the attached scan shows a photo illustration for Le Theatre (no date) of Mlle Lobstein.
the NYPL dance coll. cat. says the following about this dancer:

<<Lobstein, Mlle. Paris Opéra dancer, début 1884, "sujet" in 1887. May be Désirée Lobstein.>>

i have noted a few references to Mlle L. in ballets by Joseph Hansen for P.O.B. in particular FETE RUSSE (1893).

if any BT members with knowledge of the Paris Opera Ballet can add more data to this caption, i'd be much obliged.

A ballet russe before Les Ballets Russes?

I wonder if this were Desirée Lobstein, of whom we have heard briefly before, from Estelle. In addition to being a dancer, she was also something of a socialite.

thanks, M.
i wonder if one could point out Estelle's mentions of Mlle L. i suspect she's the one shown in my photo.
i don't recall reading it, but then, i don't recall any number of things as time marches on...

Estelle repeats the name she received as part of a larger query, here. She has no substantive information to offer, and no one replies with any on that thread.

Google has several pages of references to a "Mlle. Lobstein," though not to "Desiree." Searches like this open doors to world unknown (to me at least). I was interested to find a Google Book reference to her appearance as Stella in a "dance-pantomime," Zino-Zina (1906). This was a private performance at a ducal chateau.

http://books.google.com/books?id=mZxNjBltJ...%22&f=false

There are several photos of Mlle. Lobstein on the following website, along with a Mlle. Piodi. The ballet is "l'Etoile" (Chabrier). The photos are by Nadar. (Scroll down)

http://www.culture.gouv.fr/public/mistral/...RPWD=4%24%2534P'

There is an interesting lead to a site called Jewish Memories, but this seems to be defunct.

Not online, but I've found several examples of news stories that covered her as a model for at least one painting exhibited at the 1889 Paris Exhibition on the Champ de Mars, and also as a "face in the crowd" at the same event.

Wow Mel, I had completely forgotten that old thread...

There is a drawing of ballet costumes mentioning Melle Lobstein (as the "déesse des flots bleus" in the ballet "Le rêve") on the following page:

http://richet.christian.free.fr/costume/costume.html

I suspect that the first name "Desiree" is a mistake. In a list of Academie Nationale de Musique dancers for the 1897-98 season, -- which gives only last names -- "Lobstein" is listed immediately FOLLOWING a different dancer, "Desire." (Bottom of p. 860.)

http://books.google.com/books?id=6SYbAAAAY...;q=&f=false

Thanks, Bart ! I also found another reference mentioning "Désiré" and "Lobstein" dancing together in Ascanio, and the following reference (which has a lot of typos...) mentions a "Mademoiselle Désiré" and a "Mademoiselle Lobstein":

http://www.archive.org/stream/lecostumeaut...riuoft_djvu.txt

The following article appears in a google search about "lobstein ballet:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html...9629C94679ED7CF

There's a short excerpt:

"Lobstein, an of the ballet of the Opera, in a dress of rose-colored satin. Another is the Marquise de C. in a toilet of green changeable silk with a white"

but unfortunately, the article itself isn't freely available.

(Edited to add:)

RG, there are some other photos of Melle Lobstein there:

http://www.culture.gouv.fr/public/mistral/...RPWD=4%24%2534P

A search on "Lobstein" gives 13 results, with some beautiful photos by Nadar.


The photos come from Chabrier's "L'étoile", and were taken by Nadar's atelier.

Thanks, Estelle, for your research.

The photos on the government's culture site are wonderful. It took me a while to find out how to search for them. I used "Lobstein" at first, but got results only when I dropped the quotation marks. Nadar's shots of her head and upper body are amazingly beautiful. You can feel the living, breathing human being in a way that the more artificial full-length ballet poses do not suggest.

The first of your links -- archive.org -- yields the following interesting piece of casting:


I wonder what happened to the website Jewish-Memories.com, described by Google as follows:

Thanks for the links, Bart !
It seems that "Jewish memories" was a site selling postcards about Jewish themes (one of its foundators was Gérard Silvain, who owns a huge collection of such postcards), but I have no idea why it has been deactivated.

Melle Lobstein is listed in the following book (archives of the Paris Opera):
http://books.google.fr/books?lr=&id=Sr...n#search_anchor

She's listed with the dates 1892-1909, but I have no idea of what it means.