Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Marie Taglioni

TAGLIONI, Marie (1809–1884), a ballet dancer, was the daughter of Filippo Taglioni, an Italian master of the ballet, and was born at Stockholm 23d April 1809. She was trained by her father, who in his discipline is said to have been pitilessly severe. It was to his care and her own special talent for dancing that she owed her success, for she possessed no remarkable personal attractions. Her first appearance was at Vienna, 10th June 1822, in a ballet of which her father was the author, La Réception d'une jeune nymphe à la cour de Terpsichore. Her success was immediate, and was repeated in the chief towns of Germany. On 23d July 1827 she made her debut at the Opera House, Paris, in the Ballet de Sicilien, and aroused a furore of enthusiasm. Her style was entirely new, and may be termed ideal as opposed to the realistic and voluptuous ballet previously in vogue. Among her more remarkable performances were the dancing of the Tyrolienne in Guillaume Tell and of the pas de fascination in Meyerbeer’s Robert le Liable. At this period the ballet was a much more important feature in opera than it is now, and in fact with her retirement in 1845 the era of grand ballets may be said to have closed. In 1832 she married Comte Gilbert de Voisins, by whom she had two children. Losing her savings in speculation, she afterwards supported herself in London as a teacher of deportment, especially in connexion with the ceremony of presentation at court. During the last two years of her life she stayed with her son at Marseilles, where she died in April 1884. Taglioni is frequently mentioned in the novels of Balzac; and Thackeray, in The Newcomes, says that the young men of that epoch "will never see anything so graceful as Taglioni in La Sylphide."