Autumn Ballet: Giselle
Carlotta Grisi as Giselle. Lithograph by Alexdre. Lacauchie. Lith. de Rigo frères et Cie, 1842. The New York Public Library Digital Collections.
A bright autumn day in a German vineyard. A young nobleman emerges between the trees. He takes off his long cape and sword, hides them, and runs towards a small, modest hut. After a few gentle knocks, he disappears behind the hut. The door opens. A radiantly beautiful peasant girl peaks out of the door and bursts into a joyful dance, covering the clearing in front of her home with graceful leaps: she is looking for her sweetheart.
Few would think of Giselle, the most famous of all Romantic ballets, as an autumn ballet – but it is. The ballet with choreography by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot and music by Adolphe Adam premiered at the Paris Opera in 1841, with the Italian ballerina Carlotta Grisi in the title role. The first act of the ballet is set during harvest time in a German vineyard in the Middle Ages. The ballet’s first act is filled with the joy and dances traditionally associated with this season – until the moment when the innocent peasant girl Giselle realises, that her beloved Albrecht is not a simple lad, but a count engaged to the daughter of a duke. Giselle goes mad and dies of a broken heart. In the second act, Albrecht is beside himself with grief. He visits Giselle’s grave in the forest, but is haunted by the Wilis, vengeful spirits of brides who died before their wedding day. The Wilis force any man who crosses their path to dance himself to death. Giselle’s intercession saves a heartbroken Albrecht.
The ballet’s second act is full of the darker emotions we associate with autumn: as nature prepares for winter, the trees shed their leaves and appear to be dying. Halloween has its origins in the night vigil preceding All Saints’ Day, a day when many Christians traditionally commemorate the dead. The French poet Théophile Gautier took his inspiration for the ballet’s libretto from his friend, the German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine, who wrote about the legend of the dead dancing-girls, the Wilis: “These are young brides who died before the wedding-day, and the unsatisfied desire for dancing is preserved so powerfully in their hearts that they come every night out of their graves, assemble in bands on high roads, and give themselves up at midnight to the wildest dances. Dressed in their wedding clothes, with garlands on their heads, and glittering rings on their pale hands, laughing horribly, irresistibly lovely, the Willis dance in the moonshine, and they dance ever more madly the more they feel the hour of dancing, which has been granted them, is coming to an end, and that they must again descend to their cold graves.”
When Heinrich Heine watched the ballet in Paris, he approved of Carlotta Grisi’s romantic aura, pointing out that she distinguished herself from the other dancers “rather like an orange in a sack of potatoes.” For Gautier, Giselle marked the beginning of a life-long friendship with Carlotta Grisi. Giselle embodied the ideal of Gautier’s vision for the Romantic ballet: “The very essence of ballet is poetic, deriving from dreams rather than from reality. About the only reason for its existence is to enable us to remain in the world of fantasy and escape from the people we rub shoulders with in the street. Ballets are the dreams of poets taken seriously.”