The New York
Public Library for the Performing Arts > Italian
Dance
Walter Toscanini, Bibliophile and Collector,
and
the Cia Fornaroli Collection of the New York Public Library
Part II
By Patrizia Veroli
This essay was originally published in Dance Chronicle (Volume
28, number 3; 2005), 344 – 362, and is reprinted with permission
of Dance Chronicle (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group).
©Patrizia Veroli.
Once back in the United States, collecting Italian dance items
possibly became for him a way to envelop his present in a past
more and more idealized. During the war he had been involved in
anti-Fascist activities and had been wishing for a complete renewal
of things once Mussolini had been deposed. After 1945 daily Italian
chronicles were to cruelly disappoint his idealism. Politics was
the land of compromise and he was not a man who betrays his principles. Collecting
shaped the only Italy he could love unreservedly, the homeland
of authors, ballerinas, and artists forever gone. There, in books,
prints, and letters, they could people a landscape of pure beauty. Walter
could replace memories of his own past with an aestheticized landscape,
the only one left for him. History was replaced by classification;
a complex and contradictory reality was supplanted by order. Still,
as Susan Stewart has noted, the collector’s “Noah’s Ark is a world
not of nostalgia but of anticipation.”
[1] The dance collection had to be revealed to scholars:
they were the only ones with whom Toscanini could share his own
Italy. That was also the only way the homeland of his dreams could
become true: it would radiate in future books and articles nourished
and inspired by its treasures.
Although in the early 1930s he had focused on Romantic ballet
and ballerinas, his American postwar years were devoted to Angiolini
and Guglielmo Ebreo. Walter’s love for antiquarian and rare documents
was coupled with his thirst to get to know whatever could explain
and place in context each individual item. Not only was he in
search of original books or librettos to buy, he also tracked down
rare items anywhere in the world and had them hand-copied by destitute
friends, like the old dancer and mime Toni Corcione, whom he could thus help
to earn a living. His network of contacts included national libraries
and private collectors, antiquarian book dealers and scholars of
all ages, old dancers, and dear friends committed or ready to submit
to his yearnings. On reading his correspondence, one is astonished
by his constantly up-to-date knowledge of whatever old or antiquarian
dance item that popped up on the international market or whatever
autobiographical recollection a dancer published in a minor Italian
gazette. How could he keep alert to so many and varied bibliographical
events happening across the Atlantic? Walter was haunted by his
search for primary sources: there was no single bit of data that
could exhaust his eagerness to know more. Dates and names reported
in an old chronicle might prove false and even names in original
programs might be contradicted by last-minute decisions, which
only after-the-performance reviews revealed. How, after all, can
one remain free of perpetuating errors? As with his father, perfectionism
was his torment.
As a collector, the more he replaced the narrative of history
by the narrative of the collection he was constructing, the more
he was haunted by subjectivity. His research on Angiolini, which
took him several years, he poured into a long typescript that he
would always refuse to have published. “I have been sketching
out a 160-page typescript in English and there are people who find
it interesting,” he wrote to a friend at the Biblioteca Nazionale
in Florence. “The only one who is not convinced is me, since I
know how many voids there are, and how much searching has still
to be done.”[2] In 1955 he finally published just a short article
on the topic in Opera News.[z] His studies on Guglielmo Ebreo
and the Jewish dancing masters of the fifteenth century were left
in manuscript; although he provided the “Giorgio” with extensive
notes, he was almost upset by suggestions to publish it. As with
Angiolini, only a short essay came out of it all.[aa]
In 1949 Walter first crossed paths with twenty-four-year-old Genevieve
Oswald, a music librarian and part-time dance specialist on the
music staff of the New York Public Library. A graduate of the
University of North Carolina Women’s College in Greensboro, Oswald
was a singer and a graduate student in the Juilliard School when
in 1947 she decided to join the Music Division then located in
the library’s main building at Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue. “At
the time,” John Martin wrote, “the dance collection was a smallish
affair working out of a corner of the Children’s Room [sic].”[3] Oswald
had a passionate interest for dance, having written music scores
for college theatre and dance performances as a composition major. When
she was invited by Carleton Sprague Smith to develop the Music
Division’s dance materials, she was elated. There were not more
than four hundred dance books, when, being in charge of organizing
an exhibition, Oswald one day saw in an Italian book the caption “Raccolta
Cia e Walter Toscanini” under Randolph Swabe’s famous portrait
of Cecchetti.[4] She contacted Walter and asked him if she might
borrow the portrait. Walter agreed. He also said that for Christmas
she would get a thousand dollars from Walter and an equal amount
from Arturo Toscanini—an enormous sum for the time—for the archive. Oswald
was an enthusiast, a visionary, and a hard worker, and in 1965
she would finally manage to obtain for the dance archive independent
status within the library.
