France Manuel Legris’s Sylvia: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet, Orchestra of the Paris National Opera / Kevin Rhodes (conductor). Palais Garnier, Paris, 9.5.2025 (JO’D)
Creatives:
Libretto – Manuel Legris and Jean-François Vazelle
Choreography – Manuel Legris
Music – Leo Delibes
Set and Costume design – Luisa Spinatelli
Dramaturgy – Jean-François Vazelle
Cast:
Sylvia – Bleuenn Battistoni
Diana – Silvia Saint-Martin
Aminta – Paul Marque
Orion – Andrea Sarri
Eros – Jack Gasztowtt
Endymion – Marius Rubio
With the Étioles, Premières danseuses, Premiers danseurs and the Corps de Ballet of the Paris Opera Ballet
Sylvia ou la Nymphe de Diane was the first three-act ballet to be performed, to music by Léo Delibes, at the recently opened Palais Garnier in 1876. Revived and newly choreographed several times since then, it enters the repertoire of the Paris Opera Ballet this season in a version from 2018 (for Vienna State Opera Ballet) by Manuel Legris.
Trained at the Paris Opera Ballet School, Legris was an Étoile of Paris Opera Ballet from 1986 to 2009. His aim, as a choreographer, is to revive the heritage of French classical dance. While this Sylvia bears marked resemblance to that by Frederick Ashton in the repertoire of The Royal Ballet, its fluid, muscular movement contrasts strongly, even in the ‘Pizzicati’ of the Act III pas de deux, with Ashton’s knottier choreographic style.
A prologue, performed to the overture, shows the goddess Diana (Silvia Saint-Martin) rejecting the love of Endymion (Marius Rubio) in real time. (Ashton incorporates this as her backstory at the end.) It is an affecting sequence. Endymion disappears into the dark with the abruptness of the three women who leave the stage at the end of ‘Emeralds’ in Balanchine’s Jewels. But it results in an emotional investment in characters before the story proper begins, that of the love between the nymph, Sylvia, and the shepherd, Aminta, and the jealousy of Aminta’s rival, Orion.
The prologue is followed by a ‘tableau’ of fauns and satyrs who jump, leap and turn in the air around groups of dryads and naiads. Among them, Marine Ganio and Francesco Murra are a particularly striking couple given striking things to do. Only then does Paul Marque, as Aminta, dance beneath the statue of Eros to express his love. A dance that condenses a hitherto generalized fluid muscularity into the body of one, muscular dancer.
Bleuenn Battistoni is a commanding Sylvia who cocks a snook at Eros, leads her fellow huntresses in a dance made thrilling by the horns and percussion of the Orchestra of the Paris National Opera as conducted by Kevin Rhodes, and kills Aminta. Eros, coming to life in the form of Jack Gasztowtt, takes revenge by piercing Sylvia with an arrow of love for the shepherd he will later bring back to life.
Orion (Andrea Sarri) kidnaps Silvia as she mourns her dead lover and carries her to his grotto. He, too, performs a solo during which the dancer is able to make you almost forget the kidnapping and think only about a man expressing love through dance. As fauns and satyrs jump, leap and turn to an ‘orientalist’ climax around her, Sylvia gets Orion drunk before escaping with help from Eros.
The ballet moves to its happy ending. Not before Eros teasingly withholds Sylvia from Aminta, as the Lilac Fairy withholds the vision of Princess Aurora from Prince Desiré in The Sleeping Beauty. Not before Diana has killed Orion for desecrating her temple in search of Sylvia. Not before the goddess refuses to release Sylvia from her vow of chastity, until Eros conjures up a vision of Endymion to remind her that she, too, once loved.
The emotional investment in the figure of Diana in the prologue now pays off. For it, and music that Tchaikovsky was to admire, provide ballet’s ‘more thoughtful joy’. Sylvia and Aminta stand with Eros on an upstage platform. Diana, who lost Endymion and who now loses her nymph, looks at them with her bow raised as if ready, or resigned, to return to the hunt.
John O’Dwyer