Hartford Ballet restores a classic: journey with Giselle

Dance Magazine, April, 1997 by Doris Hering

It was a Sunday morning in May. Kirk Peterson and I were having breakfast in a Hartford diner. Unaware of the animated family groups around us, we were deep into a discussion of Giselle. We were even arguing a bit.

This was not the first time since its Paris Opera premiere, June 28, 1841, that details of this most beloved of all Romantic ballets were being questioned. When Maryinsky ballerina Olga Spessivtseva, the twentieth century's definitive Giselle, danced the first-act solo, she introduced a version different from that of her older colleague, Tamara Karsavina; and Vaslav Nijinsky made changes in the second-act male solo.

Along with changing steps have come opposing critical viewpoints. When Serge Lifar partnered Spessivtseva at the Paris Opera in 1932, Franco-Russian critic Andre Levinson found him the ideal Albrecht: "[T]he insatiable Giselle whose eternal sleep is troubled by the gentle delirium of dance needs a companion who is transported by the same sublime madness . . . it was necessary that Serge Lifar be joined with Spessivtseva."

Levinson later added, "His brilliant debut in the role of Albrecht-Loys, the disguised prince [sic] and lovelorn traitor who becomes in the second act the gloomy one, the widower, the inconsolable one, dragging his black cloak among the graves, endowed the Opera's production with the protagonist it required in order to approach perfection."

Of this same protagonist American critic Edwin Denby penned a delicious bit of irony: "There was a piece of business in Lifar's Giselle, Act II, which was new to me. Mourning at her tomb, he seemed for some time unwilling to part with the flowers he had brought. He held them out, snatched them back, looked at them appreciatively. Mastering his emotion, he sacrificed them and fainted. But Giselle, dead as she was, rushed out from the wings with a much bigger bunch and pelted him with it headlong. So prompt, so sweet of her, so fitting. He lay drowned in flowers. If only the audience had given way to its impulse, had leapt to its feet in rapture and tossed hundreds of bouquets more, aiming them from all over the house, what a perfect moment of art it would have been for all of us to share with him!"

When Baryshnikov staged Giselle for American Ballet Theatre in 1977, he thinned out the drama of Act II, and he treated Myrtha more as a soloist than a ballerina. It was this act that Peterson and I disagreed about.

My interest in Peterson's staging of Giselle for Hartford Ballet's 1996 spring season began with his letter inviting me to a performance. The letter sounded almost autobiographical, as though Giselle had influenced stages in his own artistic growth. He wrote, "Giselle is certainly one of my favorite ballets, and upon seeing a performance by American Ballet Theatre with Lupe Serrano and Royes Fernandez (who was trained by my teacher, Lelia Haller), I was convinced that ballet as a career was to be my destiny." Farther on he added, "I do realize that there are some who question why I should assume so important a task as the staging of this remarkable classic, but my relationship to Giselle is not simply a dancer's love for a timeless masterpiece."

It is said that Giselle has been performed somewhere in the world every year since its premiere. During the past five years, American audiences have seen versions set on companies ranging from American Ballet Theatre and Dance Theatre of Harlem to Atlanta Ballet, Ballet Arizona, BalletMet, Ballet Oklahoma, Boston Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet, Cleveland San Jose Ballet, Colorado Ballet, Indianapolis Ballet Theatre, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, Richmond Ballet, Sacramento Ballet, and Tulsa Ballet Theatre. What promised to distinguish Peterson's approach was his awareness of the ballet's stylistic roots through his teacher.

Haller was one of a handful of early twentieth-century American dance teachers who had the taste, the intelligence, and, above all, the passion to search beyond their own fragmented early training. She was born in New Orleans in 1903. The city's performing life centered upon the French Opera House, and Haller studied with two of its dance adherents, Nina Piccolotte and Louis Ferrenbach.

Realizing the need to expand her horizons, she accepted a job teaching and performing in Kansas City, but the fact that she temporarily changed her name to Musette Hallier offers a clue to where her heart was.

As summer 1923 approached, she and her husband boarded a ship for France. There must have been something very special about this diminutive American woman--a harmony of talent and drive--that impelled Albert Aveline, premier danseur and maitre de ballet at the Paris Opera. to accept her into the school that he conducted outside of his classes at the Opera. He taught with his dancing partner, Paris Opera etoile Carlotta Zambelli.

Like Carlotta Grisi, for whom Giselle was created, Zambelli was Milanese, and, like Grisi, she was a product of the best Italian and French training. Giselle was not being performed at the Opera when she arrived in 1894, but in 1901 she was invited to St. Petersburg to learn and perform it with the Maryinsky Ballet. Grisi had also performed it in Russia, and Zambelli learned Grisi's version.