Henri Justamant’s Choreographies for Les Huguenots and La Favorite at the Paris Opéra, 1868/69
During the 1868–69 season, Henri Justamant served as balletmaster of the Paris Opéra, where his duties included creating and directing dances for that year’s reprise productions of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots and Donizetti’s La Favorite—tasks for which he received critical acclaim. This paper examines Justamant’s surviving choreographies for selected numbers from those two operas, transmitted in manuscript manuals held by the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung der Universität Köln. Justamant’s manuals reveal a much more vibrant and dynamic staging than what has often been presented in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (particularly in commercially available video recordings): for example, his choreography of the Huguenots bathing ballet demonstrates more overt humor and playfulness than is traditionally attributed to this scene, and his choreography for La Favorite suggests an intertextuality with Act II, Tableau 2 of Verdi’s Don Carlos.
This paper shares its larger aim with the Moving Meyerbeer project of the Hochschule der Künste Bern: namely, to more closely interrogate the relationships among physical gesture, music, and affect in French grand opera. Justamant’s work is of particular significance to the reception history and performance practice of this repertoire because his detailed, easily decipherable system of choreographic notation – with diagrams of color-coded stick figures (black for male roles, red for female), timing indications, and prose descriptions – offers the most thorough, precise view of what the divertissements and choeurs dansés of French grand opera looked like in the second half of the nineteenth century. Recently, Marian Smith and Doug Fullington have used Justamant’s Giselle manual to create a historically informed reconstruction for Pacific Northwest Ballet; this paper argues that Justamant’s manuals can likewise be profitably used in the operatic repertoire, not only for potential historical reconstructions but also to better understand what made the danced numbers of French grand opera so effective on the nineteenth-century stage.
During the 1868–69 season, Henri Justamant served as balletmaster of the Paris Opéra, where his duties included creating and directing dances for that year’s reprise productions of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots and Donizetti’s La Favorite—tasks for which he received critical acclaim. This paper examines Justamant’s surviving choreographies for selected numbers from those two operas, transmitted in manuscript manuals held by the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung der Universität Köln. Justamant’s manuals reveal a much more vibrant and dynamic staging than what has often been presented in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (particularly in commercially available video recordings): for example, his choreography of the Huguenots bathing ballet demonstrates more overt humor and playfulness than is traditionally attributed to this scene, and his choreography for La Favorite suggests an intertextuality with Act II, Tableau 2 of Verdi’s Don Carlos.
This paper shares its larger aim with the Moving Meyerbeer project of the Hochschule der Künste Bern: namely, to more closely interrogate the relationships among physical gesture, music, and affect in French grand opera. Justamant’s work is of particular significance to the reception history and performance practice of this repertoire because his detailed, easily decipherable system of choreographic notation – with diagrams of color-coded stick figures (black for male roles, red for female), timing indications, and prose descriptions – offers the most thorough, precise view of what the divertissements and choeurs dansés of French grand opera looked like in the second half of the nineteenth century. Recently, Marian Smith and Doug Fullington have used Justamant’s Giselle manual to create a historically informed reconstruction for Pacific Northwest Ballet; this paper argues that Justamant’s manuals can likewise be profitably used in the operatic repertoire, not only for potential historical reconstructions but also to better understand what made the danced numbers of French grand opera so effective on the nineteenth-century stage.