Ballet Essentials: Giselle

What is the story of Giselle?  

Who are the Wilis in Giselle?  

Who choreographed Giselle?  

Who composed the music of Giselle?  

Giselle – A young peasant girl who loves to dance and has a weak heart 

Albrecht – A Count, he tells Giselle that he is a villager named Loys 

Hilarion – A forester who hopes to marry Giselle  

Berthe – Giselle’s mother 

Bathilde – A Countess who is engaged to Albrecht 

Myrtha – The Queen of the Wilis 

Moyna and Zulme – Myrtha’s second-in-commands

Act I 

A Rhineland village 

Giselle, a peasant girl, has fallen in love with Count Albrecht, who has led her to believe that he is a villager named Loys. Her superstitious mother, Berthe, hoping that Giselle will marry the forester Hilarion, warns her against Loys, to whom she has taken an instinctive dislike. In order to discourage Giselle’s love for Loys, Berthe further recounts the legend of the Wilis, ghosts of young girls who have been jilted and die before their wedding day. To avenge themselves, they dance to death any man who crosses their path between midnight and dawn. But Giselle disregards her mother and, with her beloved, joins in the celebrations that mark the end of the grape harvest, when she is crowned Queen of the Vintage. 

Wilfred, Albrecht’s squire, secretly warns him that a hunting party is approaching, led by the Duke of Courland and the Countess Bathilde (Albrecht’s future bride), who are staying at Albrecht’s castle for the betrothal ceremony. Albrecht hides, but Hilarion has witnessed this meeting and decides to break into Loys’s cottage to discover the secret of his true identity. The hunting party arrives. Giselle dances for the nobles and, when she tells Bathilde that she too is engaged, the Countess gives her a necklace. Bathilde, tired from hunting, asks to rest in Berthe’s cottage, but the Duke decides to continue the hunt and orders a hunting horn to be left by the cottage door so that he and the rest of the party can be recalled when Bathilde is ready to rejoin them. 

Hilarion now appears from Loys’s cottage. He has found Albrecht’s sword and when he compares it with the hunting horn, he sees they bear the same crest; this gives him the evidence he has been looking for. Not realizing that the hunt is still nearby, Albrecht returns. Hilarion interrupts the dancing and reveals the truth: that Loys is really Albrecht. He sounds the horn, the hunting party returns and Bathilde, coming out of the cottage, claims Albrecht as her fiancé. The shock is too much for Giselle and she loses her reason. In her madness she relives her love for ‘Loys’ and, seizing his sword, she kills herself. 

INTERVAL 

Act II 

Giselle’s grave in the forest  

Hilarion keeps vigil by Giselle’s grave, which lies deep in the forest in unconsecrated ground. It is midnight, the time when the Wilis materialize. Hilarion flees in terror when confronted by these apparitions. Myrtha, their queen, now arrives from the marshes and summons her Wilis. She draws Giselle from her grave to be initiated into their rites. The Wilis disperse as Albrecht approaches, searching for Giselle’s grave. He lays flowers at the cross and when Giselle’s spirit appears to him, he follows it into the forest.  

Hilarion, pursued by the Wilis, returns and is forced into an endless dance. Exhausted, he is driven into the lake, where he drowns.  

The Wilis now seek out Albrecht and, when Myrtha commands him to dance, Giselle urges him to the safety of the cross; but he is powerless when Myrtha orders Giselle to entice him away by dancing with him. Giselle tries to sustain him, but as the night wears on he becomes weaker and weaker. Just as he is about to die, dawn breaks. Daylight destroys the Wilis’ power and the ghostly dancers fade away. Giselle, whose love has transcended death, returns to her grave, her spirit freed from the power of the Wilis, leaving Albrecht sorrowing and alone. 

Théophile Gaultier was inspired to create a ballet after reading Heinrich Heine’s De l’Allemagne. At the time, themes of the supernatural world were all the rage in Paris. This was largely in part due to Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le diable (1831), which included a short ballet known as Ballet of the Nuns, and La Sylphide (1832) – which featured dancers donning white diaphanous shrouds, illuminated by a pale light evoking the moon. Due to evolutions in ballet technique, the dancers seemed almost ghost-like: floating, gauze-clad creatures inhabiting a misty wood. Reading about the Wilis in De l’Allemagne, Gaultier knew he had found the seed of an idea for his next ballet.  

He wanted to combine this with another tale from Victor Hugo’s poem Fantômes. The poem told the story of a girl who loved to dance and who would later die at a ball after exhausting herself through frenzied dancing. To combine these two ideas into a coherent story, Gautier sought the help of Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges, who was more experienced in writing ballet librettos. The latter would reshape Gaultier’s ideas, writing the story in three days.  

