Ballet de Cour For the establishment of ballet, a certain amount of sophistica­tion, of organisation and of patronage is necessary. Its birthplace is the Court, its background the Italian Renaissance with its balls and masquerades, its masques and spectacles, its triumphs and entertainments of every kind, the fashion for which was brought to Paris by Francis I, Catherine de Medici and their successors and thence copied throughout Europe. Its half-sisters are the mime-play and the puppet-show, its world the unreal realm of fantasy. It is but a short step from the masque to the music drama (opera) or to the 'geometrical mixture of many persons dancing together to the harmony of several instruments' (ballet), a description given by the Italian composer-choreographer Balthasard de Beaujoyeulx of his Ballet Comique de la Reine, which was produced in the Salle du Petit Bourbon in Paris in 1581 at the instigation of Catherine de Medici in an arena and on a scale not unlike that used in our own day by Max Reinhardt. At one end, the King and the Queen-Mother sat on a dais surrounded by courtiers, noblemen and hal­berdiers; at the other, the enchantress Circe enthroned, wearing a robe of gold tissue of two colours with a wand in her hand, was accommodated with her victims in a sort of glorified pen. Be­tween them stretched the length of the hall,the upper tiers crowded with spectators in rich dresses, while below a Grove of Pan and a gleaming Cloud-Bower for Deities occupied some of the inter­vening floor space. In this multiple setting the story of Circe was unfolded with dancing, music, singing, and declamation, the Queen, gorgeously attired as a Naiad and 'posed upon machinery,' was drawn through the hall while Court ladies in long dresses formed the corps de ballet and moved with carefully rehearsed precision into their appointed places. It lasted, we are told, from ten until half-past three in the morning. Here we have the prototype of the spectacle-ballet which, transferred to the theatre, was to reach such great heights in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries at Vienna, Florence, Milan and Naples, where the superb spectacular scenery and stage effects designed by the Bibienas and other Italian masters have, for sheer architectural brilliance and audacity, never been surpassed. At the French Court, which set the standard for every other Court in Europe, Louis XIV took a personal interest in ballet, often taking the chief part himself. Between 1658 and 1671 more than thirty ballets were composed by Lully for his royal master, a unified musical-dramatic form in which singing and dancing each had their place being evolved. In 1661 Louis established the Academic Royale de Musique et de Danse in Paris. Eleven years later a school of dancing was added, which survives to this day at the Paris Opera House. Thus was the way paved for the rise of La Camargo in the eighteenth century, who in order to gain greater freedom of movement shortened her skirt to show her feet and thereby revolutionised the technique of dancing. Her contemporary Marie Salle, of whom Voltaire wrote: De Diane elle est la pretresse Dansant sous le nom de Venus, dared to discard her panniers and appear in London in a simple Greek robe of muslin, an attempt at naturalism so far in advance of her time that it was not acceptable to the public. In 1793 Maria Medina, wife of the celebrated choreographer Vigano, caused a sensation in Vienna by appearing in a clinging, high-waisted, semi-transparent dress, with her hair flying loose. Not until our own day were the shackles of traditional dancing costume finally broken by Isadora Duncan. Ballet was established meanwhile at the Court of Peter the Great in Russia under French masters, an Academy of Dancing being founded by the Empress Anne in 1735 and an Imperial Ballet School at St. Petersburg in 1779. At Vienna, in Scandinavia and at the rococo Courts throughout Europe the ballet fashion reign­ing at Versailles was followed, and in 1755 the great Noverre came to London at the invitation of David Garrick to produce ballets at Drury Lane. The inspiration still came from France and Italy though the dancers might be of any nationality, and only in Russia, where Didelot was mdtre de ballet, did a native school of dancing begin to establish itself. In England it struck no roots, though Auguste Vestris, the first dancer of his time, was appointed maitre de ballet at the King's Theatre when Haydn was conductor there, and in the nineteenth century the celebrated dancer Marie Taglioni, trained by her father, had some of her greatest successes in London. Appearing over here for the first time in 1830, she initiated a new romantic style of dancing emanating from the folk-lore, sentiment and tender melancholy of Heine's writings, perfectly suited to her ethereal grace and extolled by Theophile Gautier. La Sylphide (1832), the story of an airy Being who appears to a Scottish lad, fluttering round him on his wedding morning, drawing him away into the forest from his bride, was devised for his daughter by Philippe Taglioni on a scenario by Nourrit, the famous tenor at the Paris Opera House. It had a phenomenal success and was the first of a long series of romantic ballets, usually with a tragic ending, in the new style. The most famous of these is Giselle (1841) with a scenario written for Grisi by Theophile Gautier, which has trium­phantly survived the vicissitudes of a hundred years. The glories of the Romantic Ballet culminated in the pas de quatre danced by the four leading ballerinas of the time—Taglioni, Grisi, Grahn and Cerito—which was produced at Her Majesty's Theatre in 1845 and became the talk of Europe. Something of the charm and the light and airy grace of these vanished dancers has come down to us in contemporary lithographs and engravings showing a frail maiden in diaphanous skirts poised on a flower, alighting on a twig or floating impalpably through the air, scattering flowers in her train. As Paul de Saint-Victor said of Taglioni's protegee Emma Livry: L'herbe la porterait, une fleur n'aurait pas Recu 1'empreinte de ses pas. Image: Taglioni in "La Symphide" Article Ballet de Cour was readed 1412 times.