Parisian Music-Hall Ballet through the Eyes of its Critics

Abstract

In the 1890s, Paris's three pre-eminent music halls – the Folies-Bergère, the Olympia, and the Casino de Paris – staged ballets on a nightly basis alongside circus acts and song-and-dance routines. As music-hall ballet librettos and scores show, these productions were closely related to ballets staged by the Paris Opéra, with similar large-scale structures, scene and dance types, and dramatic, choreographic, and musical conventions. What music-hall ballets looked like, however, is less clear: they have left few visual traces, and virtually no prose descriptions of choreography or staging. The one plentiful source of information is press reviews, but relying on reviews poses many problems for the historian. Critics’ various culturally situated viewpoints and interpretations may be used to create a composite picture of what might have been happening on stage, but they can also leave us with a hazy understanding of the genre. This paper examines the multiple and sometimes contradictory critical responses to 1890s music-hall ballets both to highlight what effect such contradictions might have on our perception of music-hall ballet (in particular as art or salacious spectacle) and to call attention to the problems inherent in using the press as a documentary source.