Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle.(Review)(Brief Article)

Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle by Marian Smith Princeton University Press, 288 pp. $39.95

As anyone who dips into the production books for, say, Verdi's operas soon discovers, nineteenth-century stagings of opera differed considerably from the mainstream, naturalistic productions that are the norm in most American companies today. Those who decry "modern directorial excess" and advocate "fidelity to the creator's intentions" might be surprised at what these documents stipulate: elaborately choreographed pantomimes and a rhetoric of gesture that today's spectators might find most perplexing. Certain aspects of the style, oddly enough, might even bring to mind the productions of those same dastardly iconodasts whose work drives traditionalists to fits of indignation.

Marian Smith's Ballet and Opera in the Age of "Giselle" takes up just such issues: the visual and musical languages shared by ballet and opera in the early nineteenth century. Smith's focus is narrow: the ballets created at the Paris Opera during the 1830s and 1840s, including Giselle and La Sylphide, which "laid the foundations for `classical' ballet as we know it today." Opera plays a secondary role in this thoughtful, revealing study, though, as Smith ...