Arthur Saint-Léon

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Arthur Saint-Léon (17 September 1821 – 2 September 1870) was a leading ballet master who led the St. Petersburg Imperial Ballet from 1859 to 1869 and is best known for creating the choreography of Coppélia.

Born in Paris as Charles Victor Arthur Michel, he grew up in Stuttgart where his father was a court dance master. His father encouraged him to study music and dance. Saint-Léon studied violin with Joseph Mayseder and Niccolò Paganini and learned ballet so he could perform as both violinist and dancer. At 17 he danced as first demi-character dancer at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, then toured Europe and earned praise for his jumps and stage presence, winning over London audiences who were fond of male dancers on stage.

In Vienna he danced with Fanny Cerrito, whom he married in 1845. He choreographed La Vivandière for Cerrito (1843) and created ballets for La Fenice in Venice and the Paris Opéra. He became a teacher at the Paris Opéra and choreographed the divertissements for major productions. He separated from Cerrito in 1851 and retired when she joined the Opéra.

After more touring, including three years at Teatro San Carlos in Lisbon, he was invited to become Maître de Ballet at the Imperial Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1859, a post he held until 1869. He was succeeded by Marius Petipa. His favorite dancer was Adèle Grantzow, whom he brought to Paris and Italy, hoping she would star in Coppélia, completed in 1870.

Although Saint-Léon choreographed many ballets, Coppélia is the work that has survived largely intact. He died two days after Coppélia’s first season ended because of the Franco-Prussian War. He also devised a pioneering system of ballet notation, La Sténochoréographie (1852), the first method to record the movements of feet, arms, torso and head. A Pas de Six he notated from his 1846 La Vivandière was later reconstructed in the 1970s and staged for companies such as the Kirov/Mariinsky; it is known as the La Vivandière Pas de Six or the Markitenka Pas de Six. This Pas de Six remains the only major Saint-Léon choreography to survive.