Images of "La Sylphide": Two Accounts by a Contemporary Witness of Marie Taglioni's Appearances in St. Petersburg

Abstract

Since Pushkin, the art of writing about ballet has involved the recapture in words of magical effects created on stage by dancers. In the case of Maria Taglioni (and many other ballerinas of historic stature), Ivor Guest has created orfound these moments, and bequeathed them to readers of English. A decade after Taglioni's debut in Paris, which Guest documents in his book, The Romantic Ballet in Paris,' Marie and herparents were in St. Petersburgfor her first appearances there. Of these, the most important was La Sylphide on 6 September 1836, even though that ballet had been in repertoire since 28 May 1835 with another ballerina. On this occasion a young editorial assistant was called upon to review Taglioni's dibut. He signed his work, published on 18 September 1836 in The Northern Bee,2 only with the letter 'E' too obscure an identity to permit our learning who he was eitherfrom other reviews orfrom any reference in Ivan Filippovich Maslov's massive Dictionary of Pseudonyms of Russian Writers, Scholars, and Social Figures.3 His obscurity, in turn, may have been intentional, a cover for the elegant prose of his apostrophe, which stood in bright contrast to the norms of ballet criticism at the time. While his likening of Taglioni's movements to 'a light puff of smoke in the morning breeze' is hardly Pushkin, he too was attempting to recapture in words the magical effects she created on stage. Here is what he wrote.