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On Ballet at the Opéra, 1909–14, and La fête chez Thérèse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Abstract
This article is broadly centred on the ballets staged at the Paris Opéra during the era in which Diaghilev's Ballets Russes were resident in the French capital. I seek initially to define the ways in which both troupes, the Opéra Ballet and the Russian, were received in the period press: in short, how the French company was implored to take its lead from Russian choreographic and scenic developments. My principal aim, though, is to offer a ‘thick’ description of one particular ballet – a commission from the Opéra endded La fête chez Thérèse, set to music by French salon composer Reynaldo Hahn and premièred on 16 February 1910. A close reading of Thérèse‘s narrative, structure and musical design reveals something of the ballet's cultural resonance: a resonance that extends from the ballet-pantomimes of the July Monarchy, through the extra-curricular endeavours of the composer Gustave Charpentier, to contemporary ideals of womanhood, social parity and dancers’ skirts. A new historical perspective emerges, one that prompts a revision of the taxonomies according to which narratives of the pre-war balletic scene are usually plotted, along with a reassessment of the dominant historiographical strategy itself.
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- Copyright © The Author 2008
References
I am grateful to my anonymous readers for their careful and constructive comments on the first draft of this article; thanks also to Roger Parker for his continuing support and to Chris Bradley for his companionship at home and abroad.Google Scholar
1 Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (Oxford, 1989; repr. New York, 1998); Léandre Vaillat, Ballets de l'Opéra de Paris (Paris, 1943); Olivier Merlin, L'Opéra de Paris (Fribourg, 1975); and Ivor Guest, Le ballet de l'Opéra de Paris: Trois siècles d'histoire et de tradition (Paris, 2001). Guest offers a particularly comprehensive survey of the productions and goings-on at the Opéra, as well as a catalogue of the Ballet's repertory, principal dancers and ballet-masters.Google Scholar
2 Quoted in Guest, Le ballet de l'Opéra de Paris, 118. For further discussion of the eclipse of the Romantic ballet, see idem, The Ballet of the Second Empire, 1847–1858 (London, 1955); his The Romantic Ballet in Paris (London, 1966); and Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the Romantic Ballet, ed. Lynn Garafola (Hanover, NH, and London, 1997).Google Scholar
3 Pierre Lalo, ‘La musique’, Le temps (3 December 1907); clipping in Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Opéra (hereafter F-Po), dossier d'oeuvre for Le lac des aulnes. Unless otherwise stated, all translations given here are my own.Google Scholar
4 Jacques Aubertin, review of Namouna (1908) in Le Voltaire (n.d.); clipping, F-Po, dossier d'oeuvre for Namouna.Google Scholar
5 Incidentally, the perfume inspired by the Ballets Russes was not only metaphorical. A fragrance of the name ‘Parfum des Jardins d'Armide’ was created in honour of the ballet Le pavilion d'Armide, staged by the troupe in 1909. For more on this and other on/offstage blurrings, see ‘La mode actuelle au théâtre et à la ville’, Comædia illustré (1 June 1909), 319–21.Google Scholar
6 For use of these terms, see Vuillermoz, Emile, ‘Les Ballets Russes’, Musica-Noël, 1912, 255–7.Google Scholar
7 Camille Mauclair, ‘L'enseignement de la saison russe’, La revue (1 August 1910), 350–60 (pp. 350–1).Google Scholar
8 Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, ‘Variations sur les Ballets Russes’ (July 1910); repr. in Vaudoyer, Propos et promenades (Paris, 1914), 253–76 (pp. 273–4).Google Scholar
9 This idea of active spectatorship meshes neatly with a comment from Lucien Alphonse-Daudet in Comædia illustré. Writing in 1911 of the Ballets Russes's sixth season, he speaks of an intimate relationship between audience and art kindled during performances: ‘Nous ne sommes pas seulement spectateurs de ces danses, nous y jouons un rôle et c'est pourquoi elles nous bouleversent’ ('We are not only spectators of these dances, we play a role in them, and this is why they are so staggering'); see ‘6e Saison des Ballets Russes au Châtelet’, Comædia illustré (15 June 1911), 575–8 (pp. 575–6).Google Scholar
