Ballet Company
Picture: Alessandra Ferri in Romeo and Juliet by Kenneth MacMillan
The Teatro alla Scala Ballet Company’s illustrious past goes back to the centuries prior to the inauguration, in 1778, of the world’s most celebrated opera house, where it still has its premises today. Its history is interwoven with the birth of ballet itself. Ballet was in fact promoted in the Renaissance courts of Italy, notably in the Sforza family’s splendid palace in Milan. It was to that city, between 1779 and 1789, that Gasparo Angiolini, the choreographer of Gluckian reform in serious opera, brought a company of more than fifty dancers. Milan was also where Salvatore Viganò, “that supreme choreographer, idolized by Stendhal”, experimented, in such works as Il Noce di benevento (1812), Prometeo (1813), Mirra (1817), Dedalo (1817), Otello (1818), La Vestale (1818) and I titani (1819), his personal interpretation of ballet d’action, which he called “choreodrama”. This had an enormous influence on the creators of dance at the time, such as Gaetano Gioja, and on such favourite star dancers as the danseur noble Carlo Blasis, whose name is forever linked to the glories of the Scala school founded in 1813.
Picture: Maria Taglioni, La Sylphide
A great teacher and theorist of romantic ballet, Blasis was director of the Imperial Regia Accademia from 1838 to 1851. Under him studied the leading stars of the first half of the nineteenth century: from Carlotta Grisi to Fanny Cerrito and from Lucile Grahn to Amelia Boschetti. Many of his Scala pupils, such as Caterina Beretta and Virginia Zucchi, later contended for the favours of audiences across Europe and Russia, where a group of prime ballerine originally from the Scala went and contributed to the birth of late-romantic or classical ballet. Carlotta Brianza was the first to dance Sleeping Beauty by Tchaikovsky/Petipa (1890), and Pierina Legnani was the first Odette/Odile in Tchaikowsky/Petipa’s Swan Lake (1895), to which ballet is indebted for the technical feat of the 32 fouettés of the Black Swan. Carlotta Zambelli was the last representative of the nineteenth-century school of Milanese ballet, led by Enrico Cecchetti, who directed the Scala school from 1926 until his death in 1928. Among the greatest teachers in the history of theatrical dance of all time, Cecchetti projected the Italian teaching of academic technique into the world.
Picture: Lèonide Massine rehearses Le tricorne with Antonio Ruiz - 1952
As early as in 1881, with the debut of Excelsior by Luigi Manzotti, Romualdo Marenco and Alfredo Edel, the Scala had already begun, albeit in its own original style, to move with the spectacular fashion that prevailed in the closing decades of that century. In praise of progress, Excelsior was the most celebrated of Manzotti’s “balli grandi” (after Excelsior came Amor, 1886, and Sport, 1897). It ushered in the genre of musical review and, besides gaining worldwide fame, created Scala proselytes. Established professionals like Raffaele Grassi, Nicola Guerra and Giovanni Pratesi (who created Vecchia Milano in 1928), ferried the Scala company into the twentieth century. A fresh generation of brilliant dancers, who included Teresa Battaggi, Cia Fornaroli, Rosa Piovella Ansaldo, Attilia Radice, Ria Teresa Legnani, Vincenzo Celli and Gennaro Corbo, helped to restore lustre to the theatre after the wartime interruption. Great choreographers too, like Michel Fokin and Léonide Massine, undertook to adapt to the Scala’s tastes the novelties that had been introduced into dance, music and scenery by the Ballets Russes.
