The Paris Opéra stood as perhaps the most influential house for ballet in nineteenth-century Europe until the ascendance of the Imperial Russian Theatres in the 1880s. Its stage attracted the talents of the great choreographers and dancers of Europe, and its audiences witnessed some of the most important phenomena in nineteenth-century ballet: the rivalry of Vestris and Duport in the first decade; the birth of the romantic style in the cloister scene of Robert le diable in 1831; the controversial failure (accompanied by the derisive whistles of the balletomaniac Jockey Club) of Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser in 1861. At the Opéra, audiences not only insisted that ballets be included within opera, but exalted independent ballets, sometimes praising them more highly than the operas with which they shared the stage. The house's directors, with their generous budgets and top-notch teams of choreographers, composers, designers and librettists, oversaw the creation of new ballets at a steady pace – including such staples of today's repertoire as the other-worldly Giselle (1841), the heroic Le Corsaire (1856) and the comic Coppélia (1870) – and by popular demand exported many of them to other houses in Milan, Copenhagen, Moscow and Philadelphia, to name a few.