Anna Pavlova

The Danish ballet and Bournoville’s reform; Lucile Grahn, Augusta Nielsen, etc.—Mrs. Elna JÖrgen-Jensen; Adeline GenÉe; the mission of the Danish ballet.

I

The French ballet dominated civilized Europe for centuries, as did the French fashions, manners, language, art and social traditions. The high society of every country was outspokenly French, and so were its views and entertainments. How much even Germany was in the grip of French ideals can be seen best from the efforts of her eighteenth-century writers and reformers on behalf of their own national traditions. Lessing was most bitterly fighting the French influence in German life and art. It was only natural that semi-aristocratic Sweden and Denmark felt the French sway. Stockholm introduced the ballet during the last part of the eighteenth century, but used it for the most part as an accessory of the opera. Taglioni, the father of the celebrated ballerina, was employed as a ballet-master in Stockholm where, in addition to his actual stage work, he was training dancers for the ballet corps. He was succeeded by no one else than the great Didelot, who later became a director of the ballet and ballet school in Petrograd. But Sweden strictly followed the footsteps of France and Italy and never took another direction. The Swedish ballet of the nineteenth century was strictly French-Italian. But the Danish ballet, which had been founded at the same time with the Swedish, took a different turn. The early part and middle of the nineteenth century mark a great turning point in the history of the Danish stage dance. This is wholly due to the patriotic efforts of its great reformer, Bournoville, who did not like the foreign flavor of such an important art as dancing, and, moreover, found the stiff style, artificial manners and the incoherent relation between the music and dancing too crude and outmoded for a new era. On the other hand, the method of training the dancers was lacking in system and seemed too insufficient to make any thorough artists of the young men and women who wished to make their career as dancers. Vincenzo Tomaselli Galeotti, who had been for half a century an autocratic figure and ballet-master of Denmark, emphasized either the acrobatic Italian or the stereotyped French styles. For Galeotti the Danish ballet was perfection itself, but not so for Bournoville.

Antoine Auguste Bournoville was born in 1805 in Copenhagen, where his father had been a dancer and assistant conductor under Galeotti. Already at the age of eight he danced in small parts in Copenhagen. But it was not until 1829 that he made his real dÉbut in Gratiereness Hulding. In 1824 he made a trip with Orloff to Paris where he saw Vestris and Gardel, whose instruction and art inspired him to do for the Danish ballet what they had done for the French. After a tour in Austria and Italy, Bournoville settled down in Copenhagen and began to reform the stage of his native land.

Bournoville’s main reformative idea was that a dancer should first of all have a perfect technique, and then be an individual and not a dead figure in a spectacular design. The technique of the Milan school was to him one-sided, striving for gymnastic effects at the expense of the musical and thematic requirements of a composition. Taglioni had just made her reputation on the foundations that Bournoville had laid for the Danish ballet. Virtuosity had been the danger of the old school. Admiration was centred exclusively in the difficulty of the execution of the steps. The pointes and pirouettes had been regarded as the highest form of accomplishment. Bournoville realized that this step, when it is abused, becomes the curse of ballet dancing. While recognizing that it was absolutely necessary for momentary use, when completing an attitude or giving a suggestion of ethereal lightness (as of the poise of a winged being alighting for an instant upon the earth) he combated the tendency to base the significance of the dance only on this. On other occasions, one quick passage across the stage, the tips of the toes scarcely brushing the dust of the carpet, the dancer may make the impression of the grace of a bird’s flight. But if this trick is displayed constantly during a performance the effect is lost in the ugliness of the effort.

Bournoville was also dissatisfied with the ballet compositions and plots. He remodelled many French ballets and wrote some himself. In many things Bournoville coÖperated with Pierre J. Larcher. The most conspicuous of their works was Valdemar, which was first performed in 1835, with music by Froehlich. Not less successful was the Festen i Albano, an idyllic ballet in one act with music by Froehlich. This was first performed in 1839. A very popular ballet that Bournoville arranged to the music of Hartmann was Olaf den Hellige.

The most conspicuous pupil of Bournoville and the foremost of his prima ballerinas was Lucile Grahn, a girl of outspoken individuality, temperament and dramatic force. She was a rival of Taglioni and Elssler, not only in Denmark, but in France, England and in other European countries. Grahn’s favored ballet was La Sylphide, though she danced superbly in the Fiorella, and Brahma und Bayaderen. The Danish critics wrote that the Copenhagen audience fairly went wild over her dancing in the Robert af Normandie. Grahn differed from Taglioni in her individual style, which was more romantic and lofty, and in her dramatic talent. Besides being a great dancer she was an excellent actress. The London and Petrograd audiences were particularly fond of her divertissement numbers, mostly written by Danish composers. She was born in 1819 and died in Munich in 1875, after having lived nineteen years of happy married life with Friedrich Young, a celebrated opera singer of that time.