By 1949 Oswald had already made some notable acquisitions, including
Ted Shawn’s sizable collection of Denishawn materials and the Doris
Humphrey and Charles Weidman Collections. In 1951 a Dance Magazine-Universal
Films Benefit provided funds to buy rare and fine books and a private
collection of eighteenth century and nineteenth century prints
and lithographs, both European and American, and in 1954 the Dance
Collection was recognized ad the most extensive ever assembled
in the United States. In 1956 a Rockefeller Foundation grant was
awarded, which freed Oswald to be a “full-time curator” with assistants,
and as the archive became widely known in the American dance community
there were more gifts as well as new acquisitions.
In 1954, when Oswald had a child and was not expected to resume
her job, the dance historian Lillian Moore took her place for a
time at the Dance Collection. One day in September, the two women
were invited for lunch at Villa Pauline. Walter was now a widower.
Cia Fornaroli had died the month before, struck by a heart attack
on
August 16, her son’s twenty-fifth birthday. Since 1953 she had
suffered from heart trouble and was practically bedridden, only
descending from her second-story bedroom on Christmas and New Year’s
Eve to join her family in the main hall. During that time, Walter
must have long meditated on the future of his wife, himself, and
his dance archive. Having organized auctions, he could imagine
only too well the sad fate of collections abandoned by their owners
in an act of God. His own creation could not be left to chance
and dispersion.
At lunch, Walter informed Oswald that he was considering donating
his dance collection to the library under the condition that she
return to her position there. “Why don’t you give it to Teatro alla
Scala?” she responded simply, to Moore’s horror. “Just because
you have asked such a question,” said Toscanini with a smile.[5] Beyond
this pleasant anecdote, Walter must have considered that only a
donation to an American institution would preserve the individuality
of his collection and Cia’s name. Had all his collection poured into the Teatro alla Scala
Museo Teatrale, with its thousands of Italian books, only a part
of it would fill voids in the theatre’s collection, while duplicates
would be set aside, and sooner or later his items would be dispersed
into a much large entity. The neat features of the historical
and aesthetical landscape he had been so painstakingly shaping
for years would blur and disappear. Walter was convinced that
the New York Public Library was indeed the right and only place:
its public use, efficiency, the richness of the Dance Collection,
and the great interest in dance clearly shared by a large community
bore no comparison with Italy, where the serious financial problems
of the postwar years gave dance a low status among the arts. Still,
Walter felt a moral duty to provide the Italian libraries, and
in particular the La Scala Theatre Museum, with whatever they might
be lacking and that could easily be found on the rich shelves of
the New York Public Library. In December 1954 he felt the need
to explain his choice to Stefano Vittadini, then curator of the
La Scala Theatre Museum: “An Italian section is totally missing
at the Library for a number of reasons. First, dance books in
Italy all along the centuries are few in comparison with what was
issued in France, England, or Germany. Second, our language is
not that familiar and international, and third, our dance books,
documents, and leaflets have never been either scientifically gathered
or catalogued and are lying scattered on the shelves of a number
of Italian libraries and archives. And in order to pick them up,
one has to penetrate the secrets of the various cataloguing systems!”[6] This
is why he finally chose the New York Public Library as the recipient
of his gift of Italian materials. At the same time he offered
to send to Vittadini’s museum duplicates of more recent foreign
books.
