But the Danish ballet, which had been founded at the same time with the Swedish, took a different turn. The early part and middle of the nineteenth century mark a great turning point in the history of the Danish stage dance. This is wholly due to the patriotic efforts of its great reformer, Bournoville, who did not like the foreign flavor of such an important art as dancing, and, moreover, found the stiff style, artificial manners and the incoherent relation between the music and dancing too crude and outmoded for a new era. On the other hand, the method of training the dancers was lacking in system and seemed too insufficient to make any thorough artists of the young men and women who wished to make their career as dancers. Vincenzo Tomaselli Galeotti, who had been for half a century an autocratic figure and ballet-master of Denmark, emphasized either the acrobatic Italian or the stereotyped French styles. For Galeotti the Danish ballet was perfection itself, but not so for Bournoville. Antoine Auguste Bournoville was born in 1805 in Copenhagen, where his father had been a dancer and assistant conductor under Galeotti. Already at the age of eight he danced in small parts in Copenhagen. But it was not until 1829 that he made his real début in _Gratiereness Hulding_. In 1824 he made a trip with Orloff to Paris where he saw Vestris and Gardel, whose instruction and art inspired him to do for the Danish ballet what they had done for the French. After a tour in Austria and Italy, Bournoville settled down in Copenhagen and began to reform the stage of his native land. Bournoville’s main reformative idea was that a dancer should first of all have a perfect technique, and then be an individual and not a dead figure in a spectacular design. The technique of the Milan school was to him one-sided, striving for gymnastic effects at the expense of the musical and thematic requirements of a composition. Taglioni had just made her reputation on the foundations that Bournoville had laid for the Danish ballet. Virtuosity had been the danger of the old school. Admiration was centred exclusively in the difficulty of the execution of the steps. The _pointes_ and _pirouettes_ had been regarded as the highest form of accomplishment. Bournoville realized that this step, when it is abused, becomes the curse of ballet dancing. While recognizing that it was absolutely necessary for momentary use, when completing an attitude or giving a suggestion of ethereal lightness (as of the poise of a winged being alighting for an instant upon the earth) he combated the tendency to base the significance of the dance only on this. On other occasions, one quick passage across the stage, the tips of the toes scarcely brushing the dust of the carpet, the dancer may make the impression of the grace of a bird’s flight. But if this trick is displayed constantly during a performance the effect is lost in the ugliness of the effort.