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When Virtuosity Becomes Sublime Milano
Teatro alla Scala
10/01/2026 - & October 5, 7, 9, 13, 17, 19*, 21, 22, 23, 2026
Giselle
Jean Coralli & Jules Perrot (choreography), Yvette Chauviré (revised choreography), Adolphe Adam (music)
Nicoletta Manni/Martina Arduino/Virna Toppi/Vittoria Valerio*/Alice Mariani (Giselle), Timofej Andrijashenko/Mattia Semperboni/Nicola Del Freo/Marco Agostino*/Navrin Turnbull (Albrecht), Maria Celeste Losa/Caterina Bianchi/Martina Valentini*/Chiara Ferrara (Myrtha), Marco Agostino/Christian Fagetti* (Hilarion), Christian Fagetti (Wilfred), Gabriele Corrado/Emanuele Cazzato* (Duke), Francesca Podini/Giorgia Sacher* (Bathilde), Azzurra Esposito/Licia Ferrigato* (Berthe), Agnese Di Clemente/Asia Matteazzi*/Domenico Di Cristo/Darius Gramada* (Peasant Pas de Deux), Vittoria Valerio/Camilla Cerulli* (Moyna), Linda Giubelli/Camilla Cerulli* (Zulmé), Massimo Garon/Edoardo Caporaletti* (Head Huntsman), Sabrina Solcia*/Giordana Granata*/Laura Farina*/Gaia Andreanò/Marta Gerani/Alessia Auriemma (Giselle’s Friends), Teatro alla Scala Ballet Company
Teatro alla Scala Orchestra, Mikhail Agrest (conductor)
Aleksandr Benois (sets & costumes), Angelo Sala & Cinzia Rosselli (revised sets & costumes), Andrea Giretti (lighting)
The quintessential Romantic ballet, Giselle, is for a ballerina what Everest is for a mountaineer: the supreme test of technique, artistry and dramatic intelligence. Few roles demand such an accomplished synthesis of seemingly antithetical qualities, from the ingenuous spontaneity of the village girl in Act I to the ethereal, almost disembodied lyricism of the Wili in Act II. Betrayed by the man she loves, Giselle dies of grief, only to return from the grave as one of the supernatural maidens condemned to dance by night. Yet the role’s enduring fascination lies in something more complex than this metamorphosis from innocence to spectral transcendence. Giselle must remain recognisably human even when she has ceased to belong to the world of the living; her forgiveness of Albrecht must possess a moral and emotional force capable of transcending the very conventions of Romantic tragedy that have brought her to her death.
The literary origins of Giselle are to be found in De l’Allemagne (1822), Heinrich Heine’s celebrated exploration of German culture, customs and traditions, which introduced French readers to the legends and supernatural beliefs of the Germanic world. Théophile Gautier, the poet, dramatist and influential theorist of Romantic aesthetics, subsequently drew upon this material in developing the ballet’s scenario, in collaboration with the playwright Jules‑Henri Vernoy de Saint‑Georges. The resulting work, set to music by Adolphe Adam and choreographed by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, premiered at the Paris Opéra in 1841, with Carlotta Grisi in the title role.
The plot initially appears to belong to the familiar territory of Romantic melodrama. Giselle, a frail but vivacious peasant girl whose passion for dancing is encouraged by the disguised Albrecht, Duke of Silesia, is unaware that her beloved is already betrothed to a woman of his own aristocratic station. Hilarion, the gamekeeper who loves Giselle and distrusts his rival, eventually exposes Albrecht’s deception by producing the latter’s sword and summoning the hunting party. The discovery of the duke’s identity and the appearance of his noble fiancée precipitate Giselle’s psychological collapse. Her ensuing dance, a convulsive disintegration of movement and consciousness, is strikingly reminiscent of the mad scenes of Italian bel canto opera. Exhausted by grief and the shock of betrayal, she dies, traditionally from a weak heart.