Toscanini’s donation to the Library was officially announced by
its director, Edward G. Freehafer, on May 27, 1955. [7] The gift
was presented in Cia’s honor, and Walter would go on stubbornly to insist that her name
not be replaced by his own. [bb] It included prints, ballet scores,
clippings, rare books, and also a fund to pay the cost of microfilming
the materials, especially the rare items, and distributing copies
to libraries in all parts of the world. In the following months,
under Oswald’s direction and with Walter acting in an advisory
capacity, the first such microfilm was made, concerning Salvatore
Viganò. Original libretti, pamphlets, early reviews, and contemporary
engravings illustrating scenes from his ballets and the dancers
who appeared in them were filmed and by the end of 1955 copies
were sent to a number of Italian libraries as wall as to libraries
in London, Paris, Vienna, Copenhagen, Munich, São Paolo, Boston,
Chicago, and San Francisco, along with a request for a list of
their holdings, if possible on microfilm. As replies started to
arrive, information was exchanged, and items were transferred to
the library from Riverdale, where Lillian Moore worked once a week
to sort out the materials, Walter’s profile as a donor started
to take shape.
His abundant correspondence with Oswald (to whom he would sometimes
write twice a day) shows that he wanted the library to get a broader
knowledge of each donated item, of its identity and rarity. “I
took out all the duplicates,” he warned Oswald after donating a
collection of prints, “and those I left which appear to be duplicates
are not, because there is always some little difference either
of paper or of the time and place of printing.”[8] The bibliophile
was transmitting his lifelong experience in handling old materials. There
are letters motivated by Oswald’s request for some details, with
a long and accurate description of items, and a list of bibliographic
references that even today would save scholar days of work. One
has the impression that Toscanini felt he had found a colleague
and a friend in Oswald, and certainly she was the main reference
for researches that his donation, far from interrupting, just made
more urgent.
In the early 1950s Walter gave the library a manuscript in an
unknown hand titled Tarantella. Ballo Napolitano. After
long searches and comparisons, he could finally ascertain that
it was the draft for the work by Pasquale Chiodi with lithographs
drawn by Gaetano Dura, published in Naples in 1834. Still, he
was haunted by a doubt: was the manuscript by Dura himself or made
by a copyist? The library cataloguers had to hold up the printing
of the catalogue card until Walter obtained from abroad (probably
through the library) microfilms of several other editions on which
he had obtained information and that he could study in detail,
which took around a year. Finally some misspellings of the text,
the dancers’ positions, the presence of a scarf, the visibility of one hand and other minor
and tiny differences proved to him that he had given the library
sketches made by Dura himself. [cc]
This provided the occasion for him to suggest that Oswald “make
as soon as possible more research and study about the Italian popular
dances,” as he was extremely interested in the topic.[9] During
the 1930s, Fascism had conceptualized Italian society as an organism
and favored the frequent revival of local customs and dances. At
that time Italy was still very rich in popular dancing and Walter
profited from the many festivals patronized by the regime to hire
researchers and to bid on books and transcriptions, although such
gathering inevitably came to a halt when he left Italy. In 1955-56
he envisaged making a microfilm on the tarantella, which would
contain reproductions of any book written on the subject and any
existing transcription as well as reproductions of all available
prints, drawings, photographs, and postcards. Finally, the film
would include a complete bibliography and index [10]. In Walter’s
vision, the New York Public Library should become able not only
to offer originals to scholar of Italian dance, but also, at a
time when inexpensive photocopies did not exist, to provide them
with an array of microfilms, photographic reproductions, and transcriptions
from other libraries all over the world. He believed that information
on a given topic should be as complete and accessible as possible.
Only gradually did the Cia Fornaroli Collection go to the library. In
the meantime, Oswald often had the opportunity to visit Walter
and to browse among his possessions to choose items for the library’s
exhibitions: at Riverdale she had a drawer where she could put
items she was interested in analyzing, borrowing, and having donated
sooner than others.[11] Walter often sent money to the library,
either “ to plan more microfilms or to buy some of the rare books
occasionally offered to the Library.” [12] Over time he paid half
the sum needed for one of Cesare Negri’s treatises,[13] contributed
to the purchase of Edward Gordon Craig’s Duncan collection, and
located a particularly rare volume of the nineteenth-century series L’Indice
deglu Spettacoli Teatrali. [dd] In May 1960 Oswald received
an urgent telephone call from George Chaffee offering his collection
of Romantic prints and statuettes for ten thousand dollars, a large
sum that neither the library nor the Harvard Theatre Collection
could afford. Not only was the deal expensive, but it also had
to be concluded in a matter of hours, as the following morning
his collection was to be sod as bulk material in an unannounced
sheriff’s sale for nonpayment of rent. Oswald phoned Walter and
asked him if he was interested in buying a lot of very valuable
material. She gave him no more details. Walter made a hurried
appointment to join her in Manhattan. A short time later they
met in a recording studio’s parking lot and he handed her a check
for the needed sum, without even asking what exactly she had in
mind to buy. Later that day when she told him about the urgent
need for money that had prompted Chaffee to sell his collection,
he suggested that she and the library not publicize the purchase,
as they would usually do in such cases; he imagined that Chaffee
had built his very reputation on his dance material, so that as
long as the deal was kept secret, his status as a collector would
remain unchallenged. Otherwise, Chaffee would suffer too greatly.[14] The
episode reveals Toscanini’s attitude toward his own dance collection
and in part explains the many stages of his gift to the library.