10 Mauclair, for example, writes: ‘Nous avons été étonnés de reconnaître, dans la chorégraphie russe, les principe [s] de l'ancienne chorégraphie française, absolument oubliés aujourd'hui, importés en Russie à la fin du XVIIIe siècle et au début du XIXe, par nos maîtres de ballet’ ('We have been surprised to recognize in Russian choreography the principles of ancient French choreography, absolutely forgotten nowadays, imported to Russia by our ballet-masters at the end of the eighteenth century and at the start of the nineteenth'); see ‘L'enseignement de la saison russe’, 355. More recently, Richard Shead has offered an account of the French heritage of Russian choreographic practice in his Ballets Russes (London, 1989), 10–13. Shead notes the line of Frenchmen – from Jean-Baptiste Landé, then Charles-Louis Didelot, to (most famously) Marius Petipa – through which Western European ‘classical’ dance was exported to Russia.Google Scholar
11 Garafola, Diaghilevs Ballets Russes, remains the most authoritative voice on the choreographic practices of Fokine; also see Souritz, Elizabeth, ‘Isadora Duncan and Prewar Russian Dancemakers’, The Ballets Russes and its World, ed. Lynn Garafola and Nancy Van Norman Baer (New Haven, CT, and London, 1999), 97–115; and, of course, Michel Fokine, Memoirs of a Ballet Master (London, 1961).Google Scholar
12 Abel Bonnard, ‘Le Ballet Russe’; quoted in Valerian Svétlow, Le ballet contemporain, trans. Michael Dimitri Calvocoressi (Paris, 1912), 110–11. Incidentally, Svétlow offers a particularly comprehensive survey of French critics' response to the Russian troupe, with extensive citations from the period press. Other sources that I have found useful include: Truman Bullard, ‘The First Performance of Igor Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1971); Martine Kahane, Les Ballets Russes à l'Opéra (Paris, 1992); and Thomas Forrest Kelly, ‘Igor Stravinsky: Le sacre du printemps, First Nights: Five Musical Premieres (New Haven, CT, and London, 2000), 256–334. Of the press itself, Comædia illustré and Le théâtre offer perhaps the most detailed response to the Ballets Russes; a selection of cuttings from the former has been compiled at F-Po, B pièce 144. It is also worth noting that articles on the Russian company appeared not only in the theatrical presses, but also in journals such as La lanterne, Le radical and La libre parole, rarely concerned with theatre.Google Scholar
13 See Charles Méryel, ‘L'adieu aux Ballets Russes’, Comædia illustré (15 June 1912), 749–55 (p. 750). Svétlow summarizes the French reception of the Russian principals in his Le ballet contemporain, 131–5.Google Scholar
14 Two press reports that describe Zambelli in such terms are Adolphe Jullien, ‘Revue musicale’, Feuilleton du Journal des débats (1 December 1907), and Henry Gauthier-Villars, L'écho de Paris (27 November 1902). (Gauthier-Villars is better known as Willy, the first husband of the novelist Colette.)Google Scholar
15 André-E. Many, ‘Encore les Ballets Russes’, Comædia illustri (15 August 1909), 459–60 (p. 460). Vaudoyer closes his 1910 piece with something similar, expressing a hope that French choreography and scene design might follow the Russians' lead; see his ‘Variations sur les Ballets Russes’, 276.Google Scholar
16 See Clustine, Ivan, ‘Ballets Russes et Ballets d'Opéra’, Musica-Noël, 1912, 245.Google Scholar
17 Clustine, ‘Ballets Russes et Ballets d'Opéra’, 245.Google Scholar
18 As it happens, the fate of the tutu provoked something of an uproar in the popular press, several critics bewailing the garment's seeming demise. In response to an article in Comædia illustré entitled ‘Est-ce que la fin du tutu?’, Clustine wrote specifically of his intentions, claiming that, whilst the tutu might be appropriate attire for a supernatural character, it was unbefitting of peasants and religious folk; see Delluc, Louis, ‘À propos du “tutu”’, Comædia illustré (n.d.); clipping, F-Po, dossier d'auteur for Ivan Clustine.Google Scholar
19 See Guest, Le Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris, 149. It seems likely that the gestural language of Les Bacchantes was also influenced by the bas-relief postures of Cléopâtre and Narcisse, as well as L'après-midi.Google Scholar
20 Ibid.Google Scholar
21 Vaillat, Ballets de l'Opéra de Paris, 47–56.Google Scholar
