Ballet "La Bayadere" History 

The fires of the French revolution had scarcely flickered out when the bright flame of the Romantic movement began to illuminate and transform the arts in Europe. The romantic movement in ballet was born in Paris on November 21, 1831. The occasion was the premiere of Mayerbeer’s opera Robert le diable which featured a ballet sequence in which white-clad ghosts of dead nuns rose from their tombs and danced a Valse infernale in eerie moonlight. Such an amazing success was this episode - it became overnight the talk of Paris - that the tenor, Adolphe Nourrit who was singing Count Robert, wrote a scenario for a new ballet with a supernatural story, La Sylphide and offered it to the choreographer of the Valse infernale, Filippo Taglioni. Taglioni’s daughter Marie, who had led the nuns in the opera ballet, created the lead role in La Sylphide. There followed a spate of ballets with supernatural themes of which the most famous was Giselle in 1842