The premier of Giacomo Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable at the Paris Opéra in 1831 came close to being a calamity. So much kept going wrong on stage. The leading tenor accidentally plummeted through a trapdoor. Another singer barely escaped being struck by a falling gaslight. A dance episode in this opera began with the ballerina poised upon a tomb and the choreography required her to glance soulfully upward. What she saw on this occasion was no celestial vision, but a piece of scenery that had come loose from the flies and was hurtling toward her. If she had not jumped aside in the nick of time, she might have been seriously injured.

Edgar Degas 1834-1917 Ballet Scene from 'Robert le Diable' 1876 Oil on canvas V&A Images/ Victoria and Albert Museum This painting shows the scene from Meyerbeer's Gothic romance, Robert the Devil. Under Bertram's orders, the nuns are brought back to life to haunt his son, Robert. Ballet Scene was owned by Constantine Alexander Ionides, and was the earliest known work by Degas to enter a public collection in Britain. Sickert, who shared Degas's fascination with the atmosphere of the stage, probably saw the painting in Ionides's London home.

In spite of these catastrophes, Robert le Diable was a tremendous success, thanks to Meyerbeer's powerful operatic music and to a ballet sequence so unusual as to be almost unprecedented. This episode was set in a ruined cloister where ghosts of lapsed nuns rose from their tombs to dance by the light of the moon. The sight of flickering moonbeams - a lighting effect created by suspended gas jets - Gothic ruins, and dancing phantoms caused audiences to shiver with delight, and even though a few critics thought Filippo Taglioni's choreography for the episode confused in design, it was effective nonetheless. Equally remarkable was the choreographer's daughter, the renowned Marie Taglioni, who seemed to float across the stage as if she truly was the spectré, the role called upon her to portray. Nothing quite like this had ever been seen before, and the 'Ballet of the Nuns' from Robert le Diable is the first choreographic triumph of the artistic movement known as Romanticism.

The heyday of Romanticism in the ballet extends from the 1830s to the 1850s, although aspects of Romanticism can be found in ballets as late as the 1870s. Romanticism developed in a time of social upheaval. Visionary radical ideas were in the air, yet people retained bitter memories of the excesses of the French Revolution and of Napoleon's defeat. Moreover, a new middle class, that had grown prosperous through commerce and industry, was gaining power, and this class had started to patronize performances of drama, opera and ballet. The rise of the middle class was accompanied by a wave of materialism, prudishness, and hypocrisy which, a few years before the premier of Robert le Diable, had led the Opéra's management to require all its danseuses to lengthen their skirts, lest the sight of naked flesh arouse the male spectators.

Rebelling against, both stultifying moral convictions and out-worn artistic forms, young artists began to praise feeling and passion. The turbulence of Romanticism can be noted in the poems of Lord Byron and Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt. Two important elements of Romantic art profoundly affected the development of ballet. The fascination with the colourful or even exotic aspects of the world and a pining after the non-rational or supernatural. French choreographers often utilized themes from folklore and set their ballets in foreign lands. Spain, Italy, and even Egypt. The Industrial revolution may have helped generate this interest in faraway places and curious customs. If, thanks to such inventions as the railroad, improved methods of transportation made it easier to visit remote corners of the globe.