The parallel with opera is more than incidental. One of the defining preoccupations of early Romanticism was the vulnerable heroine whose innocence rendered her particularly susceptible to the cruelty of a world governed by social convention, masculine duplicity and unequal power. Bellini’s Amina in La sonnambula (1831) offers a particularly illuminating counterpart to Giselle. Both women are wronged by the men they love; both embody a fragility that is at once physical and moral, and both are subjected to public humiliation through circumstances they can scarcely comprehend. The difference is that Amina survives her ordeal. Having endured the devastating accusation of infidelity and the perilous episodes of sleepwalking, she is reunited with a remorseful Elvino, and the opera concludes in reconciliation rather than death. Giselle’s tragedy admits no such earthly resolution. Her redemption of Albrecht must take place beyond the grave.
The kinship between the two works is nevertheless profound. In La sonnambula, Amina’s vulnerability finds its most poignant expression in the aria “Ah! non credea mirarti”, whose expressive delicacy anticipates the aesthetic ideal embodied by the Romantic ballerina. Giselle translates a comparable emotional language into movement: the eloquence of the body assumes the function of the operatic voice, while gesture, line and rhythmic phrasing become the equivalents of musical declamation. Indeed, more than any other ballet of its period, Giselle seems to invite comparison with bel canto, with its alternation of lyrical effusion, virtuosic elaboration and psychological extremity. The ballerina becomes, in effect, a soprano without words, whose instrument is the body and whose most eloquent utterances may be those in which movement appears to falter or dissolve.
The supernatural dimension of the second act situates Giselle within the broader Romantic fascination with the uncanny, the macabre and the irrational, as encountered in the writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Adelbert von Chamisso, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. The Wilis, those spectral maidens who have died before their wedding day and exact vengeance upon men by forcing them to dance to their deaths, belong to a folkloric imagination shaped by Germanic and Slavic traditions. Yet the ballet’s supernatural world is not merely a picturesque excursion into Gothic horror. The Wilis embody the lethal consequences of love betrayed, transforming feminine suffering into a terrifying instrument of retribution. Against their implacable vengeance, Giselle’s compassion becomes an act of moral transcendence. Having herself been wronged, she refuses to reproduce the violence inflicted upon her; she saves the man whose deceit destroyed her.
Another indispensable antecedent is La Sylphide (1832), which had already transformed the aesthetic and technical vocabulary of ballet. In contrast to the earlier tradition, in which male dancers enjoyed a prominence at least equal to that of their female counterparts, the Romantic ballet increasingly placed the ballerina at its centre. The sylph, a supernatural creature who captivates a mortal man before meeting her own tragic end, and Giselle, the betrayed peasant girl who becomes a spirit, represent complementary manifestations of the new ideal. Both works juxtapose earthly desire with an unattainable feminine otherworldliness, while making the female protagonist’s vulnerability the principal vehicle of dramatic expression.
Marie Taglioni, the celebrated creator of La Sylphide, was instrumental in establishing this transformation. Choreographed by her father, Filippo Taglioni, the ballet exploited her distinctive physical qualities and exceptional elevation, while the sustained use of dancing en pointe helped establish the ethereal aesthetic that became emblematic of Romantic ballet. Carlotta Grisi, the original Giselle, inherited and developed this ideal, combining technical brilliance with a vivacity and expressive immediacy essential to the role. Her family connections are themselves a delightful reminder of the close relationship between the operatic and balletic worlds: she was a cousin of the celebrated singers Giuditta and Giulia Grisi, whose careers were closely associated with the bel canto repertoire of Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini.
Although Giselle was created in Paris, its subsequent history was decisively shaped by Marius Petipa, the French‑born choreographer who established the work in the repertory of the Imperial Russian Ballet in 1884. Through successive generations of dancers and revisions, it became one of the most enduring monuments of the classical repertory. Its apparent familiarity, however, conceals the difficulty of achieving a performance in which the formal perfection of classical dance never overwhelms the psychological substance of the drama. The challenge is particularly acute in Act II, where the choreographic ideal of weightlessness must coexist with the emotional gravity of a woman whose love has survived her death.
