Giselle, danced to familiar music by the French ballet and opera composer Adolphe Adam, is a Romantic-era ballet first danced in Paris in 1840. It is one of the very few ballets of that tradition that still holds the stage, danced in calf-length tutus. In the second act, the undying love of Giselle for Albrecht, who has come by night to visit her tomb, saves him from having his life-spirit taken from him by the spectral wilis, the vampiric ghosts of betrothed girls who have died before their wedding day, and their Queen.
A persistent legend reports that the Romantic poet Theophile Gauthier was called in to collaborate on the atmospheric plotline.
The version we see today is not much like the original, where the most famous dancer of her day, Fanny Elssler had an operatic mad scene at the end of the first act. Giselle passed out of the European repertory until it was revived by Sergei Diaghilev in 1910, a startling change of pace for the avant-garde Ballets Russes.
