris A. Illiaronov, Petersburg Ballet. Three Centuries.
Claudia Jeschke and Robert Atwood, "Expanding Horizons: Techniques of Choreo-Graphy in Nineteenth-Century Dance", Dance Chronicle, 2006
Henri Justamant Giselle, Deutsches Tanzarchiv, 2008.
Tamara Karsavina, Ballet Technique.
Lincoln Kirstein, Dance, a short history
Mathilde Kschessinskaya, Dancing in St Petersburg.
André Levinson, La danse d'aujourd'hui.
Serge Lifar, Giselle, Apothéose du Ballet Romantique, Éditions Albin Michel, Paris 1942.
Alicia Markova, Giselle and I,Keith Money, Anna Pavlova.
Alexander Shiryaev, Memoirs
Marian Smith, Ballet and Opera in the Era of "Giselle"
Marian Smith, "The earliest 'Giselle'?", Dance Chronicle, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2000), pp. 29-48,
David Vaughan, Frederick Ashton and his Ballets, second edition, Dance Books.
Ekaterina Vazem, Memoirs of a Ballerina of the St Petersburg Bolshoy Theatre 1867-1884. See Wiley, A Century of Russian Ballet, below.
John Waller, The Dancing Plague (2009) - printed in the UK as A Time to Dance, a Time to Die.
Roland John Wiley, A Century of Russian Ballet, Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1810-1910. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990.
@Alastair.Macaulay, Doug Fullington, Maina Gielgud, Jane Pritchard, Alexei Ratmansky, and Marian Smith.2020
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Alastair Macaulay
1: Olga Spessivtseva in live 1932 performance at the Savoy Theatre, in the opening arabesque of Giselle’s Act One variation. From a live film.
2: Alicia Markova in the same opening arabesque of Giselle’s Act One variation, with the Markova-Dolin Ballet, 1935-1937
3: Margot Fonteyn in 1937 in the same opening arabesque of Giselle’s Act One variation. Studio photograph by Gordon Anthony at the time of Fonteyn’s debut on the role at Sadler’s Wells with the Vic-Wells Ballet.
3: Olga Spessivtseva: a studio image of Giselle in Act Two.
5: Margot Fonteyn in Act Two of “Giselle” at the Paris Opéra, 1967.
6: A sketch of one of the final moments of the original “Giselle” at the Paris Opéra, 1841. Giselle bids farewell to Albert as she sinks into a flowery knoll, while Wilfride and Bathilde appear in the forest at dawn.
7: Robert Helpmann as the now dead Albert (Albrecht) at the end of Act Two of “Giselle”, with Wilfride (Wilfred) and huntsmen finding his corpse at dawn. Vic-Wells Ballet, before 1944.
8: Satiric 1841 sketch of Giselle falling into the soil while Albert looks aghast.
9: The arabesques voyagées (nicknamed cow-hops) of the corps de ballet of wilis in Act Two of “Giselle” as performed by Pacific Northwest Ballet in the production by Peter Boal, Marion Smith, Doug Fullington as revised in 2014. In pre-1985 performances by the Royal Ballet, the line of the wilis’ torsos and heads was yet lower.
Photo: Lindsay Thomas.
10: In Alexei Ratmansky’s 2019 production for the Bolshoi Ballet, Myrtha sustains an arabesque, echoed by the wili corps de ballet, as she summons Giselle up from the grave. Screen-capture photograph.
11: Myrtha summons the wili Giselle to stage center in Alexei Ratmansky’s 2019 production for the Bolshoi Ballet. Screen-capture photograph.
12: Giselle the wili bows in révérence to her queen, Myrtha, just before commencing her wili debut solo in Act Two of Alexei Ratmansky’s 2019 production for the Bolshoi Ballet. Screen-capture photograph.
13: a cross formation for the wili corps de ballet in Act Two of Alexei Ratmansky’s 2019 production of “Giselle” for the Bolshoi Ballet. Screen-capture photograph.
14: Myrtha leads Giselle away from the power of the cross, and from Albrecht, in Act Two of Alexei Ratmansky’s 2019 production of “Giselle” for the Bolshoi Ballet. Screen-capture photograph.
15: Myrtha commands Giselle to dance and thus to lure Albrecht from the sanctuary of the cross, in Act Two of Alexei Ratmansky’s 2019 production of “Giselle” for the Bolshoi Ballet. The designs are based on those made in 1910 by Alexandre Benois for Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet. Screen-capture photograph.
16: Albrecht now partners Giselle, flanked by the wilis, in Act Two of Alexei Ratmansky’s 2019 production of “Giselle” for the Bolshoi Ballet. Screen-capture photograph.
17: Albrecht lifts Giselle overhead in Act Two of Alexei Ratmansky’s 2019 production of “Giselle” for the Bolshoi Ballet. Screen-capture photograph.
18: Giselle and Albrecht, dancing for the wilis until dawn, end their first pas de deux, she kneeling with her hands covering her tears, in Act Two of Alexei Ratmansky’s 2019 production of “Giselle” for the Bolshoi Ballet. Screen-capture photograph.
19: As Albrecht (Jérôme Tisserand) lies exhausted on the ground, Myrtha (Carrie Imler) and Giselle (Kaori Nakamura) are both struck by the sound of the church clock announcing four and therefore dawn, in Act Two of Peter Boal’s 2011 production for Pacific Northwest Ballet, on which Marian Smith and Doug Fullington were artistic advisors.
Photo: Angela Sterling