MARIA

TAGLIONI (1804-1884)  , Italian ballet dancer, daughter of Filippo Taglioni (1777-1871), master of the ballet at Stockholm, Cassel, Vienna and Warsaw, was born at Stock-holm on the 23rd of April 1804 . She was trained by her father, who is said to have been pitilessly severe . It was to his care and her own special talent for dancing that she owed her success, for she possessed no remarkable personal attraction . Her first appearance was at Vienna on the loth of June 1822, in a ballet of which her father was the author, La Reception d'une jeune nymphe d la tour de Terpsichore . Her'success was immediate, and was repeated in the chief towns of Germany . On the 23rd of July 1827 she made her Paris debut at the Opera, in the Ballet de Sicilien, and aroused a furore of enthusiasm . Among her more remarkable performances were the dancing of the Tyrolienne in Guillaume Tell, of the pas de fascination in Meyer-beer's Robert le Diable, and in La Fille du Danube . Al this period the ballet was an important feature in opera, but with her retirement in 1847 the era of grand ballets may be said to have closed . In 1832 she married Comte Gilbert de Voisins, by whom she had two children . Losing her savings in speculation, she afterwards supported herself in London as a teacher of deportment, especially in connexion with the ceremony of presentation at court . During the last two years of her life she lived with her son at Marseilles, where she died on the 23rd of April 1884 .