Yvette Chauviré, a grande dame of French ballet, has died at the age of 99 at her home in Paris.
A child prodigy who became one of the 20th century’s most dazzling prima ballerinas, Chauviré was acclaimed as the quintessence of classical French dance from the 1940s to 1960s.
The Paris Opera announced the news of her death on Wednesday evening. In a statement, the dance directors Stéphane Lissner and Aurélie Dupont wrote that “the ensemble of staff at the Paris National Opera are sad to learn of the death of Yvette Chaurviré, prima ballerina”.
Chauviré was widely considered one of France’s greatest ever classical dancers.
Her last performance was at the Palais Garnier opera house in 1972 when she danced the title role in the classic Giselle, a role that was her signature piece.
Chauviré, born in April 1917, was 10 when she entered the Paris Opera dance school and was officially accepted into the dance corps in 1931. She became a principal dancer in 1937 and reached the highest rank, étoile, in 1941.
Among those she trained under were the Italian prima ballerina and teacher Carlotta Zambelli and Russians Boris Kniaseff and Victor Gsovsky, who were credited with softening the rigidly academic training she had received in France and giving her the lyricism for which she was recognised.
She danced with equally legendary male stars including Māris Liepa, Erik Bruhn and Rudolf Nureyev, a great admirer who described her as a “legend”.
After Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union in 1961, he requested to partner Chauviré at the Paris Opera, but the French government was reluctant to upset Moscow and cancelled the performance.
Chauviré left the Paris Opera in 1946 to dance in Monte Carlo, but returned to the French capital in 1947, before leaving again in 1949 to tour and dance with the world’s most distinguished companies in Russia, London and the US.
She retired from the Paris Opera in 1956, but continued to appear as a guest prima ballerina during the 1960s and for a short while was co-director of the Paris Opera Ballet school, where she coached the younger prima ballerinas Sylvie Guillem and Marie-Claude Pietragalla.
With her husband, the Russian émigré artist Constantin Nepokoitchitsky (Nepo) who died in 1976, she choreographed short ballets for which Nepo had created the sets.
She is one of the rare dancers to have received the title “prima ballerina assoluta”, given only to those who are recognised as having exceptional talent. Chauviré was also made a member of the Légion d’honneur.
She is credited as being the inspiration and muse to the controversial director and choreographer Serge Lifar, another Ballets Russes star, who ran the Paris Opera ballet for three decades until the end of the 1950s, and introduced experimental works to its repertoire. Lifar cast her in the key role in several of his new ballets: David Triomphant, La Péri, Le Chevalier et la Damoiselle and Les Animaux Modèles.
In an interview with a German magazine in 1989, Chauviré lamented that ballet had become “hi-tech”.
“They exploit jumps or certain beats, or pirouettes, or those stretches that go on for ever, but they have forgotten that dance is made up of directions and épaulements. I find that at the moment, people have difficulty making the head, the arms and the torso relate to what the legs are doing, how that all fits together, which means that the style has got more and more slipshod,” she was quoted as saying.
“For example, in a jump, I see people going up like rockets, in one blow, BAM! Losing what should be the value of each successive moment, rising, and then ending when one touches the ground. Instead, they’re suddenly up in the air and it just stops right there, and the whole singing quality is lost.
“As for the classics, I must say that even audiences which have never seen a classical ballet before, when they do see one, they are transported. You can’t do a thing about it, audiences prefer classical dancing.
“How many times have we had a houseful of people who had never, ever been to a classical ballet, and what a triumph it was. Whereas, if we listened to certain people, who cry: ‘Enough of all that! It’s old hat.’ Well, ‘old hat’ it may be, but it still delights people, especially if it’s beautifully danced. Yes, it’s a delightful thing. All this will never die. Out of the ashes, the phoenix. It will never die.”
