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Pantomime-Ballet on the Music-Hall Stage:

The Popularisation of Classical Ballet in Fin-de-Siècle Paris

Sarah Gutsche-Miller

Schulich School of Music

McGill University

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Ph.D. in musicology

April 2010

© Sarah Gutsche-Miller 2010

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ABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract and Résumé iii

Acknowledgements iv

Introduction 1

Chapter 1. The Origins of Parisian Music-Hall Ballet 19

Opéra Ballet 19

The Legal Backdrop 24

Ballet in Popular Theatres 26

English Music-Hall Ballet 37

Chapter 2. Elegant Populism: The Venues and the Shows 45

The Folies-Bergère, 1872-1886 47

Marchand's Folies-Bergère, 1886-1901 54

The Casino de Paris 81

The Olympia 92

Chapter 3. Music-Hall Ballet's Creative Artists 105

Librettists 107

Composers 114

Choreographers 145

Chapter 4. The Music-Hall Divertissement 163 The 1870s: The Popular Divertissement 164 The 1880s: From "Divertissement" to "Ballet" 171 The 1890s: From Divertissement to Pantomime-Ballet 189

Chapter 5. Popular Ballet's Conventions 199

A Traditional Structure 200

Music as Storyteller 229

Chapter 6. Up-to-Date Popular Spectacles 253

Pantomime-Ballet Librettos: Conventions and Distortions 254

The Popular Surface 275

Chapter 7. The Music of Popular Ballet 319

Popular Ballet Music at its Height 348

Conclusion 363

Appendix A 371

Appendix B 387

Bibliography 403

iiiA

BSTRACT

This dissertation explores the history and aesthetic of ballet in Parisian music halls at the turn of the twentieth century. Although the phenomenon is now long forgotten, ballet was for more than four decades a popular form of entertainment for a large audience. Between 1872 and 1918, nearly two hundred ballets were staged in Paris's music halls, more than half of which were premiered by the three most prominent halls: the Folies-Bergère, the Olympia, and the Casino de Paris. These newly written, composed, and choreographed ballets were often complex productions with lavish scenery and costumes, large ballet corps, and star ballerinas. Although they were in many ways structurally comparable to ballets staged at the Paris Opéra, music-hall ballets reflect the preferences of their fashionable, pleasure-seeking audiences through their emphasis on catchy up-beat music, stage spectacle, and the female body. My doctoral research brings to light this important ballet culture and repertoire. I begin with an overview of the historical circumstances that made it possible for variety theatres to adopt ballet. I then examine ballet's new context in order to establish the institutional features that helped shape music-hall ballet, and provide biographical information about the artists who created and performed them. This is followed by analyses of music-hall ballet's conventions, with sections on the types of subjects favoured by librettists, the formal structures of popular ballets, the choreographic elements that were typically incorporated, and the musical characteristics of the genre. I end with an exploration of the visual and musical elements that distinguish music-hall ballet as a "popular" genre, and discuss its mediation of high and lowbrow features and intersections with contemporary popular culture. ivR

ÉSUMÉ

Cette thèse examine l'histoire et l'esthétique du ballet dans les music-halls parisiens au tournant du XX e siècle. Quoiqu'on l'ait longtemps oublié, le ballet constitua pour plus de quatre décennies une forme de divertissement populaire auprès d'un vaste public. Entre 1872 et 1918, près de deux cent nouveaux ballets furent mis en scène dans les music-halls de Paris, dont plus de la moitié furent créés dans trois établissements proéminents, les Folies-Bergère, l'Olympia et le Casino de Paris. Ces oeuvres aux partitions, chorégraphies et livrets originaux constituaient fréquemment des productions complexes et spectaculaires, faisant appel à des décors et costumes flamboyants, un important corps de ballet et des danseuses étoiles. Bien que les ballets de music-halls aient été comparables, sous plusieurs aspects, aux ballets contemporains présentés à l'Opéra de Paris, ils reflètent néanmoins les préférences de leur audience épicurienne par l'importance accordée à une musique vive et entraînante, au spectaculaire et au corps féminin. Ma recherche met en lumière l'importance de la culture et du répertoire du ballet de music-hall. Je me penche d'abord sur les circonstances historiques qui permirent aux music-halls d'adopter le ballet. J'examine ensuite ce nouveau contexte de représentation du ballet afin d'établir les caractéristiques institutionnelles qui contribuèrent à façonner les ballets de music-hall, et offre de l'information biographique sur les artistes qui créèrent et interprétèrent ceux-ci. J'analyse les conventions du ballet de music-hall, les types de sujets abordés par les librettistes, les structures formelles des ballets populaires, les éléments chorégraphiques communément incorporés et les aspects du langage musical propres au genre. En terminant, j'explore les attributs visuels et musicaux caractérisant le ballet de music-hall comme un genre " populaire », discute de la façon dont il amalgame des éléments " légers » et " sérieux » et examine ses points communs avec la culture populaire contemporaine. vA

CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A great many people have contributed to this dissertation and made the process an enjoyable one. Above all, I would like to thank my advisor, Steven Huebner, and second reader, Lloyd Whitesell for their advice, insights, and encouragement throughout the process of writing my dissertation. I wish to extend a special thanks to Julie Cumming, who has consistently supported my work and offered her advice both for parts of this dissertation and for the many grants that have allowed me to pursue my research. I am grateful to Marian Smith, who went far beyond the call of duty in reading and providing suggestions for what became three chapters, and to Jane Pritchard for her generosity in sharing her knowledge of English music-hall ballet and French popular ballet, and for bringing my attention to a multitude of documents in the Victoria and Albert Theatre Archives that have greatly enriched this project. Since my work is grounded in archival research, I have relied on the kindness and resourcefulness of many unidentified librarians and archivists who have helped me turn up arcane bits of information. I would especially like to thank the magasiniers of the Opéra, who took it upon themselves one summer to devote several hours to unearthing three scores listed as "missing," and to Vincent Warren of the Grands Ballets de Montréal dance library for presenting me with several rare documents from the library's treasure trove of old journals and iconography. Several friends and fellow musicologists, including Samuel Dorf, Willa Collins, Matilda Butkas, and Stephanie Schroedter, have also generously shared material and information. viThis dissertation would not have been possible without substantial research and travel funding, including a Canadian Graduate Scholarship and travel grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Elizabeth Bartlet research travel grant from the American Musicological society, and McGill Alma Mater travel grants. A McGill Schulich Graduate Scholarship also allowed me to focus on writing in my last year of the Ph.D. I could not have completed this dissertation without the support and practical help provided by friends and family. Dana Gorzelany-Mostak did wonders with the footnotes and bibliography, Julie Pedneault with the translation of my abstract at the eleventh hour, Andrew Deruchie with teaching me how to negotiate the Byzantine world of the BnF, and Nathan Martin with teaching me how to negotiate the field. All were also wonderful colleagues and friends. As well as prepare most of my musical examples, Steven Vande Moortele patiently answered all of my analysis questions and offered suggestions for nearly every chapter. My mother, Clara Gutsche, proved a phenomenal editor and my father, David Miller, a wonderful copy editor. Above all, I would like to thank Mom, Dad, Wilbur, and Steven for their intangible but all the more valuable contributions of love and encouragement. 1 I

NTRODUCTION

In the late nineteenth century, a popular form of ballet emerged in Paris's foremost music halls, first at the Folies-Bergère in the 1870s, then at the Casino de Paris and Olympia in the 1890s. For more than four decades, music halls rather than ballet's traditional home, the Opéra, were the settings of a vibrant French ballet culture. Music halls had the money, artistic ambition, and public visibility to attract the era's best creative and performing artists, and the profitable staging practices to support the production of a constant stream of spectacular ballets. Performed to full houses night after night alongside acrobatic acts and popular song-and-dance routines, these ballets catered to a diverse but increasingly upscale audience that came for evenings of light entertainment and social encounters. Music hall ballets were initially no more than short divertissements similar to those integrated into large-scale lyrical and dramatic productions staged at mainstream Parisian theatres. In the 1870s and early 1880s, the Folies-Bergère regularly produced little illustrative ballets with slight plots that served as pretty and sometimes titillating backdrops to an evening of socialising. They proved immediately popular, and ballet quickly became a favourite form of music-hall entertainment. Soon the Folies-Bergère was creating new ballets at a rate of three to four per year and producing them on an ever grander scale. By the late 1880s, the hall was staging large-scale pantomime-ballets - ballets with extended narratives conveyed through a combination of mime and dance. 1

