Giselle: The Original Collaboration
Giselle: premiere: 28th June 1841
Composer: Adolphe Adam: 24th July 1803 – 3rd May 1856
Choreographer 1: Jean Coralli: 15th January 1779 – 1st May 1854
Choreographer 2: Jules Perrot: 18th August 1810 – 29th August 1892
Librettist: Théophile Gautier: 30th August 1811 - 23rd October 1872
The Choreography:
Debuted almost 185 years ago, Giselle is one of the oldest ballets that is still performed today. However, the original version that was premiered in 1841, was likely very different to what has graced our stages in the 20th and 21st centuries. The reason being is that much of the music and choreography has been lost, replaced, and reworked as the ballet has evolved through the ages. In this day and age, the choreography that we know and love originates primarily from the the late 19th/ early 20th century when the ballet was re-staged by Marius Petipa for the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg.
Despite its long and changeable evolution, like every ballet, at one point it had its beginning in the minds of its creators, and in the case of Giselle it was Théophile Gautier who crafted the libretto, Adolphe Adam who composed the music, and Jean Coralli (with input from Jules Perrot) who created the original choreography. Initially, it was only Jean Coralli who was credited as the choreographer on posters and programs for Giselle, with Jules Perrot being cruelly ommitted, likely as an effort to prevent him from collecting royalties. Yet, since the role of Giselle was created for Italian ballerina, Carlotta Grisi, for her Paris debut (a role of which she would be the only ballerina to dance at the Paris Opera subsequently for many years), and that she and Jules Perrot were lovers, it was well-known that Perrot had created all of her dances and pantomime performances within Giselle, a truth that Coralli didn’t deny.
“[Giselle] has survived because its simple story contains the concentrated essence of romance, it is the embodiment of a whole period.”
It is essential to note just how important story-telling was within the original choreography for Giselle, often even over and above the dancing. Known specifically as a ballet-pantomime, at the Salle Le Peletier premiere, “almost a half of the two-act piece consisted of mime and action scenes that conveyed the story to the audience – some 54 minutes – while just an hour was devoted to dancing.” (Graham, D. Classical Music). The focus was primarily on telling the story, with many more theatrical effects employed then than there are now. For example, The Duke of Courland and Bathilde originally made their entrance on horseback, whereas now they walk on, there were moments where Giselle would fly and disappear that are no longer included, and now rarely is a trapdoor used to make Giselle rise in and out of her grave. There have been other cuts and changes that are less theatrical, but subtly alter the way the story is told compared to the original.
The Music:
Usually, in the world of ballet, it is unfortunately common for the original choreography of older works to have been lost to time. Yet, in contrast, the music is often well documented and performed just as it was when it had been completed all those decades or centuries ago. Why this is, it is difficult to know? One could assume that for a longer time, the music world has been more diligent in recording and documenting musical works from an earlier period. The requirement for the music to be written down in order for it to be played already encourages this practice of collecting and cataloguing the music, ready to be learned and performed by all kinds of musicians. Dance however, is much more free. Although choreographers might have written down their choreographies, their notation was rarely how dancers would learn what it is that they needed to do. Instead, they would have been taught the steps by the choreographer in the rehearsal rooms and memorised them quickly, meaning that perhaps there would have been less importance placed on the notation in the first place.