Money could arrive at the library in Walter’s name,
in that of his father, or those of old friends whom he made aware
of the Dance Collection’s many needs. Finally, the decision was
made that the library would keep all books and librettos on permanent
loan, and legal title would be transferred over a number of years. A
lot of 127 rare prints passed into the library’s possession by
the end of 1961. “You have so enriched the Dance Collection through
the past six years with the veritable ‘library of treasures’ that
you have deposited here in the memory of your wife…” Oswald wrote. “This
is not only a wonderful gift to us, but one to the City of New
York and to the country as a whole…you have enabled us, a new library
in a relatively new country, to assume a position of leadership
and competition to the great national libraries of Europe. Certainly
we could not have done this ourselves.”[15] Over the years a relationship
of mutual admiration and understanding grew between Oswald and
Walter. “I wanted to tell you one thing,” he wrote her in 1962. “I
am deeply touched by your tremendous work to build up the Dance
Collection of the New York Public Library, and I firmly hope that
sometime this branch of the Music Division will become a separate
unit like the Dance Archives and that you will have space enough
to expand more and more the Dance Library so as to make a real
Dance Archives of the Dancers of the world.”[16] They were two
idealists enthusiastically committed to their jobs, and shared
an idea of dance culture that admitted no borders of language and
country.
Bit by bit, Walter deprived himself of his private
landscape of Italian dance and history: pieces were physically
going to the library. Still, it was the final act, the one that
marked the passing of the possession, the mourning of the true
and definite loss. And the items he most cherished were the last
to leave. In 1965, when the Dance Collection as a new, separate
division moved into its new home at Lincoln Center, the Library
and Museum of the Performing Arts, his wish for the Collection
had come true. Characteristically, his great gift of the “Giorgio” manuscript
marked this event. That year Walter was sixty-seven. His mother
had died in Milan in 1950 and his father on January 16, 1957, at
Villa Pauline. Financial problems started to arise in the early
1960s as profits from record sales were becoming less than the
cost of keeping the whole recording apparatus working. In June
1966 John Corbett, an NBC engineer who served as technical curator
of the recorded archive, returned to NBC at Walter’s request. Corbett
had worked at the Riverdale home for more than a decade on the
preservation and preparation of Toscanini recording masters for
release on RCA Victor Records, and on the many radio programs of
the Man Behind the Legend series. Walter also released
full-time and later his part-time secretaries, until Arthur M.
Fierro, an energetic and reliable young man who had became Walter’s
part-time administrative assistant in 1963, was the only employee
left. In the mid-1960s Walter had to start considering selling
Villa Pauline. It was the end of an era, and possibly too much
of a trauma for him.
An inveterate smoker for most of his life until the
1950s, he was hit by a first stroke in May 1968, which left him
with limited motion on his right side and without the use of his
right arm. His communication skills, both verbal and written,
were almost entirely destroyed. However, his mind remained sharp
and clear, his remarkable memory intact, and his inexhaustible
thirst for knowledge gave him partial relief. He spent most of
his days reading books, newspapers, and periodicals, and watching
a bit more television than was his normal habit. He was not able
to work in the standard sense, but he was able to communicate his
wishes, sometimes with great frustration and difficulty. By the
end of 1969 Villa Pauline was sold[ee] and after two months of
packing, Walter settled down in a duplex apartment at 2500 Johnson
Avenue in Riverdale, together with Maria Flebus (known as “Isolina”,
the family’s faithful domestic servant) and twenty-four-hour nurses. It
was up to his son Walfredo and to Arthur Fierro, by now his full-time
assistant, to work on many complex issues, problems, and management
of his medical needs. Walter originally requested that the balance
of the ballet collection still at Villa Pauline—the ballet books
in Cia’s bedroom (left largely untouched since her death), ballet
books and files in his own bedroom and third-floor office including
the massive card index, and other books in the adjacent outer corridor—be
packed and shipped to the Cia Fornaroli Collection at the New York
Public Library. At the last moment, however, he changed his mind. Such
a separation must have seemed to him quite unbearable. Instead
he asked his assistant to ship the material to his apartment. In
the days prior to his initial stroke, he was intently working on
an extensive article about the ballerina Maria Teresa Flogliazzi
(Gaspero Angiolini’s wide), but never completed it; the handwritten
draft and thirty-five-page typed transcript were sent to the library
in 1972, after his death. His final retouching of his manuscript
on Angiolini would occur in March 1971, just a few months before
his death, when he crossed out certain lines on some pages near
the end of the typescript, correcting the birth date of Pietro
Angiolini, and having Fierro type out additional changes based
on more recent readings.