22 Critics' tendency to justify their silence was almost universal. Here, for example, is a passage on Isadora Duncan from the Buffalo Express: ‘Thinking over her performances one scarcely recalls whether she is beautiful or tall; one remembers only that she is a perfect exemplification of human grace […]. It would be folly to dissect her work. One cannot put a sunset into words or set down in cold type the emotions aroused by a perfect statue. Miss Duncan's dancing equally defies description’; quoted in Winthrop Palmer, Theatrical Dancing in America (New York, 1945), 18.Google Scholar
23 I have been unable to locate either manuscript or répétiteur (rehearsal score).Google Scholar
24 Mobisson, F., Le journal (n.d.); clipping, F-Po, B pièce 717 (a collection of press cuttings on Thérèse, mostly dating from the months surrounding the première).Google Scholar
25 The seminal account of Louis-Philippe's conversion of the château from royal residence to ‘musée national d'histoire’ remains Pierre Francastel, La création du musée historique de Versailles et la transformation du palais, 1832–1848 (Paris, 1930). For more on the king's historical vision – of a preferred, some would say politicized, version of the past – see Marrinan, Michael,Google Scholar
Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe: Art and Ideology in Orleanist France (New Haven, CT, and London, 1988), and The Popularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy, ed. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Gabriel P. Weisberg (Princeton, NJ, 1994).Google Scholar
26 Clipping from L'écho de Paris (n.d.); F-Po, B pièce 717.Google Scholar
27 Bacchus, premièred on 26 November 1902, was about the god of wine and his romance with an Indian princess betrothed to the king; La ronde des saisons, 25 December 1905, was based on a Gascon legend in which Oriel, a sprite, beguiled the young Tancrède; Le lac des aulnes, 25 November 1907, was inspired by Goethe's ‘Erlkönig’; España, 3 May 1911, was an exotic fable about Spanish dancers; La Roussalka, 8 December 1911, was based on a Russian myth (and a poem by Pushkin) in which a woman, having drowned herself when separated from her lover, returns as a water spirit to claim him; Les Bacchantes, 30 October 1912, was loosely inspired by the Bacchae of Euripides and told of conflict between Bacchus and the Theban King; Philotis, 18 February 1914 was about a wealthy, love-struck dancer from Corinth battling against the will of Apollo; and Hansli le bossu, 22 June 1914, followed an Alsatian folk tale about a hunchback. Incidentally, the three non-mythological commissions were: Danses de jadis et de naguère (Dances of Long Ago and of Late), premièred at the Opéra on n November 1900 and consisting of a sequence of ‘danses barbares’, ‘danses grecques’, ‘danses françaises’ and ‘danses modernes’; Thérèse, and Suite de danses, premièred on 23 June 1913. The ballets Javotte and Namouna were also staged at the Opéra during this period, but were recreations.Google Scholar
28 André Mangeot, ‘Les Bacchantes’, Le monde musical (30 October 1912); clipping, F-Po, dossier d'æuvre for Les Bacchantes.Google Scholar
29 Marian Smith, Ballet and Opera in the Age of ‘Giselle‘ (Princeton, NJ, 2000).Google Scholar
30 Details of the July Monarchy ballet-pantomimes that foreground such romantic themes can be found in Smith's exhaustive table of ‘plot situations’ characteristic of the genre; see ibid., 26–7.Google Scholar
31 Smith discusses the issue of verisimilitude, noting librettists' ‘acute sense of what was proper and improper subject-matter for the ballet-pantomime’; ibid., 65–72 (p. 66).Google Scholar
32 Ibid., 71–2. To account for this lighter tone, Smith points to the public's perceived connection between ballet, the body and sex. According to Smith, the overt objectification and sexualization of the danseuse, both on stage and off (the goings-on in the foyer de danse are well known), steered ballet towards amorous themes, private realms and seductive impulses.Google Scholar
33 The critic Fourcard, writing in Le Gaulois (1 November 1912), offers some definitions: ‘Nous connaissons au moins deux genres de ballet: le ballet de pure danse, qui est, proprement, le divertissement chorégraphique, où tous les effets de virtuosité sont de mise et où la pantomime n'intervient que comme un fil très léger pour relier entre elles, par un semblant d'action, les différentes danses; et le ballet de pantomime, où la chorégraphie dansante apparaît surtout pour orner une action suivie, ayant de l'intérêt par elle-même et traduite en gestes, en évolutions motivées et en jeux de physionomie’ (‘We know at least two genres of ballet: pure dance, which is really choreographic divertissement, in which all virtuosic effects are allowed and mime occurs only, with a semblance of action, as a link between the different dances; and ballet-pantomime, in which dance appears particularly to decorate the narrative, which carries the interest itself, translated into gestures, into narratively contingent movements and character play‘).Google Scholar