Pantomime-

ballet in turn became a staple of Parisian music-hall entertainment. 1 Music halls also presented popular dances in the "numbers" section of the programme that had

nothing to do with ballet. These included "eccentric" dances, dancing "girls," English step or skirt

2 As the Folies-Bergère grew to be the pre-eminent music hall in Paris and

as ballet became an increasingly important element of its success, other venues took notice. When the Casino de Paris and the Olympia became music halls in

1890 and 1893, they looked to the Folies-Bergère as a model and patterned their

activities on the already famous and profitable hall. Between 1890 and 1909, all three halls presented new pantomime-ballets on a regular basis, each vying to stage more exciting and impressive productions than the others. In the 1890s alone, the Folies-Bergère created thirty pantomime-ballets, the Casino sixteen, and the Olympia eighteen, each of which was performed on a nightly basis for several months. Ballet had become everyday entertainment for a broad public. The vogue for ballet in popular venues quickly spread beyond Paris. In the

1860s and 1870s, ballet could be seen in only eight French cities, and always in

established grands théâtres and municipal theatres. Of the forty-eight ballets staged in the regions of France between 1860 and 1878, twenty-two were created in Lyon and sixteen in Bordeaux - historically the two centres of French ballet outside of Paris - and all were staged in established theatres. 2

When ballet caught

the attention of the general public, many of the commercial entertainment venues springing up across the country kept pace, producing a remarkable number of ballets in just a few years. In the 1880s, not only did the number of ballets staged in France nearly double, these works were presented in nineteen different venues, dances, Spanish or other foreign dances, and Loïe Fuller's "new" dances involving mesmerizing repetitive manipulations of her long skirts beneath coloured lights. 2 The span of dates for these statistics corresponds with the publication dates of the Catalogue

général des oeuvres dramatiques et lyriques faisant partie du répertoire de la Société des Auteurs

et Compositeurs Dramatiques (SACD), période 1860-1878 (Paris: Typographie Morris, 1882); période 1879-1888 (Paris: Typographie Morris, 1891); période 1889-1898 (Paris: Typographie Morris, 1900); période 1899-1909 (Paris: Imprimerie Cerf, 1910). My statistics are compiled from these catalogues so they only include ballets recorded by the SACD. See also Hélène Laplace-

Claverie, Écrire pour la danse: les livrets de ballet de Théophile Gautier à Jean Cocteau (1870-

1914) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001), 70-71.

3 including several regional music halls such as the Lyon Folies-Bergère, the

Bordeaux Folies-Bergère, and the Bordeaux Alcazar. Between 1899 and 1910,

165 different ballets were staged in sixty-eight venues in thirty-seven locations.

Nearly all were popular entertainment establishments. After 1900, urban music halls and popular theatres in spas such as Aix-les-Bains and Vichy outnumbered traditional theatres, which nonetheless continued to present new works every year. Combined, French regional theatres and music halls produced at least 310 new ballets between 1870 and 1909. Over the same forty years, Parisian music halls and popular theatres alone created at least 250 independent ballets (mainly pantomime-ballets) and more than 300 divertissements within other large-scale spectacles and dramatic genres. 3 Until recently, this vibrant ballet culture has been entirely ignored. Indeed, the turn of the twentieth century has long been considered a dark period for ballet in France. Few ballets were thought to have been created or restaged, and there were, supposedly, no more than a half a dozen popular or critical successes. Historical surveys of ballet usually skip over these years altogether, while the historians who do cover the era describe it as one of decline and decadence. 4 In her seminal work on the Ballets Russes, Lynn Garafola similarly downplays the 3 These numbers do not include the many ballets staged for special cultural events or the many ballet divertissements not recorded in the SACD catalogues. They also do not include ballets

staged at the Opéra and Opéra-Comique in the same period. The total number of ballets produced

in France between 1870 and 1909 is likely far greater than what I have counted. 4 See Ivor Guest, The Paris Opéra Ballet (Princeton: Princeton Book Co., 2006); Léandre Vaillat,

Ballets de l'Opéra de Paris: ballets dans les opéras et nouveaux ballets (Paris: Déchaux, 1947);

and Robert Quinault La Danse en France sous la troisième république (Typed text, n.d. [F-Po AID 2209]). Many other dance histories mention the period in passing under revealing chapter

headings. See Paul Bourcier, "Le Coma prolongé de la danse à l'Opéra," in Histoire de la danse en

Occident (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 201-2; Marie-Françoise Christout, "Le Déclin progressif du ballet en

occident," in Le Ballet occidental: naissance et métamorphose (Paris: Desjonquères, 1995), 80-87;

Serge Lifar, "Décadence du ballet," in La Danse académique et l'art chorégraphique (Paris: Gonthier, 1965), 66-68; and Troy Kinney and Margaret West Kinney, "Ballet in its Dark Age," in The Dance: Its Place in Art and Life (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1936), 228-40.

