On Ballet at the Opéra, 1900-1914, and _La Fête chez Thérese_ (1910)

Abstract

This article is broadly centred on the ballets staged at the Paris Opéra during the era in which Diaghilev's Ballets Russes were resident in the French capital. I seek initially to define the ways in which both troupes, the Opéra Ballet and the Russian, were received in the period press: in short, how the French company was implored to take its lead from Russian choreographic and scenic developments. My principal aim, though, is to offer a 'thick' description of one particular ballet – a commission from the Opéra entitled La fête chez Thérèse, set to music by French salon composer Reynaldo Hahn and premièred on 16 February 1910. A close reading of Thérèse's narrative, structure and musical design reveals something of the ballet's cultural resonance: a resonance that extends from the ballet-pantomimes of the July Monarchy, through the extra-curricular endeavours of the composer Gustave Charpentier, to contemporary ideals of womanhood, social parity and dancers' skirts. A new historical perspective emerges, one that prompts a revision of the taxonomies according to which narratives of the pre-war balletic scene are usually plotted, along with a reassessment of the dominant historiographical strategy itself.