The shadow of herself: Some sources of Jules Perrot'sOndine

Abstract

Since early times man has populated the waters with imaginary halfhuman creatures. The ancient Greeks had their naiads and nereids, the Hindus their apsaras, and the Germans their nixies. Although belief in these fantastic folk waned with the centuries, people in the early nineteenth century still found the notion of water sprites charming and appealing, and thus a popular literary heroine, Undine, was born. Her tragic story, told by the German author Baron Friedrich de la Motte Fouque in the novel Undine, in turn inspired one of the most famous Romantic ballets, Jules Perrot's Ondine, ou la Naiade, first produced in London in 1843. The transmutation of book into ballet was by no means simple. Their common title would seem to indicate that the novel is the ballet's starting point, but the ballet itself stands as evidence that Perrot drew upon more than this single literary source in giving Ondine theatrical form.