Next to Lucile Grahn in the Danish ballet stands Augusta Nielsen, born in 1823 in Copenhagen. As a girl of fifteen, she danced in Valdemar. But her real career began with Toreadoren, in which she danced for the first time in 1840. Nielsen’s tendency in dancing was to be natural rather than acrobatic. Her mimic and rhythmic talent surpassed by far that of Grahn, Taglioni and Elssler. But since she strove less for gymnastic effects than her celebrated contemporaries, she failed to arouse the enthusiasm that greeted the others. She came close to the modern natural dancers, since dancing was for her an individual art like singing, in which each artist should express only the best of his inner self. Like many other Danish dancers, Nielsen was a born actress and emphasized the dramatic features as the most important ones in the ballet.

Among Danish ballet dancers the most conspicuous figures are Adolph F. Stramboe, Johann Ferdinand Hoppe, Waldemar Price and Hans Beck. They all follow the footsteps of Bournoville, whose reforms in Danish dancing are equal to those of Noverre in France, or Petipa in Russia. Bournoville’s main efforts were to make dancing a serious dramatic art. In this he succeeded. The influence of the Danish ballet upon the Russian is of far-reaching extent. Didelot, having been a ballet-master in Stockholm, was inspired by Bournoville’s attempts, and followed his example after becoming a ballet director in Russia. But the art of dancing has its period of youth, maturity, decay and rebirth. The Danish ballet stopped its evolution after Bournoville. It has remained what it was half a century ago. It is sound, classic, and noble in its spirit, but it lacks the fire and soul of youth.

II

The writer has a record of the young living solo dancer of the Danish Royal Ballet, Mrs. Elna JÖrgen-Jensen, whose exquisite delicate plastic art in Strindberg’s Brott och Brott, and Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Gioconda aroused stormy enthusiasm among Copenhagen’s audiences. Haagen Falkenfleth, the celebrated ballet critic of the Nationaltidende of Copenhagen, writes of her; ‘Mrs. Elna JÖrgen-Jensen, the prima ballerina of the Danish Royal Ballet, entered the Copenhagen Ballet School as a child, as the result of an episode that is still little known. Her parents knew that little Elna was passionately fond of dancing, but their surprise was great when one day she disappeared from her home. It appeared that she had run after a street organ-grinder to whose screaming tune she was dancing in the middle of the street to the surprise of the occasional spectators. At the age of seven she became a pupil of the Royal Ballet School in Copenhagen, where the children are taught not only dancing and calisthenics, but also the general school subjects, in the same way as the dancers are educated in the Russian Imperial Ballet School in Petrograd. As a pupil she was favored with small dancing parts in certain ballets. She was excellent for little fairy rÔles. In this way she received a gradual training for the stage and had already mastered her routine when she made her real dÉbut in Drigo’s “Harlequin’s Millions.” She had personified Sylvia’s child in d’Annunzio’s Gioconda and the page in Schiller’s Don Carlos. Her dancing was so sure, her movements so graceful and her mimicry so true to life that her reputation was instantly established; but how versatile she was became known only later.

‘No one who saw her during her dÉbut in the rÔle of the gay Pierrette, with frolic-humorous eyes and graceful juvenile steps, could imagine that on the next occasion she would be so easily transformed into a tragedienne in Schnitzler’s and DohnÁnyi’s “Veil of Pierrette.” She practically created her rÔle. Her romantic eyes, so full of sorrow and despair, added a magic gloom to her dramatic dance, in which she stands so high above her many contemporaries. She is realistically gripping. Already at the age of nineteen she was an accomplished mute actress of the modern type, and a great solo dancer. DohnÁnyi, who attended the performance, told me that he had not supposed she could possibly add such a tragic fire to the rÔle that he wrote for untrained theatrical dancers. Mrs. JÖrgen-Jensen proved in this rÔle that she had broken loose from all the traditions of the Bournoville school in which she was trained. You could not see a line of the conventional ballet style.