He kept working at his archive up to the very last,
when he died after a second stroke on July 30. 1971, at the age
of seventy-three. His ashes were taken by his son to the Toscanini
chapel, located in the Cimitero Monumentale of Milan, to be placed
at the feet of his wife, Cia, as he had requested.
At Walter’s death, the donation had not yet been entirely
transferred to the library. It was Walfredo who continued his
father’s gift with additional material. Of course the largest
part of the collection had become the property of the library during
the 1950s and 1960s. Unfortunately, the full extent of Walter’s
donation is not easily recognizable, since a number of items only
indirectly related to dance but important in understanding particular
dance issues flowed into other sections of the library (mainly
into Humanities, Theatre, and Music Divisions) and their original
context was not retained.[ff] Walter’s painstaking and lifelong
research assembled hundreds of publications, either original or
copies,[gg] that are connected directly or indirectly to Italian
dance. However marked by his subjectivity as a scholar his work
has been, a catalogue of his donation would prove of great value.
“Walter’s gift started the historical archive of the
Dance Collection,” Genevieve Oswald has remarked. “He could have
sat on all the boards and committees of the library had he wanted
to.”[17] His insistence on standing apart and not having his name
appear was equaled only by the generosity with which he welcomed
any serious scholar who addressed requests for material or advice.
The importance of this collection was immediately
appreciated and it was considered a jewel not only of the Dance
Collection at the Library and Museum of Performing Arts, but also
of the library as a whole, where Cia Fornaroli Collection was engraved
on the marble columns bearing names of major gifts at the Fifth
Avenue entrance of the main building. In 1957 the library chose
Marian Eames, who had been on the staff of the Museum of Modern
Art and worked for a time as co-editor of Dance Index with
Lincoln Kirstein, as the editor of a booklet, When All the World
Was Dancing: Rare and Curious Books from the Cia Fornaroli Collection,
in which some of the most precious volumes were described and commented
on. It accompanied an exhibition of the most important items donated
so far, which were displayed in the library from August 16 to October
16, the date of Cia’s birth and death, as certainly requested by
Walter himself. The titles included a few eighteenth-and nineteenth-century
books and treatises, not only famous ones (like a translation of
Lucian’s dialogue Della Pantomima, and some of Blasis’ treatises),
but also little-known pieces, like a 1707 reply by German writer
Johann Paschens to the then current vilification dance. And from
an anonymous poem written in 1778 to a Madamigella Cecilia Castellini,
one might guess that dancing on pointe was already practiced.
In addition to several hundred dance books, almanacs,
and yearbooks, mostly rare and covering five centuries, Walter’s
total gift includes a number of treatises, starting with the “Giorgio” manuscript
as well as later treatises, including the fundamental works of
Fabritio Caroso, Pierre Rameau, Giovanni Battista Dufort, Gennaro
Magri, Jean-Georges Noverre, and Carlo Blasis. A very large section
of the Fornaroli Collection comprises ballet and opera libretti
from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. One
still-uncatalogued box of valuable material includes the results
of research Walter conducted over the years in European libraries. In
addition, two manuscript ballet librettos, L’Amazzone:balletto,
by an unknown choreographer (ca.1725), consisting of twelve pages
of choreographic diagrams and music, and Antonio Evangelista’s
eight-page Balletto per la S.A.R. il Principe di Galles composto
da Bartolo Ganasetti (1729), both in Feuillet notation, are
still uncatalogued.
