Manuel Legris, lithe in a tracksuit, held up a hand. “Stop! Stop!” he called out as Francesco Mura, a Paris Opera Ballet principal dancer, smoothly executed a tricky passage.
“It’s lovely, but I’ve lost the character,” Legris told Mura. “I’m just seeing technique.”
Legris, 60, knows about technique. A former étoile, or star, of the Paris Opera Ballet, and a former director of the Vienna State Ballet and La Scala Ballet, Legris was the supreme classicist of his era — the Roger Federer of ballet — his unobtrusive virtuosity always informed by an elegant refinement.
On this day, though, Legris was focused on character and intention as he worked with a cast of Paris Opera dancers in his ballet “Sylvia,” at a public rehearsal in the Opera Bastille amphitheater.
“Imagine you are a young, fresh shepherd, bursting with joy and life,” he told Mura as he ran onstage. The character of Sylvia, he explained to Inès McIntosh, is “strong and sensual; this isn’t ‘Sleeping Beauty.’”
“Sylvia,” set to an enchanting score by Délibes, was the first ballet performed at the Palais Garnier, a year after it was inaugurated in 1875. Choreographed by Louis Mérante, it had a mixed reception, with most plaudits going to the score. (“What riches in the melody, the rhythm, the harmony,” Tchaikovsky wrote, after seeing it in 1877.)
Versions of the ballet came and went over the next century. Frederick Ashton’s for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet (the forerunner of the Royal Ballet) in 1952, with a resplendent Margot Fonteyn in the title role, put the ballet back into the mainstream repertory, though it wasn’t performed by the Royal from the mid-1960s to 2004. American Ballet Theater will present it at the Metropolitan Opera House in July.
Why isn’t “Sylvia” as commonly performed as story ballets like “Swan Lake,” “Giselle” or “Romeo and Juliet”? It has a plethora of dancing roles along with its exceptional score. And like “Coppelia,” another Délibes ballet, it’s notable for having a strong-willed heroine who doesn’t die or need saving by a prince.
Perhaps “Sylvia” has never quite taken off because its story, at once thin and complicated, is hard to care about. The heroine, a chaste nymph of the goddess Diana, is loved by the shepherd Aminta, and eventually united with him through the machinations of Eros, the god of love. Along the way she is abducted by the hunter Orion, frolics with fauns and tree nymphs and must convince Diana to allow passion’s true course.
“The ballet is about power and love,” Legris said, speaking in French in an interview in his red-velvet-accented dressing room at Palais Garnier. “It shows women preserving and showing their strength; I don’t think it’s old-fashioned at all.”
When he saw the 1979 “Sylvia” created by Lycette Darsonval for the Paris Opera Ballet, he fell in love with it. “There was something so magical about the gods, the creatures,” he said. “It was everything I thought ballet should be.”
“It’s a particular style, a particular era,” he added, referring to the nimble, delicate footwork, pronounced épaulement (the angled relationships between head, shoulders and hips) and charm of manner that were mainstays of French ballet style when he joined the Paris Opera Ballet school.
That style is less prevalent today at Paris Opera Ballet, which since the 1990s has made something of a specialty of commissioning work by contemporary dance makers. José Martinez, the director of dance since 2022, said: “It’s now more rare at the Opera that we have new works with a classical vocabulary coming into our repertory,” adding that he wanted to expand that part of the repertory while continuing to explore new vocabularies.
After Legris — who, Martinez said, “represents a part of French dance history and style, the heritage of our theater” — retired from the Opera in 2009, he became the artistic director in Vienna; in 2020 he took the job at La Scala. At both companies he dramatically improved the standard of the dancing, and at La Scala brought new works by Alexei Ratmansky and William Forsythe to the repertory.
“I have heard dancers complain that he was a hard taskmaster,” said Graham Spicer, a Milan-based critic. “But however he got there, in 30 years of watching them, I have never seen the company so tight and technically clean.”
Legris left La Scala earlier this year, timing his departure to that of Dominique Meyer, the general director of both the Vienna Opera and La Scala during his tenures. Legris said he had no desire to direct a company again. “I don’t want that responsibility anymore,” he said, adding that the end of his tenure at La Scala had been difficult.
“There was a lot of resistance to change,” he said. “I felt I was the only person in the theater trying to advance things.” He added that there has been a change in mentality amid dancers since the Covid-19 pandemic. “You need to find a different way to communicate, which is fine, but takes time.”
Of Paris Opera Ballet, he added, that in his years focused on Vienna and La Scala, he hardly felt connected to it. “When I walked past the theater, I felt like I could hardly remember dancing here,” he said. But when he came to work on “Sylvia,” “it was like I had never left.”
Legris’s “Sylvia” offers a torrent of dance, from its prologue, showing the goddess Diana withstanding love’s temptations, to its divertissement-filled final act. Technically, it’s ferociously demanding for both principals and the ensemble; Legris makes full use of the details he loved in the Darsonval version: small beaten jumps, multiple turns and épaulement, and packs the pas de deux with tricky transitions and bravura overhead lifts.
“There are also combinations of steps that aren’t done so much anymore, which we did at school,” Legris said, adding that he had mostly retained the narrative framework of the Darsonval version, but none of the choreography.
When Legris graduated from the school into the company, he was part of the generation of young dancers — which included the future stars Sylvie Guillem, Laurent Hilaire and Isabelle Guérin — that Rudolf Nureyev picked out of the corps de ballet in the mid-1980s when he was the Opera’s director of dance.
He is clearly influenced by the incessantly dancey, often fussy Nureyev versions of the classics that are still Paris Opera staples. But despite dull décor and uninspired costumes (Grecian tunics, Eros in gold thong and wings) by Luisa Spinatelli, Legris’s “Sylvia” is largely charming.
“We can really feel the heritage of the French style,” said Paul Marque, who danced Aminta. “It’s a bit like French couture; you are trying for perfection, but it’s never overstated. We can jump super-high and turn like crazy, but it has to be clean: feet pointed, legs straight, no sound on landing, musical.”
The challenge for the Paris dancers wasn’t the technical difficulties, but inhabiting their characters, Legris said. “I think it’s a generational thing,” he said. “They are more focused on the demonstrative aspect, they find it harder to show their feelings.”
He added that he didn’t really think of himself as a choreographer, despite having created both “Corsaire” and “Sylvia” in Vienna. But now, he said, he was getting requests from ballet companies. “I believe in classical ballet, and there really aren’t so many people working in this traditional way, so perhaps I’ll continue,” he said.
He laughed. “I’ve found a niche.”
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