Over the years, one of the great pleasures of attending performances at La Scala has been the opportunity to experience its historically significant productions of the great classical ballets: Nureyev’s The Sleeping Beauty and Pierre Lacotte’s Paquita in 2025; Nureyev’s La Bayadère and The Nutcracker in 2024; and John Cranko’s Onegin in 2022. At a time when calls for innovation in the classical repertory are increasingly vociferous, it is a blessing that venerable institutions such as La Scala, the Paris Opéra and the Wiener Staatsoper continue to preserve the choreographic legacies of the great dancers and choreographers of the recent past.
At La Scala, Vittoria Valerio and Marco Agostino proved the emotional fulcrum of the evening. Valerio brought to Giselle not merely technical assurance but an exquisite conjunction of grace, expressive subtlety and dramatic intelligence. Her dancing possessed a natural fluency that never degenerated into mere prettiness; every gesture seemed to emerge from an inward necessity, lending the choreography a psychological coherence too often sacrificed to the demonstration of classical accomplishment. Her transformation from the ingenuous village girl of the first act into the spectral, infinitely compassionate spirit of the second was particularly affecting.
Agostino proved an ideal partner. His formidable technique was matched by a virility and stage presence that endowed Albrecht with compelling physical authority, while his dramatic sensibility rescued the character from the merely athletic display to which the role can sometimes be reduced. Too often, Albrecht functions as little more than a faire‑valoir for Giselle, his virtuosity serving principally to frame hers. Agostino, by contrast, invested the prince’s remorse with palpable humanity, making his redemption something more than the conventional culmination of a Romantic ballet.
The chemistry between the two dancers was remarkable, reaching its apogee in the second‑act pas de deux. Here, elegance became an instrument of pathos, and the choreography acquired an almost unbearable tenderness. Particularly shattering were those passages in which the lovers approached one another but remained incapable of touching. Giselle, now belonging to the realm of the dead, could offer forgiveness and consolation, yet no longer the physical intimacy that had once defined their love. The distance between their bodies, measured in mere inches, became an abyss separating the living from the dead, desire from fulfilment, and memory from irretrievable loss. It was difficult not to be moved to tears.
I have witnessed scores of performances of Giselle, some more dazzling in their technical bravura than this one. The dancing here was nevertheless of a commendably high standard, its classical discipline never in doubt. Yet technical virtuosity, however exhilarating, is not in itself the ultimate measure of a ballet’s success. The sublime emerges when mastery of the body becomes inseparable from the expression of feeling. On this occasion, Valerio and Agostino achieved precisely that conjunction. This may not have been the most technically thrilling Giselle I have seen, but it was unquestionably among the most moving—and quite possibly the most moving of all.
Martina Valentini made an equally telling impression as Myrtha, queen of the Wilis. Her authority was established less through ostentatious gestures than through a calculated severity of bearing: the purposeful rigidity of her movements, the menacing articulation of her hands and the austerity of her expression lent the character an almost implacable majesty. She conveyed a supernatural power that seemed to brook neither appeal nor resistance, making Giselle’s eventual intervention on Albrecht’s behalf all the more poignant.
Ultimately, the achievement of this performance lay in its rediscovery of the human drama beneath the ballet’s accumulated conventions. Giselle may be a monument of Romantic choreography, but its immortality depends upon something more fragile than the preservation of steps, poses and traditions. It depends upon the capacity of dancers to make the stylised language of classical ballet speak with the immediacy of lived experience. Valerio and Agostino accomplished this with uncommon sensitivity. Their almost-touching hands expressed the paradox at the heart of the work: that love may survive betrayal and even death, while remaining powerless to restore the lost intimacy of the living. In that final separation, forgiveness becomes more poignant than reconciliation, and the beauty of the dance derives its force from the impossibility of what it depicts. The result was a Giselle that did not merely exhibit the enduring splendour of the Romantic ballet, but vindicated its deepest artistic ambition: to transform physical virtuosity into an expression of the ineffable.
Ossama el Naggar
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