August Bournonville was educated in the best of the French and Italian dancing traditions by his father, a French dancer, and the Italian Vincenzo Galeotti, who was ballet master in Copenhagen from 1775-1816. He became an elegant demi-caractère dancer, small and light with a beautiful jump and a great facility for mime. During the 1820's, he continued his training in Paris, the 19th century center for ballet, later bringing the elegance and grace of the French style back to Copenhagen. While this style later disappeared in France, it was preserved in Copenhagen. In his ballet, The Conservatory, from 1849, Bournonville remembers his youth in Paris and gives us a snapshot of the life and classroom exercises of a young dancer at the Paris Opera.

As a dancer, Bournonville could have had an international career, but he chose to return to work in Copenhagen for several reasons. First of all, he was Danish, and his ideas about life and art were aligned with those of the other leading Danish artists of the period. Additionally, he was interested in the male dancer as the central figure, and he did not want to disappear behind the ladies as the Romantic period's focus on the ballerina required. In Copenhagen where he was ballet master and artistic director, Bournonville could decide for himself; in his own ballets, where he danced the leading male parts until 1848, the male and the female dancer are of equal importance. Through his own dancing and through the important position male dance has in his ballets, Bournonville created a tradition for Danish male dance of high standards. Beyond his dancing, he was an organizer, a choreographer, and a teacher who was very much aware of the demands and standards of the international ballet world. He raised the Royal Danish Ballet to an international level of ability and at the same time gave it a unique national quality which remains to this day its distinctive characteristic. It was also due to his influence that Danish dancers achieved social equality with the citizens of the town and with the other artists of the Theatre.

Bournonville staged nearly fifty ballets as well as numerous divertissements in opera and drama. He was a sublime man of theatre, and it was of great importance that he had studied, lived and danced in Paris in the 1820's when the Romantic theater had its breakthrough. With La Sylphide, he introduced French/European Romanticism on the Danish stage. He went on to create ballets in many genres, including his idyllic ballets like Far from Denmark and The King's Volunteers on Amager. He produced many works based on folklore such as the merry Flemish Kermesse in Bruges, the oriental Abdallah, The Valkyrie and The Lay of Thrym based on Nordic myths, and other Norwegian-, Italian-, and Spanish-inflected ballets. His three major works, La Sylphide, Napoli, and A Folk Tale, became the treasures of the Danish ballet.

Despite the strong influence of French Romanticism – which we can see in his La Sylphide – Bournonville's art was very Danish. The attitude to life representated by his works dissociates itself from European Romanticism and its preoccupation with disintegration and disharmony. With a firm foundation in the Danish cultural tradition of the period – the Danish Romanticism – Bournonville maintained that art should be positive; its purpose was to elevate us and to make us into harmonious human beings. This harmony is to be found not only in the stories and the happy endings of his ballets, but also in his style of beautiful proportions and delicate musical timing.

Bournonville kept in touch with the development of the artistic life in Paris, travelled in Italy, where he was inspired for several ballets, and towards the end of his life went to Russia. There he met Marius Petipa, the great French-Russian choreographer, whom he knew from their youth, and his Swedish pupil Christian Johansson, whom Bournonville had trained in Copenhagen in the 1830's. Later on, Johansson became a dancer and chief pedagogue at the Imperial State Ballet School in St. Petersburg, and he is considered one of the chief architects of the Russian School of dancing. Thus there are close connections between French, Danish, and Russian style, even if the Russian style has since developed in its own way.

Bournonville did not become world famous until long after his death, when the world began to discover his work in the beginning of the 1950's. When he died, he was convinced that his ballets would only survive him a few years. But he was wrong; today he is performed all over the world, and his style is kept alive through the Bournonville School's six daily training classes – one for each day in the week – established by Hans Beck, one of his faithful successors. In his ballets we see reflections of his time, the Romantic period, but in the greatest of his ballets we also meet ideas which enrich our own lives today. We recognize our own problems, our hopes, and our ideas about beauty, happiness and harmony.

--Erik Aschengreen, Copenhagen, 2001