Harald Scharff, the Bournonville male dreamboat to whom Hans Christian Andersen lost his heart

Aug 11

The charming and handsome dancer Harald Scharff (1836-92) created leading roles for the choreographer August Bournonville, some of them in ballets still danced today; and he inherited several of the roles that Bournonville had made for himself. He also became one of the great loves of Hans Christian Andersen’s life.

In the late 1990s, my good friend Jackie Wullschlager (we were both leading arts critics to the Financial Times, as she remains) was preparing her biography of Andersen (Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller) when she told me of the relationship between him and Scharff. I was able to lend her not only Bournonville’s autobiography My Theatre Life but Knud Arne Jürgensen’s endlessly fascinating tome The Bournonville Ballets - A Photographic Record 1844-1933 (Dance Books, 1987, U.K.), which contains the nine photographs of Scharff that I copy here. She was able to use photograph 3 - showing Scharff as Gennaro in Bournonville’s Napoli (Bournonville’s own role) in her book; and she was delighted to find that, when it was published in Denmark, much was made of it.

Andersen, thirty-one years older than Scharff, had wanted to be a dancer. Bournonville and he had parallel careers among Denmark’s foremost creative artists, though Bournonville was largely based in Copenhagen while Andersen spent long periods in other countries. Bournonville adapted some Andersen stories into ballets; a number of Andersen’s stories are about dance. When Andersen met Scharff, in Paris, in 1857, Andersen was in his mid-fifties; Scharff was twenty-one and had recently created a role in Bournonville’s In the Carpathians (photograph 5). The young dancer was the epitome of youthful virile charm; Andersen, on his way back from staying with Charles Dickens in London, was an international celebrity. Both men were unmarried (Scharff shared a house with a male actor, Lauritz Eckhardt, and travelled Europe with him); Andersen already had a pattern of losing his heart to members of both sexes. Scharff was inheriting Bournonville’s own roles; Bournonville wrote that Scharff was “full of life and imagination... he is undoubtedly the finest hero we have had since I left!” In Paris, Scharff and Andersen went together to visit Notre-Dame.

Scharff and Andersen did not meet again for three years. When they did so, it was by accident, in 1860, in Bavaria: Scharff, Eckhardt, and Andersen had all gone to see the famous passion play performed every ten years in the village of Oberammergau. Scharff had recently created the central role of Wilhelm in Far from Denmark (photos 6 and 7), a ballet still danced today. Andersen, while calling Scharff “a butterfly who flits around sympathetically”, seems to have fallen in love with him. The two corresponded (their letters do not survive) and exchanged birthday gifts. Andersen wrote The Snowman (1861), telling of a snowman’s love for a stove, almost certainly in response to his feelings for Scharff. Andersen’s diaries for 1861-1862 record kisses, embraces, and his own sexual excitement; it’s likely that some degree of sexual relationship occurred. (This remains the subject of intense controversy in Andersen circles. While Wullschläger and others assume that there was a sexual dimension, some believe that Andersen’s religious beliefs would not have permitted any consummation.)

Whatever affair there may have been seems to have ended in 1863. Scharff’s inclinations subsequently became heterosexual. In 1871, a knee injury ended his dance career; he turned to acting (without any notable success); in 1874, he married. The Snowman is still read; Far From Denmark is still danced.

Wednesday, 11 August