34 A short remark: the contredanse, indicated in Example 1, developed from the English country dance introduced at the French court in the 1680s; including circle, square and long-ways formations, it became popular in urban society throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, until ousted from the floor by quadrilles and the round dances of the waltz and polka.Google Scholar
35 Four of the five ballets of the Russians' first season – Prince Igor, Le festin, Les Sylphides and Cléopâtre– were choreographed to pre-existing compositions, all by Russian composers (with the exception of Les Sylphides, originally by Chopin, though orchestrated by Glazunov, Stravinsky and Taneyev). Vuillermoz discusses the company's musical preferences in his ‘Les Ballets Russes’, 257. Folcine famously sums up: ‘The new ballet […] in contradistinction to the older ballet […] does not demand “ballet music” of the composer as an accompaniment to dancing; it accepts music of every kind, provided only that it is good and expressive’; see Fokine's letter to The Times (6 July 1914), repr. in What is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism, ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen (Oxford and New York, 1983), 260.Google Scholar
36 I arrived at these fractions by reference to the published piano reductions of each ballet (in the absence of annotated autograph scores, répétiteurs and recordings): I simply added together the number of bars of set dance music in each score, and, assuming the remainder (with the exception of the scene-setting passages at the beginning of each act) to be action music, calculated the proportions accordingly. My calculations are admittedly approximate.Google Scholar
37 On the emergence and further definition of ‘modern’ dance, see Anderson, Jack, Art without Boundaries: The World of Modern Dance (London, 1997), and his Ballet and Modern Dance (Princeton, NJ, 1986). Elizabeth Souritz offers an account of the influence of ‘modern’ styles (particularly Duncan's) on the Ballets Russes's choreographic practice in her ‘Isadora Duncan and Prewar Russian Dancemakers’.Google Scholar
38 The writings of Stéphane Mallarmé are perhaps the most famous of those which advance these ideas; his Crayonné au théâtre of 1886 embraces ballet's metaphorical potential, describing each dance step as a hieroglyph of a mysterious writing that can only be deciphered by a spectator's poetic instinct. Dance critic and theoretician André Levinson, who moved to Paris after the Russian Revolution of 1917, offers a succinct reading of Mallarmé's thesis in his short piece ‘The Idea of the Dance: From Aristode to Mallarmé’ (1927), reprinted in What is Dance?, ed. Copeland and Cohen, 47–55.Google Scholar
39 Smith notes the proportions of Giselle, perhaps the most famous ballet-pantomime of the 1840s – 54 minutes of mime to 60 minutes of dance; see her Ballet and Opera in the Age of ‘Giselle‘, 175.Google Scholar
40 The recent studies to which I refer include: Smith, Ballet and Opera in the Age of ‘Giselle'; Maribeth Clark, ‘The Body and the Voice in La Muette de Portici’, 19th-Century Music, 27 (2003–4), 116–31; Stephanie Jordan, Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet (London, 2000); Susan McClary, ‘Music, the Pythagoreans, and the Body’, Choreographing History, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington, IN, 1995), 82–104; and Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2004). This is not to forget Roland John Wiley's seminal Tchaikovsky's Ballets: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker (Oxford, 1985), a book that seems hardly to have aged in light of the glacial progress of music-dance studies.Google Scholar
41 See Smith, Ballet and Opera in the Age of ‘Giselle‘, 97–123.Google Scholar
42 Edouard Risler, review of Thérèse, untitled (n.d.); clipping, F-Po, B pièce 717.Google Scholar
43 Ibid.Google Scholar
44 Musical America (19 February 1910); clipping, F-Po, B pièce 717.Google Scholar