“Adam readily accepted the commission for Giselle and returned the score completed in just over a week- surely a record for this type of composition. Musically it was not particularly distinguished but it undoubtedly captured the ineffable charm of the story and is full of entrancing melodies which admirably set off the many dance sequences that are a marked feature of the ballet; moreover, it revealed in the composer a shrewd grasp of dramatic musical expression. ”
Interestingly, Adam’s ‘Giselle’, despite being one of the earliest ballets, has retained the majority of its original choreography, however much of the initial score has either fallen out of use or been replaced by newer, fresher music, alongside some replenished choreography. A lot of the music used to restore Adam’s score was not music that “Adam would have owned…[indicating that] it is often hard to tell if the origin of a piece of ballet music is unrecorded through mere indifference or as a matter of policy.” (Fiske, R. p.15). The list of orchestrators and composers that worked on it over the years is extensive (including Gordon Jacob and Robert Irving), which together with the fact that “no [original] published full score or orchestral parts seem to exist” (Fiske, R. p.14), queries how much of Adam’s music has remained. This could support the notion that across the three most significant elements of a traditional ballet; the music, the choreography, and the story, ultimately it is the narrative that seems to be deemed the most important aspect, allowing artists the freedom of re-interpretation.
That being said, within the score, Adam has employed compositional techniques that help to enhance this story-telling facet of the music. One example is ‘an incipient leitmotif system.’ Leitmotifs are short musical melodies and phrases that are attributed to specific characters, places, incidents, or ideas, helping the audience to identify these moments on stage and more easily follow the dramatisation of the story. Within the early performances of Giselle, there were clear leitmotifs that marked Hilarion’s entrance, another highlighting Giselle, one to represent the peasants, ‘fear’ themes associated with the Wilis, a hunting horn to mark surprises, and a melody associated with Act 1’s ‘he loves me, he loves me not’ flower scene. Many of these leitmotifs remain in productions today, however, some have been obscured overtime, through the changes in music, scene structure, and choreography. According to Roger Fiske, “Adam deserves credit for the [use of leitmotifs, as] many subsequent composers of ballet music copied him in this respect.”
Another technique used by Adolphe Adam was the utilisation of national dances, primarily, in the case of Giselle, the Waltz. A waltz is a dance of German origin, and back in the nineteenth century, audiences, on hearing a waltz, would have drawn the conclusion that the ballet was set in Germany. Giselle is set on the East bank of the Rhine, and so Adam included three waltzes within the score, two for Giselle, and one for the Wilis, highlighting, in his own words, that Giselle’s waltz in Act 1 had “all the German color indicated by the locality.” Nowadays, we do not automatically make this connection when hearing a waltz, perhaps because they are used quite frequently in all kinds of musical scores, for ballets, theatrical productions, and even film, all for various different reasons that sit outside the ambition to link the work to Germany. Nevertheless, I do wonder whether Adam’s use of the waltz within Giselle and it being one of the earliest surviving ballets, is the reason that waltzes themselves have become such an important dance form that is so heavily affiliated with the world of ballet, a notion that further cements Giselle as an incredibly important work in the historic evolution of the ballet style.
The Relationship:
There is little information out there detailing the nature of Adolphe Adam’s working relationship with Jean Coralli or Jules Perrot during the making of Giselle. Though, from what I have read regarding the making of this ballet, I can only assume that their input was all very individual and not really that collaborative at all. I say this because, if it is true that Adam composed the score as quickly as he did, there surely would not have been enough time for any deep collaborative work to be done. I imagine that each creator contributed their parts at the appropriate times and that was that. Théophile Gautier prepared the libretto and Adolphe Adam completed the score ready for Jean Coralli to take the reigns on the choreography and lead it to its premiere. Perhaps this was the common order of things, with the story taking pride of place and the composer and choreographer doing their best to tell that story through the medium of music and dance. Perhaps, they treated it like any other commission and simply fulfilled their parts without requiring nor expecting anymore. Whether there was any further re-workings or re-compositions in-between Adam’s completion of the score and the premiere, remains to be discovered.
Read more about Giselle & Adolphe Adam here:
Sources:
Classical Music: BBC Music Magazine: Adam, Adolphe
‘Giselle’ (1949) by Sandy Posner
‘Ballet Panorama’ (1947) by Arnold L. Haskell
‘Ballet Music’ (1958) by Roger Fiske
‘The Relationship Between Music & Dance Through The Prism Of Ballet’ (2019) by Sylvia Villa (my dissertation)
