On 8th December 1881 at a performance of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann at the Ringtheatre in Vienna, between 384 and 620 theatregoers were burned alive or crushed in panicked crowds as they tried to flee from a fire that begun with the stage gas lighting, engulfing the auditorium in minutes.
That same year, experiments had been carried out in the Savoy Theatre in London and at the Opéra Garnier of theatre lighting with Swan’s lightbulbs.
Almost a year after the fire, fairies filled the stage of the Savoy Theatre wearing dresses made of light. Tiny Swan bulbs were sewn into the hems, and the dancers wore battery packs hidden in their underwear: the term ‘fairy lights’ was born.
The French newspaper Le XIXe siècle did not commend the piece, but marveled about the atmosphere: ‘l’opérette à Londres est une chose bien curieuse. Tout y est franchement mauvais, de l’orchestre à la chanteuse; mauvais le chant et mauvais le jeu, et pourtant le public y prend un plaisir extrême. Pourquoi ? C’est que dans les théâtres d’opérettes tout est joli.’
It was over ten years later that the fairy metaphor of light, la fée électricité appeared in France. This paper will investigate the form of the fairy in late nineteenth-century France, and make a claim for this fairy’s journey, arguing that fairy lights' flight to France may have helped to form the fée électricité.