Lifar and Giselle

I must say that I had taken the greatest possible care in the preparation of that ballet. I changed the colour of the costume--violet instead of white--and I added a romantic cape. With his complete agreement, I also modified entirely Benois's stage-setting. So as to lend more dramatic relief to Albert-Hamlet, in the second act I put a great bunch of flowers in his arms so that he might, with melancholy, pose them on the tomb of his beloved. I insisted that these flowers, arums and lilies, must be real, because as living things they seemed to me to add, as it were, a human presence to this romantic drama which, for my part, I wanted to see transformed into a Shakespearian tragedy.

This success of Giselle [1932] made ballet history. Spessivtzeva's interpretation of the part of Giselle was, in my opinion, the absolute perfection of choreographic art. In this role she was the greatest, the most sublime, dancer of the 20th century.

Ma vie: From Kiev to Kiev; an autobiography by Serge Lifar. 1970. Page 115.