François Alexandre Nicolas Chéri Delsarte (; 19 November 1811 – 20 July 1871) was a French singer, orator, and coach. Though he achieved some success as a composer, he is chiefly known as a teacher in singing and declamation (oratory).
Applied aesthetics
Delsarte was born in
Solesmes, Nord
Solesmes (; Picard: ''Solinmes'') is a commune in the Nord department in northern France.
Population
Heraldry
Education
The city is home to:
* the École Saint-Joseph.
* the ' Institution Saint Michel: Collège and Lycée', a Catholic S ...
. He became a pupil at the
Paris Conservatory
The Conservatoire de Paris (), or the Paris Conservatory, is a college of music and dance founded in 1795. Officially known as the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (; CNSMDP), it is situated in the avenue Jean Ja ...
, was for a time a
tenor
A tenor is a type of male singing voice whose vocal range lies between the countertenor and baritone voice types. It is the highest male chest voice type. Composers typically write music for this voice in the range from the second B below m ...
in the
Opéra Comique
''Opéra comique'' (; plural: ''opéras comiques'') is a genre of French opera that contains spoken dialogue and arias. It emerged from the popular ''opéras comiques en vaudevilles'' of the Théâtre de la foire, Fair Theatres of St Germain and S ...
, and composed a few songs. While studying singing at the Conservatoire, he became unsatisfied with what he felt were arbitrary methods for teaching acting. He began to study how humans moved, behaved and responded to various emotional and real-life situations. By observing people in real life and in public places of all kinds, he discovered certain patterns of expression, eventually called the Science of Applied Aesthetics. This consisted of a thorough examination of voice, breath, movement dynamics, encompassing all of the expressive elements of the human body. His hope was to develop an exact science of the physical expression of emotions, but he died before he had achieved his goals.
Delsarte System
Delsarte coached preachers, painters, singers, composers, orators and actors in the bodily expression of emotions. His goal was to help clients connect their inner emotional experience with the use of gesture. Delsarte categorized ideas related to how emotions are expressed physically in the body into various rules, ‘laws’ or ‘principles.’ These laws were organized by Delsarte in charts and diagrams. Delsarte did not teach systematically but rather through inspiration of the moment, and left behind no publications on his lessons. In America, Delsarte's theories were developed into what became known as the (American) Delsarte System.
Influence and impact
Delsarte is believed to have played an important role in the musical evolution of nineteenth-century France, and his ideas were influential to the
physical culture movement in the late 19th century in America.
Delsarte intended his work for the
performing arts
The performing arts are arts such as music, dance, and drama which are performed for an audience. They are different from the visual arts, which involve the use of paint, canvas or various materials to create physical or static art objects. P ...
, including the
theatre
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors to present experiences of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a Stage (theatre), stage. The performe ...
, and his many students (who also included
orator
An orator, or oratist, is a public speaker, especially one who is eloquent or skilled.
Etymology
Recorded in English c. 1374, with a meaning of "one who pleads or argues for a cause", from Anglo-French ''oratour'', Old French ''orateur'' (14 ...
s and teachers) are known or believed to have included
Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt (; born Henriette-Rosine Bernard; 22 October 1844 – 26 March 1923) was a French stage actress who starred in some of the most popular French plays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including by Alexandre Dumas fils, ...
,
Victor Cousin
Victor Cousin (; ; 28 November 179214 January 1867) was a French philosopher. He was the founder of " eclecticism", a briefly influential school of French philosophy that combined elements of German idealism and Scottish Common Sense Realism. ...
,
Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier ( , ; 30 August 1811 – 23 October 1872) was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic.
While an ardent defender of Romanticism, Gautier's work is difficult to classify and rema ...
,
Angélique Arnaud,
Delphine de Girardin, Henri Lasserre,
Alphonse de Lamartine
Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine (; 21 October 179028 February 1869) was a French author, poet, and statesman. Initially a moderate royalist, he became one of the leading critics of the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe, aligning more w ...
,
Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas (born Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, 24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870), also known as Alexandre Dumas , was a French novelist and playwright.
His works have been translated into many languages and he is one of the mos ...
,
Émilie Madeleine Brohan,
Benoît-Constant Coquelin
Benoît-Constant Coquelin (; 23 January 184127 January 1909), known as Coquelin aîné ("Coquelin the Elder"), was a French actor, "one of the greatest theatrical figures of the age."
Biography
Coquelin was born in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Pas-de-Cala ...
,
Madame Pasca,
Père Hyacinthe,
Henri-Dominique Lacordaire,
Jacques-Marie-Louis Monsabré,
Thomas-Étienne Hamel,
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas (, ; born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, ; 19 July 183427 September 1917) was a French Impressionist artist famous for his pastel drawings and oil paintings.
Degas also produced bronze sculptures, prints, and drawings. Degas is e ...
,
Claude Ferdinand Gaillard,
Victor Orsel,
Ary Scheffer,
Camille Saint-Saëns
Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (, , 9October 183516 December 1921) was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic music, Romantic era. His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863), the Piano ...
,
Charles Gounod
Charles-François Gounod (; ; 17 June 181818 October 1893), usually known as Charles Gounod, was a French composer. He wrote twelve operas, of which the most popular has always been ''Faust (opera), Faust'' (1859); his ''Roméo et Juliette'' (18 ...
, and
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, essayist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most o ...
.