Later, they would propose the libretto as the basis of a new ballet to choreographer Jules Perrot, who had as his muse and lover the rising star of the Paris Opéra Ballet, Carlotta Grisi. Perrot thought it the perfect vehicle to showcase Grisi’s talents to the audiences of Paris. Perrot took the story to composer Adolphe Adam, who readily agreed to write a new score for the ballet. The four men – Gaultier, Vernoy de Saint-Georges, Perrot, and Adam – would later convince the director of the Paris Opéra Ballet to stage the ballet.  

Giselle premiered to great critical acclaim on 28 June 1841 at the Salle Le Peletier. Grisi starred as Giselle with Lucien Petipa (elder brother to Marius Petipa) as Albrecht, Jean Coralli as Hilarion and Adèle Dumilâtre as Myrtha.  

The original choreography of Giselle would be revived in stagings by Marius Petipa for the Imperial Ballet in Saint Petersburg. It is that choreography that has been passed down to dancers today.  

The Royal Ballet’s production of Giselle was created by Peter Wright in 1985. Designer John Macfarlane’s painterly sets amplify the Romanticism of the ballet and the starkly contrasting moods of the two acts: from the pastoral idyll of Act I to the menacing moonlit graveyard of Act II. 

Giselle delighted audiences when it first premiered due to its captivating combination of plot with spectacle, merging reality and fantasy through choreography and storytelling though mime. 

When Giselle was first performed on the stage of the Paris Opéra in 1841, it was billed as a ‘Ballet-Pantomime’. Ballet-pantomime was a kind of theatre, also known as 'ballet d’action', that emerged in 18th-century France. What distinguished pantomime from other forms of dramatic theatre was its emphasis on the bodies, gestures and facial expressions of the performers to tell a story.  

Key moments of mime drive the plot and pace the drama. In the gestures of the dancers, the gripping story of the ballet emerges. Giselle has many mime gestures – she simply points to her finger to express that she is engaged to be married; she rolls her hands above her head to convey her love of dancing; she clasps her hands to her chest to show her love for Albrecht. Hilarion gestures that he loves Giselle, that he distrusts Loys/Albrecht, and reveals Albrecht’s identity by explaining the sword and Albrecht’s relation to the noblemen who are part of the Hunt. 

The longest narrative mime passage in Giselle occurs when Berthe, Giselle’s mother, describes the legend of the Wilis. Discovering her daughter has been dancing and concerned that she doesn’t have the heart for it, Berthe interrupts her to tell her that she mustn’t – if she dances too much, she will die. She evokes the atmosphere of the dark forest to tell everyone in the village the legend of the Wilis, and the fate of men who stray too far into their ghostly domain by moonlight. 

The balance of choreography and mime is brilliantly achieved in the ‘mad scene’, where the joyous atmosphere established in the first act unravels and the village descends into turmoil. The focus of this scene is the peasant girl Giselle. Unable to cope when she discovers that her fiancé Loys is in fact Count Albrecht in disguise, and that he is engaged to another, she loses her mind and kills herself. The characters, including Giselle, portray a whirlwind of emotions and thoughts: disbelief, horror, heart break and loss. Peter Wright stressed that when performing Giselle ‘the important thing is to make the story and the characters believable’ – and it is this fine balance between dramatic storytelling and authentic emotion that makes Giselle one of the most challenging interpretative roles for a dancer. 

Other key dance moments in Giselle, for example Giselle and Albrecht's pas de deux in Act I and Act II, demonstrate the dancers' skill and creates atmosphere and character. The entrance of Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis, at the beginning of Act II, is a good example. Myrtha is the first of the ghostly apparitions to appear on stage, and her solo marks the contrast between the worlds of the living and the dead through ethereal and weightless movements. 

Adolphe Adam composed the score for Giselle in only a few weeks. He recalled: ‘I composed the music in high spirits. I was in a hurry and that always fires my imagination. I was very friendly with Perrot and Carlotta, and the piece evolved, as it were, in my drawing room.’ His friendship with Jules Perrot and his wife Carlotta Grisi (the dancer on whom Perrot created Giselle’s steps) meant that the music evolved quickly in close association with the choreographer’s inspiration.  

Adam’s music uses leitmotifs, short distinctive themes associated with characters or objects. These drive the action of the ballet as well as providing a mood for the mime. He assigns a motif to Giselle, a light bouncing tune that captures her innocence and beauty; a sweet and harmonious motif for Giselle and Albrecht – which later returns, fragmented and chromatically altered, when Albrecht’s deception is revealed; a motif for the hunt, using a horn played as if in the distance (a common musical characterisation also used in Swan Lake and other works) and a foreboding motif for the Wilis, evocative of their tragic stories and desire for vengeance.