August Bournonville, son of a French dancer and ballet teacher who lived in exile in Denmark, studied ballet with his father in Copenhagen before completing his training in Paris with Pierre Gardel and Auguste Vestris. He joined the Paris Opera in 1826, but left France in 1830 to become a principal at the Royal Danish Ballet and later a ballet master. A post he held until 1877.

Throughout his life he supported the lightness, the elegance and the phrasing of the French balletic style. The style that he taught and that survived him thanks to an uninterrupted tradition. The choreographer of around fifty ballets essentially based on a harmonious and happy vision of life, Bournonville, in spite of the way ballet changed during his lifetime, as testified by the “romantic ballet”, gave equal importance to male and female dancers. That was an aesthetic measure but a social one as well since it enabled the Danish school to train great male dancers.