Delsarte never wrote a text explaining his method, and neither did his only protégé, the American actor
Steele MacKaye, who brought his teacher's theories to America in lecture demonstrations he delivered in New York and Boston in 1871. However, MacKaye's student
Genevieve Stebbins continued in their footsteps by developing a system of 'harmonic gymnastics',
and in 1886 she published a book building on the foundation of Delsarte's theories titled ''The Delsarte System of Expression'', which became a major success with six editions (as well as numerous copycat publications). Stebbins also lectured extensively on Delsarte's theories, and displayed them (in conjunction with harmonic gymnastics) by
statue-posing and performing so-called
'pantomimes' illustrating a poem, story or concept, thereby bringing Delsarte's work closer to dance.
According to a contemporary description, Stebbins's statue poses, spiralling from head to toe, would "flow gracefully onward from the simple to complex... commencing with a simple
attitude
Attitude or Attitude may refer to:
Philosophy and psychology
* Attitude (psychology), a disposition or state of mind
** Attitude change
* Propositional attitude, a mental state held towards a proposition
Science and technology
* Orientation ...
, and continuing with a slow, rhythmic motion of every portion of the body."
Although she did not describe herself as a dancer, from 1890 at the latest she started to perform actual dances as well as poses.
There was a renewed interest in Delsartism in the 1890s in Europe.
The principles of Delsarte were incorporated into
expressionist dance and
modern dance
Modern dance is a broad genre of western concert dance, concert or theatrical dance which includes dance styles such as ballet, folk, ethnic, religious, and social dancing; and primarily arose out of Europe and the United States in the late 19th ...
more generally through the influence of
Isadora Duncan
Angela Isadora Duncan (May 26, 1877, or May 27, 1878 – September 14, 1927) was an American-born dancer and choreographer, who was a pioneer of modern contemporary dance and performed to great acclaim throughout Europe and the United States. Bor ...
and the
Denishawn school of
Ruth St. Denis
Ruth St. Denis (born Ruth Dennis; January 20, 1879 – July 21, 1968) was an American pioneer of modern dance, introducing eastern ideas into the art and paving the way for other women in dance. She was inspired by the Delsarte advocate Gene ...
and
Ted Shawn.
While St. Denis claimed a performance by Stebbins inspired her to dance, Shawn consciously embodied the Delsarte System in his work (and his book ''Every Little Movement'' (1954) is a key English-language text on the subject).
As well as permeating the entire modern-dance movement in America,
Delsartian influence may also be felt in German
Tanztheater, through the work of
Rudolf Laban and
Mary Wigman.
Ironically, it was the great success of the Delsarte System that was also its undoing. By the 1890s, it was being taught everywhere, and not always in accordance with the emotional basis that Delsarte originally had in mind. No certification was needed to teach a course with the name Delsarte attached, and the study regressed into empty posing with little emotional truth behind it. Stephen Wangh concludes, "it led others into stereotyped and melodramatic gesticulation, devoid of the very heart that Delsarte had sought to restore."
[Wangh, Stephen. (2000). ''An Acrobat of the Heart: A Physical Approach to Acting Inspired by the Work of Jerzy Grotowski''. New York: Vintage Books. p. 32. ]
Family
Delsarte was the uncle of composer
Georges Bizet
Georges Bizet (; 25 October 18383 June 1875) was a French composer of the Romantic music, Romantic era. Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his early death, Bizet achieved few successes before his final work, ''Carmen'', w ...
and grandfather of painter
Thérèse Geraldy.
References
Notes
Further reading
* Bradley Hoover,
The Aesthetic System of François Delsarte and Richard Wagner: Catholicism, Romanticism, and Ancient Music', in the Cambridge Elements series ''Music and Musicians, 1750–1850''. Edited by Simon P. Keefe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.
* Franck Waille, Christophe Damour (dir.), ''François Delsarte, une recherche sans fin'', Paris, L'Harmattan, 2015.
* Ted Shawn, ''Every Little Movement: A Book about François Delsarte'', 1954
* Franck Waille (dir.), ''Trois décennies de recherches européennes sur François Delsarte'', Paris, L'Harmattan, 2011.
* Alain Porte, ''François Delsarte, une anthologie'', Paris, IPMC, 1992.
*Williams, Joe
A Brief History of Delsarte* Franck Waille, ''Corps, arts et spiritualité chez François Delsarte (1811–1871)''. Des interactions dynamiques, PhD in history, Lyon, Université Lyon 3, 2009, 1032 pages + CDROM of annexes (manuscripts, interview of Joe Williams, video reconstitutions of body exercises) (the last and longer chapter of this thesis concerns Delsarte training for the body).
* Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, "The Delsarte Heritage," ''Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research'', 14, no. 1 (Summer, 1996), pp. 62–74.
''Delsarte system of expression'' by Genevieve Stebbins; public-domain, online version on Internet Archive.
* Eleanor Georgen
''The Delsarte system of physical culture'' (1893)(
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
)
* Carolina W. Le Farve. (1894)
''Physical Culture Founded on Delsartean Principles'' New York: Fowler & Wells.
* Edward B. Warman. ''Gestures and Attitudes: Exposition of the Delsarte Philosophy of Expression, Practical and Theoretical'', 1892.
External links
*
*
*
(subscription)
Laban Biography and Method*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Delsarte, Francois
1811 births
1871 deaths
French musicians
Modern dance
People associated with physical culture
Musicians from Nord (French department)