The passionate interest Walter long nourished in Angiolini
and his family accounts for the very large quantity of material
related directly and indirectly to him. Walter searched widely
for any documents that could help to portray the turbulent life
and career as a choreographer of Angiolini, whose ideas and theatrical
achievements, along with Noverre’s, were instrumental to the reformation
of eighteenth-century ballet. He bought books, librettos, theatrical
posters, and prints, but from his youth he also copied documents
in libraries anywhere he went. Part of what he found (including
autograph material by the choreographer and his wife) fills four
boxes of items still uncatalogued; it is not necessary to say that
Walter’s biography of Angiolini needs to be edited by a scholar
and published. Also worth mentioning are 126 still uncatalogued
holograph letters and manuscripts from 1738 to 1798, mostly written
by singers, dancers, and theatre people of Turin to Baron di Carpené,
who was Ispettore del Teatro Regio, in Turin. Included are eighty-five
signed letters, eighteen letters unsigned or signed by otherwise
unknown writers, and twenty-three miscellaneous documents. These
manuscripts supply unique, unpublished information on dance and
theatre in Turin in the eighteenth century.
Throughout his life Walter had been working on a sort
of register of the Italian dancers and choreographers, picking
up data about their life and career. In that sense an eloquent
picture of him as a collector is given by his twenty-six drawers
of research files, which the library has maintained as he used
them. Partly encyclopedic, partly bibliographic, they cover ballet
history from its beginnings to the early 1960s and they present,
of course, a problem for public consultation. Folders bring together
original letters, current articles from journals or newspapers,
and rare librettos, whatever he found connected with a certain
object. A method of preserving his research and at the same time
making these documents available to scholars has yet to be found.
Iconography is a strong point of the Fornaroli Collection. The
more than one thousand prints and drawings include around 150 set
designs by the famous Alessandro Sanquirico for ballets by Giovanni
Galzerani, Francesco Clerico, Salvatore Viganò, and Salvatore Taglioni. The
seventeenth century is represented by etchings by Jean Callot and
Stefano Della Bella and engravings by Jean Lepautre.
Salvatore Taglioni’s career is another focus of the
collection; as the title of a modern study runs, this choreographer
was a kind of “King of Naples” from 1806 to 1868. There are a
number of manuscript scenarios of his ballets and also cast lists,
production notes, and drawings, together with poems, private correspondence
and printed scenarios. Material documenting the career of Salvatore
Viganò constitutes another formidable part of the collection. Also
represented are choreographers like Filippo Taglioni, Pasquale
Borri, Antonio Cortesi, Luigi Danesi, Antonio Casati, Cesari Coppini,
and also Luigi Manzotti, of whom a number of holograph letters,
photographs, description of his dances, and clippings life still
uncatalogued.
In the nineteenth century Italian choreography and
style of dancing were probably more influential than ever. The
Fornaroli collection gives ample evidence of the role played by
Italian ballet masters and dancers in the Romantic ballet and later
on in the shaping of the new style which, introduced in the West
by Diaghilev, would take the world audience by storm. Apart from
ballet librettos, a large number of letters and manuscripts are
included in connection with the ballerinas Maria Taglioni and Fanny
Cerrito. These precious lots include satires, articles, poems,
contracts, clippings, excerpts from programs, and much that helps
to draw a vivid picture of the theatrical life of the time. And
the collection of 128 lithographs relating to Romantic ballerinas
that Walter donated in 1961 had to be mentioned; most of them are
very rare, one of the most precious being an Italian lithograph
of Taglioni by Focosi. A great many letters, manuscripts, and
typescripts refer to some of the Italian ballerinas who reached
the apex of their fame in Russia by the end of the nineteenth century,
like Caterina Beretta, Maria Giuri, and Carlotta Brianza. But
by far the largest number of dance items dating to this period
refer to Enrico Cecchetti, the dancer and teacher long active in
Russia and then in Europe with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, including
letters, cards, programs, photographs, and newspaper and magazine
clippings. Of special importance are a still uncatalogued volume
of ballet exercises handwritten by Cecchetti as well as the variations
and music for class he copied and used while in Warsaw.
Of special interest for the history of ballet in the
United States are a number of items related to the three dancers
who came out of the school of Teatro alla Scala of Milan in the
late 1850s and early 1860s and then made their careers in America—Rita
Sangalli, Giuseppina Morlacchi, and Maria Bonfanti—as well as Rosina
Galli, who danced and choreographed at the Metropolitan Opera in
the early twentieth century for more than twenty years and then
taught in New York.
