10 - Romantic ballet in France: 1830–850

Summary

Premiere of Giselle ou les Wilis

Monday 28 June 1841

Ballet-Pantomime in 2 acts at the Académie Royale de Musique

The first chords of Rossini's music announcing the beginning of the third act of the opera Moïse can be heard faintly by the spectators who, uninterested in the 1827 opera chestnut, still wander about the Opéra's foyer as its prominent clock strikes eight. They have at least another hour before the curtain rises to reveal the long-awaited and much talked about new ballet, Giselle. Others – men, dressed in black tailcoats and top hats, asserting their privileged status derived from their associations with the worlds of business, of politics and the intelligentsia – have paid for the entitlement of entering the foyer de la danse to chat with the dancers. Aglow with the excitement of opening night, the dancers warm up and mark out their steps before the foyer's full-length mirrors. Or, in their dressing-rooms, they look to their make-up, jewels, last-minute fitting of their villagers’ costumes; many lay out their calf-length white dresses of layered gauze and crowns of flowers for the ballet's second act peopled with wilis, those enchanting dancing ghosts of maidens who, having died before their wedding day, lure each passing man into a dance that only ceases with his death from exhaustion and their diurnal fade-out. As is customary at the Paris Opéra, the evening will last three to four hours, almost until midnight.