‘Bournoville, the reformer of the Danish ballet, introduced a strong dramatic element into the national art. Yet his tendency was outspokenly romantic. In this he aimed to be classic and strictly choreographic. In many of his ballets the romantic and the realistic issues are closely interwoven. In these Mrs. JÖrgen-Jensen sometimes has gone against the Bournoville principles and used her own judgment. She has figured as the principal dancer in the “Flower Festival at Genzano,” La Ventana, “Far from Danemark,” CoppÉlia and Swanhilde. But in “The Little Mermaid,” a ballet based on Hans Andersen’s fairy-tale, she is best of all. While dancing in the rÔle of the Mermaid, she makes the impression of a magic creature of a different world, with grace and charms that we have never known, yet which cast a spell upon us. Mrs. JÖrgen-Jensen’s repertoire is large, but still larger is the range of her dramatic personifications. The Copenhagen audiences are sorry to see her so little, but the stage of our National Theatre is more adapted to the opera and drama than to the ballet.’

Perhaps the best known of the living Danish dancers is Adeline GenÉe, whose name has figured during the past twenty years in the ballet repertoires of all the more or less known opera houses. She has been a special favorite of the London public, where she made her dÉbut in Monte Cristo in November, 1897. She has shown her best in Delibes’ CoppÉlia, though some critics maintain that her triumph in the Dryad is even greater. But what La Sylphide was to Taglioni, Ghiselle to Grisi and Éoline to Lucile Grahn, that is CoppÉlia to GenÉe. She is a true exponent of the Bournoville school of ballet, though she claims that she owes her brilliant technique to some other sources. Though she studied dancing with her uncle in Denmark, yet the method, style and technique originate from Bournoville. Max Beerbohm has given a pretty characteristic account of her appearance in CoppÉlia in London. ‘No monstrous automaton is that young lady. Perfect though she be in the haute École, she has by some miracle preserved her own self. She was born a comedian and a comedian she remains, light as foam. A mermaid were not a more surprising creature than she—she of whom one half is that of an authentic ballerina, whilst the other is that of a most intelligent, most delightful human actress. A mermaid were, indeed, less marvellous in our eyes. She would not be able to diffuse any semblance of humanity into her tail. Madame GenÉe’s intelligence seems to vibrate in her very toes. Her dancing, strictly classical though it is, is a part of her acting. And her acting, moreover, is of so fine a quality, that she makes the old ineloquent conventions of gesture tell meanings to me, and tell them so exquisitely that I quite forget my craving for words.—Taglioni in Les Arabesques? I suspect in my heart of hearts, she was no better than a doll. Grisi in Ghiselle? She may or may not have been passable. GenÉe! It is a name our grandchildren will cherish, even as we cherish now the names of those bygone dancers. And alas! our grandchildren will never believe, will never be able to imagine, what GenÉe was.’

The writer has attended a number of GenÉe’s performances in Europe and in America, and does not agree entirely with Mr. Beerbohm’s eulogy. As already explained above, Bournoville’s method was a great improvement over the French-Italian schools of dancing, in that it emphasized the dramatic issues and individual traits in the ballet, which GenÉe has exactly followed; but unfortunately the evolution of the Danish ballet stopped with Bournoville. The art remained in its preliminary state of development and ended with the Dresden-china steps. It is this very style that makes GenÉe an attractive museum figure. In this she stands unrivalled. She exhibits an art of the past, with every detail sedulously studied. You can see how mathematically exact is the position of the fingers, the attitude of the head, the lines of the arms and limbs, and so on. ‘Every step has its name, every gesture belongs to its code; there is only one way and no other of executing them rightly, and that way is Madame GenÉe’s,’ writes one of her admirers. But the dance is more than an exhibition of mathematical figures. The studied smile and sorrow fail to arouse the emotions of the audience. The Dresden-china step is a fossilized thing of bygone centuries. It somehow does not belong to the stage.

The significance of the Danish ballet, and its influence upon the evolution of the art of dancing is greater than it is universally admitted. The Danes introduced the element of drama into the ballet in order to make the dancing a kind of mute acting. They were the first to revolt against many time-worn rules of the old schools. They were the first to advocate the imitation of nature to a certain extent. Bournoville said ‘as nature moves in curves and gradations rather than by leaps and turns, dancing should take that into consideration.’ The Russian ballet was influenced through the Danish and Swedish. The Danish ballet was a stepping-stone between the academic French-Italian and ethno-dramatic Russian schools. It has accomplished a great task in the evolution of the art of dancing by making the ballet a dramatic expression on academic lines.