In the fall of 1984 a large exhibition documenting
the Italian contribution to dance and ballet, featuring the work
of Salvatore Viganò, opened at New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts. As Il coreografo perduto (The Lost Choreographer),
it was the first loan exhibition undertaken by the Dance Collection,
appearing at the Teatro Municipale “Romolo Valli” of Reggio Emilia,
Italy, from June 22 to July 15, 1985. A few years later, in 1992,
a small exhibition at the Dance Collection would pay a first tribute
to Walter’s gift: with the title A New World Look at Old World
Dance: The Cia Fornaroli Collection, it featured fifty-one
items, mainly prints and photographs.
To turn to music, in 1957 the Fornaroli Collection
already included 119 bound scores and 716 pieces of unbound music,
the latter constituting almost a history of Italian dance. The
bound volumes are ballet scores, mostly dating from the nineteenth
century. The loose music includes solo dances, intermezzi, ballet
excerpts from operas, original manuscript scores, lesser-known
works of great composers, modern editions of dances taken from
Renaissance sources, holograph scores of dances created for specific
ballerinas, folk dances, and much more. Subsequent donations by
Walter and his son may have increased the musical section. Among
the most interesting items in the initial gift are the orchestral
score for a waltz, “La Bella,” danced by Virginia Zucchi, the “divine” nineteenth-century
ballerina about who Ivor Guest wrote one of his best books, and
a “Taglioni Walzer” written by Johann Strauss for Maria Taglioni
and bearing a print of the dancer on its cover. The Zucchi item
in particular has been exhibited many times, while well over twenty
exhibitions mounted by the Dance Division of the New York Public
Library for the Performing Arts have drawn heavily from the Fornaroli
archive.
With the exception of a number of outstanding items
related to the Ballets Russes (including many original programs,
a gouache by Natalia Goncharova for Firebird and a watercolor
by her for Les Noces), the early twentieth century appears
mostly in material related to La Scala and its famous school, founded
in 1813, and to Cia Fornaroli. If La Scala is represented by many
ballet programs, hand-drawn floor patterns in the style used by
Luigi Manzotti, photographs, and much printed material, Cia’s life
and career are understandably given a place of honor with several
hundred photographs, nine large charcoal portraits and eight ink
sketches by the Italian painter Anselmo Bucci (1887-1955), statuettes
of her by the well-known ceramist Francesco Nonni of Faenza (1885-1976), and depictions of her by other artists
as well as a few set and costume designs for ballets she danced
and choreographed in the early 1930s. Dozens of letters exchanged
by Cia and Walter from 1919 up to the 1930s, which remain, in their
son’s hands, allow researchers to follow step by step the fascinating
story of a partnership and the making of one of the most impressive
dance collections of the twentieth century, whose highlights are
to be shown at an exhibition scheduled for 2006 at The New York
Public Library.
The depth and breadth of Walter Toscanini’s intellect
and achievements as a bibliophile and collector cannot be underestimated. In
both temperament and purpose hew as well suited to the tasks he
undertook. The extraordinary determination, energy, vision, and
insights he brought to each of his efforts were remarkable. In
memory of his beloved wife he has left scholars a legacy on the
history of Italian ballet unmatched in the world, and an equal
achievement in the preservation of his father’s legacy. He shared
Arturo Toscanini’s ethical principles, his passion for life and
for defending human rights against the onslaught of Fascism. Clearly,
Walter was a remarkable human being and, in every sense, a gentleman
and a scholar.
Acknowledgments
My first contacts with Walter Toscanini’s son, Walfredo, date
back to the early 1990s, when I was reconstructing the Italian
ballet history of the 1930s for my biography of the choreographer
Aurel Milloss. On discovering the richness of the Toscanini private
archive and the importance of the Cia Fornaroli Collection at the
New York Public Library, I inevitably became involved in the Toscanini
saga. In 1993 and 1995, thanks to the generosity of my old friends
Sarai Sherman and David Jaffe, I could stay for many weeks in New
York and meet Mr. Toscanini several times. One day he brought
to the apartment where I was staying an old suitcase containing
dozens of letters exchanged between Walter and Cia from 1919 through
the 1930s. It was for me an overwhelming trip into the past. Further
research was made possible by a scholarship from the Italian Consiglio
Nazionale delle Ricerche, which in 1997 allowed me to work for two months in New York
as a visiting fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies
at Columbia University. Several of Walter’s file cabinets and
towering piles of yellowed material and old newspapers were moved
into two offices of the Casa Italiana at Columbia University, where
I could read much of Walter’s notes and correspondence. Maristella
de Panizza Lorch, a staunch enthusiast for Italian culture of any age and field,
and the new director of the Casa Italiana, Richard Brilliant, both generously encouraged my research.