45 Robert de Montesquiou, ‘Une collaboration entre Deveria et Lancret à propos de La fête chez Thérèse‘ (n.d.); clipping, F-Po, B pièce 717.Google Scholar
46 André Rigaud, ‘La fête chez Thérèse à l'Opéra’ (n.d.); clipping, F-Po, B pièce 717.Google Scholar
47 Pierre Lalo, Le temps (3 December 1907); clipping, F-Po, dossier d'oeuvre for Le lac des aulnes. Curiously, the son of musical superfluity criticized by Lalo had been considered necessary, 25 years earlier, to a successful ballet score. An article in Le Voltaire (8 March 1882), maintained that, in order to write ballet music, one must think only on the most superficial of musical levels. Even more curiously, this comment was made in response to a score for the ballet Namouna composed by the more senior Lalo, Edouard (Pierre's father). E. Lalo's music incidentally, was considered ‘neuve’, ‘originale’ and ‘personnelle’ – far from the supposedly required ‘superficielle’ of the time.Google Scholar
48 Julien Torchet, Hommes du jour (November 1912); clipping, F-Po, dossier d'æuvre for Les Bacchantes.Google Scholar
49 André Mangeot, Le monde musical (30 October 1912); clipping, F-Po, dossier d'æuvre for Les Bacchantes.Google Scholar
50 Note that ‘figure 84/2‘ indicates the second bar following figure 84; the bar in which figure 84 itself appears is 84/1.Google Scholar
51 A further example, concerning Bruneau's handling of identifying themes, might be offered in support of this idea. Bacchus, in particular, receives an ambiguous musical portrayal: his seeming musical signifier – the melodic line of the chordal texture of Example 4 – recurs at narrative moments that are only vaguely connected to the mythical figure. Curiously, Penthée, Bacchus's rival and king of Thebes, is portrayed with a good deal more specificity: he is granted a recurring motif (an octave leap, often doubled at the octave) and a related recurring theme.Google Scholar
52 Smith discusses this in detail in her Ballet and Opera in the Age of ‘Giselle’, 97–123, also see her chapter ‘About the House’, Reading Critics Reading: Opera and Ballet Criticism in France from the Revolution to 1848, ed. Roger Parker and Mary Ann Smart (Oxford, 2001), 215–36.Google Scholar
53 Michael Dimitri Calvocoressi, Music and Ballet: Recollections of M. D. Calvocoressi (London, 1933), 219.Google Scholar
54 Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, NJ, 1999), 84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
55 This idea has an interesting footnote. Of the three scores of Thérèse housed at the Bibliothèque de l'Opéra, two reveal a number of cuts that, to judge from handwritten scrawlings and a good deal of tape, were made after the ballet's première (and presumably realized on the ballet's recreation at the Opéra in 1921). A few of the deletions are of what we might describe as scene-setting music: from the opening of Act 2, as the curtain goes up on Thérèse's garden; from the end of Act 2, scene ii, an atmospheric passage entitled ‘Clair de lune’. A couple more are of passages from set dances, including, for example, 16 bars from the Act 2 ‘Menuet’. But most of the cuts are from action scenes – in other words, scenes of the greatest musical mimeticism. One is particularly conspicuous: a passage from Act 2, scene iii in which Mimi's identifying theme (the piano melody heard to accompany her tears at the end of Act 1) signals, according to Mendès's directions, the character's dramatic presence on stage. It is of course tempting to wonder whether these cuts reflect a larger objective – a culling of musical mimeticism. Thérèse, the argument might proceed, was refashioned for the 1920s, its music reduced in narrative intensity in accordance with contemporary trends towards more ‘abstract’ musical accompaniments.Google Scholar
56 Thoughts on the function of the ballet score are central to Smith's Ballet and Opera in the Age of ‘Giselle‘.Google Scholar
57 Smith's discussion of the scene can be found ibid., 178–80.Google Scholar
58 See Kahan, Sylvia, Music's Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac (New York, 2003), 174–6. Hahn's musical profile has received little scholarly attention. Of the few extant studies, Bernard Gavoty, Reynaldo Hahn: Le musicien de la belle époque (Paris, 1976), remains the most authoritative.Google Scholar
59 Reynaldo Hahn, Thèmes variés (Paris, 1946). 217–18.Google Scholar
