Louis Maleuvre · Public domain
La Fille du Danube is a two-act, four-scene ballet made by Filippo Taglioni for his daughter Marie Taglioni, first given in Paris in 1836. It belongs to the wave of Romantic ballets that followed La Sylphide, built around the same premise of a supernatural female spirit loved by a mortal man, here transposed from air to water. It survives in the catalogue chiefly as a Taglioni vehicle and as one of the handful of his works carried into the Russian repertory.
What is danced
The source article does not describe the choreography itself — no synopsis, cast list of variations, or scene-by-scene account of steps survives in it. What it does establish is the ballet's place in the Taglioni line of work: it is explicitly compared to La Sylphide (1832) as sharing 'the romantic theme of a supernatural maiden,' with the water spirit of the Danube standing as a counterpart to the air spirit of the Sylph. Marie Taglioni created and repeatedly performed the title role, including a celebrated 1837 St Petersburg revival for her own benefit and a final performance there in 1842.
Because no synopsis or number list is given, a reader wanting the actual pas, mime scenes or divertissements of La Fille du Danube will not find them here; this entry can confirm the ballet's genre and lineage but not its step vocabulary from this source.
Context
La Fille du Danube dates from the height of the Romantic ballet era in Paris, four years after La Sylphide had established Filippo Taglioni and Marie Taglioni as the defining choreographer-ballerina pair of the form, with its ballet blanc imagery of otherworldly female spirits and mortal men. The Danube ballet repeats that template with a water spirit in place of a sylph, part of a broader Romantic-era pattern of nature spirits (undines, wilis, sylphs) built specifically around Taglioni's pointe technique and aerial, ethereal stage presence.
Staging history
The ballet premiered on 21 September 1836 with the Paris Opera company (Académie Royale de Musique). Taglioni revived it in St Petersburg on 20 December 1837 for Marie Taglioni's benefit performance, following her triumphant Russian debut in La Sylphide earlier that year; the revival was reported a tremendous success, with contemporary critics singling out her performance. Marie Taglioni danced the role there for the last time in 1842. The ballet was one of only two Taglioni works (alongside La Sylphide) to remain in the Russian repertory after father and daughter left the country, and in 1880 Marius Petipa revived it at the request of Tsar Alexander II — who had seen Marie Taglioni in the role — for Ekaterina Vazem's benefit, with new music and revisions by Léon Minkus. Vazem's own memoirs describe the production as artistically weak but recall that the public came 'in throngs,' apparently drawn by the legend of Taglioni's earlier success.
How to watch it
Watch it as a mirror of La Sylphide: where that ballet stages a maiden of the air, this one stages a maiden of the water, and both were vehicles engineered around Marie Taglioni's pointe work and ethereal stage manner. The 1880 Petipa version is a layered document rather than a pure original — Minkus's additions and Petipa's revisions sit over Taglioni's 1836 choreography, staged partly as homage to a ballerina the reigning Tsar remembered rather than as a fresh creation for Vazem.
Credits
- composer: Adolphe Adam
Related works
Other staged works in the register connected to this one by author or lineage.