4 existence of a creative ballet culture in Paris in the years immediately preceding

the arrival of the Russian ballet in 1909. 5

This view is so widely held that in his

recent History of Western Music, Richard Taruskin blithely reiterated the established narrative, proclaiming the death of French ballet d'action after the Opéra's creation of Sylvia (1876) and giving Russia sole credit for keeping the genre alive over the turn of the twentieth century. 6 The inaccuracy stems from the way in which French ballet history has been documented and narrated. Nearly all histories of ballet focus on dance in state- funded "high art" institutions, which in France has meant a nearly exclusive concentration on works created for the Paris Opéra. The 1870s did mark the beginning of a long period of relative inactivity at the Opéra for the creation and performance of independent ballets (as opposed to ballets in lyrical productions). Whereas the state theatre created over sixty new ballets between 1820 and 1870, production dropped to twenty-five over the next fifty years; only four were created in the 1890s. As I will discuss in Chapter 1, institutional apathy also led to a significant decline in the level of creativity and performance quality of Opéra ballets. However, the Opéra was far from being the only institution to stage ballet. As demonstrated above, a cursory glance at theatre listings in newspapers and contemporary catalogues of theatrical performances paints a very different picture from the one constructed by canonical ballet history. Although ballet was 5

Looking at the Opéra, Garafola writes that "ballet in France was socially and artistically déclassé,

isolated from the cultural mainstream and patronized by the most philistine stratum of the male upper class." Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (New York: Oxford University Press,

1989), 274. She later notes the presence of le Tout-Paris and Astruc's use of glamorous society

beauties to add to the spectacle of early Ballets Russes gala performances (Garafola, 294-95), but this was not new to the Ballets Russes: it was an extension of music-hall practices, which Astruc would have known as he was the author of a Folies-Bergère ballet in 1901. 6 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 4 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 138. Taruskin therefore also dismissed the few successful ballets d'action created by the Opéra during this period.

5 floundering at the Opéra, the actual number of ballets staged in Paris and the

number of theatres in which they were performed rose exponentially over the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Ballet did not disappear from the Parisian stage at the end of the nineteenth century; it simply changed venues. 7 By the time Sergei Diaghilev brought his first productions of Russian ballet to the Paris Châtelet theatre in 1909, there was a large and diverse ballet- going audience. His productions may have drawn a new musical and artistic crowd, but the arrival of the Ballets Russes did not spark a sudden revival of ballet in the French capital as has long been assumed. 8

Rather, they marked a turning

point in the history of an ever-changing genre. Music-hall ballet marked another. This dissertation explores the history and aesthetic of Parisian music-hall ballet at the three most prominent venues: the Folies-Bergère, the Olympia, and the Casino de Paris. My interest is both in the works themselves and in the context in which they were created and performed. Music-hall ballets were newly written, composed, and choreographed by the era's pre-eminent artists of popular theatre, music, and dance, and they were often impressive productions with lavish scenery and costumes, large ballet corps, and internationally acclaimed star ballerinas and mimes. While they were grounded in the formal conventions of traditional nineteenth-century French pantomime-ballet, they form a distinct body of works that was influenced by a range of contemporary choreographic trends and popular genres and that reflected the visual and musical preferences of music- halls' pleasure-seeking audiences. 7 Ballet had long been a staple of popular entertainment, but usually as one element within other large-scale forms such as operetta, féeries, or pièces à grand spectacle (see Chapter 1). 8 Ballet's popularity in fin-de-siècle Paris spurred Albert Carré to add ballet to the Opéra- Comique's repertoire when he became that theatre's director in 1898. Carré hired Mme Mariquita to choreograph pantomime-ballets and ballet divertissements for operas, which she did until 1918.quotesdbs_dbs26.pdfusesText_32

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