60 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington, IN, 1987). Gorbman's study has prompted a spate of psychoanalytic readings of film music; see, however, Jeff Smith's review, ‘Unheard Melodies? A Critique of Psychoanalytic Theories of Film Music’, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison, WI, 1996), 230–47, which raises a number of important objections to psychoanalytic methodology.Google Scholar
61 See Smith, Ballet and Opera in the Age of ‘Giselle‘, 101–10. Smith includes a detailed list of the borrowed extracts that featured in ballet-pantomime scores from 1777 to 1845 (see pp. 104–7).Google Scholar
62 De Musset's poem, first published in 1845, is included in his anthology Poésies nouvelles (1851; repr. Paris, 1962), 161–2.Google Scholar
63 I should note a further, equally glaring backward glance to the mid-nineteenth century: the ballet's tide draws on a poem by Victor Hugo (included in his Les contemplations, published in 1856), used as the pictorial basis for Act 2.Google Scholar
64 An insightful account of Mimi Pinson's literary and stage characteristics can be found in Allan W. Adas, ‘Mimì's Death: Mourning in Puccini and Leoncavallo’, Journal of Musicology, 14 (1996), 52–79. Other studies that explore Mimi and her Bohemian heritage include Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (New York, 1986); Giacomo Puccini, La bohème, ed. Arthur Groos and Roger Parker (Cambridge, 1986); and Jürgen Maehder, ‘Paris-Bilder: Zur Transformation von Henry Murgers Roman in den Bohème-Opern Puccinis und Leoncavallos’, Jahrbuch für Opemforschung, 2 (1987), 109–76.Google Scholar
65 Mary Ellen Poole, ‘Gustave Charpentier and the Conservatoire Populaire de Mimi Pinson’, 19th-Century Music, 20 (1996–7), 231–51 (p. 231).Google Scholar
66 Stichel occupied the position of ballet-master at the Opéra prior to Clustine. Her tenure lasted only one year; Thérèse was her only balletic offering. Garafola oudines Stichel's career in her Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance (Middletown, CT, 2005), 219–20.Google Scholar
67 The lawsuit was reported extensively in the Gazette des tribunaux (4 March 1911).Google Scholar
68 Feuilleton du journal des débats (20 February 1910); clipping, F-Po, B pièce 717.Google Scholar
69 See Montesquiou, ‘Une collaboration entre Devéria et Lancret à propos de La fête chez Thérèse‘.Google Scholar
70 Quoted in André Arnyvelde, ‘Carlotta Zambelli: L'étoile de la danse classique’, Le miroir (n.d.); clipping, F-Po, dossier d'artiste for Carlotta Zambelli.Google Scholar
71 Arnyvelde, ‘Carlotta Zambelli’.Google Scholar
72 See Zambelli, Carlotta, ‘Danseuses d'hier et d'aujourd'hui’, Je sais tout (15 November 1907), 535–41.Google Scholar
73 Smith, Ballet and Opera in the Age of ‘Giselle‘, 70–1.Google Scholar
74 Garafola outlines the historicist interests of both Folcine and Benois in her Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, 3–49.Google Scholar
75 André-E. Marty, ‘Encore les Ballets Russes’, Comædia illustré (15 August 1909), 459–60 (p. 459).Google Scholar
76 The writer Ernest la Jeunesse suggests something similar about Le pavillon d'Armide in his Des soirs, des gens, des choses […]’ 1909-1911 (Paris, n.d.), speaking of the ballet's ‘slackening of time’ (p. 44).Google Scholar
77 A dream-like impression about Pavillon was also noted by Fernand Nozière: ‘Il semble que l'auteur ait voulu évoquer la somptuosité des siècles passés. C'est le rêve d'une splendeur disparue’ ('It seems as if the author had wanted to evoke the sumptuosity of bygone centuries. It's the dream of a long-lost splendour'); see his ‘La saison russe à Paris’, Le théâtre (1 August 1909), 12–15 (p. 14).Google Scholar
78 Svétlow, Le ballet contemporain, 122.Google Scholar
79 For an account of Beardsley's decadent leanings and the cultural milieu that shaped his art, see Zatlin, Linda Gertner, Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics (Oxford, 1990), and Matthew Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography (London, 1998).Google Scholar
80 Reynaldo Hahn, Notes (journal d'un musicien) (Paris, 1933), 101.Google Scholar
81 I think particularly of Taglioni chez Mussette (1920), another of the Opéra's ballets to take inspiration from the 1830s and 40s.Google Scholar
82 Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner probe a similar relation between avant-garde and official in their seminal Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art (London, 1984).Google Scholar