Giselle grew from a poet's idea that vengeful ghost brides would make a pretty ballet
Théophile Gautier read a passage by Heinrich Heine about the Wilis, spirits of brides who died before their weddings and rise at midnight to dance any passing young man to death. He thought they would make a pretty ballet. The result, Giselle, has haunted stages since 1841.
Gautier's own first draft was weak: an enchanted ballroom, a lot of whirling, one death at the end. Lacking any experience with ballet scenarios, he handed the idea to Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges, a veteran librettist who wrote the familiar story in three days. The Paris Opéra's director, Léon Pillet, was hunting for a vehicle to introduce the Italian ballerina Carlotta Grisi, and put it straight into production with music by Adolphe Adam.
The plot splits cleanly in two. In a sunlit Rhineland village at harvest, the frail peasant girl Giselle falls for Loys, who is really Duke Albrecht in disguise and already engaged to a noblewoman. The jealous gamekeeper Hilarion exposes him, and Giselle's weak heart gives out in a mad, frantic dance. In the moonlit second act the Wilis, led by their icy queen Myrtha, raise her from the grave. They drive Hilarion to exhaustion and drown him, then turn on Albrecht, but Giselle's love holds him up until dawn, and by forgiving him she escapes becoming a vengeful spirit herself.
Its roots lie in a shift after the French Revolution, when ballets about Olympian gods gave way to ordinary people and the supernatural, tastes favoured by a growing middle class. Paris had gone wild for the dancing ghost nuns in Meyerbeer's Robert le diable and for La Sylphide, in which Marie Taglioni danced on pointe as art rather than stunt and wore the white bell-shaped skirt that became romantic ballet's uniform. Gautier had seen that premiere.
The run-up was chaotic, with rumours of an injured star and an ailing conductor, and repeated postponements while trapdoors and lighting were drilled. It finally opened at the Salle Le Peletier on 28 June 1841, after an act of a Rossini opera, and succeeded even though the audience could hear the stage machinist bellowing orders. Grisi was hailed as a new Taglioni. The steps danced today descend mostly from Marius Petipa's later revivals in Saint Petersburg.
Source: Giselle