I want to thank Walfredo Toscanini and the maestro’s biographer,
Harvey Sachs, for having been patiently available for years to answer my innumerable
queries. Since 1997 Genevieve Oswald has contributed to my understanding of
a truly unique researcher and donor, whose catalogued and uncatalogued treasures Madeleine Nichols and her staff at the now Jerome Robbins
Dance Division have been ready to display special rarities to me
on more than one occasion. I also want to thank Arthur M. Fierro
for his additional insights and for his precious memories related
to Walter’s work on his father’s legacy; his unfailing loyalty
to Walter has included a painstaking care for this manuscript. Thanks
also to Barbara Sparti for sharing a number of Walter’s letters related to the “Giorgio” manuscript
and to Carlo Marinelli Roscioni, a major Italian scholar in the field of theatrical chronologies
of all eras. Finally my gratitude goes to José Sasportes, who in the late 1980s first aroused my attention to the importance
of Italian dance throughout the centuries. His perspective on dance, so close indeed to Walter Toscanini’s, is shown by the journal
La
Danza Italiana (1984-1990; 1998-99), of which he was the founding
editor, and his generosity as a scholar has always been invaluable.
[z] Walter Toscanini, “Gaspare Angiolini,”
Opera News, April 4, 1955, pp. 8-9. Two years before
he had asked the Milan dance monthly
Il cignoto reprint
a letter written by Metastasio to Angiolini, and accompanied the
text with long and meticulous footnotes. Metastasio’s letter was
identified as belonging to the “Toscanini Fornaroli Archive,” but
Walter’s name did not appear. NB: Notes in this series were originally
printed as footnotes.
[aa] Walter Toscanini, “Notizie e appuntisui maestri di ballo
ebrei in Italia nel ’400,”
Il Vasari, Rivista d’arte e di studi
rinascimentali, Anno 18 (n.s. 4), fasc. 2-3, 1960, pp. 62-71.
Genevieve Oswald had suggested in 1980 that Barbari Sparti edit
the “Giorgio” manuscript, but Sparti decided to publish another
version of the
De Praticainstead and the “Giorgio” manuscript
was finally edited by Andrea Francalanci and published in
Basler Jahrbuch
für historische Musikpraxis, Vol. 14, 1990, pp. 87-179.
[bb] In a burst of irritation he wrote to Oswald on December 2,
1955, “Referring to your draft of your letter to the Libraries
related to the Viganò film, I would suggest that in your letter
and in all other communications you emphasize the fact that this
collection is the CIA FORNAROLI Collection and not the Walter Toscanini
Collection. I notice, also, in the four microfilms of the Tarantella
manuscript [sic], it is quoted as belonging to the Toscanini Collection….I
am a little hurt by the fact that I cannot impress upon you that
it is a CIA FORNAROLI book” (copy. WTA).
[cc] Toscanini’s research was made harder by the fact that the
only copy of Dura’s work known at the time was at the National Library of Naples
and that another edition of the same Tarantella existed, with lithographs
by Dura, French captions by L. Puccinelli, and titled
Souvenir de la tarantella napolitaine, a copy of which was owned by P.J.S. Richardson. He finally
managed to buy a 1841 edition of Tarantella. Ballo Napolitano,
with nineteen uncolored lithographs of dancers, which is amont
the material donated to the library in 1986 by his son Walfredo.
Walter’s very interesting remarks on the Dura manuscript are in
a letter he wrote to Oswald on July 30, 1956 (copy. WTA).
[dd] Edward G. Freehafer officially acknowledged his financial
support in 1961 (letter to Walter Toscanini, June 6, 1961. WTA).
[ee] It would eventually be demolished by the property’s new owners,
despite a verbal understanding at the time of sale to preserve
Toscanini’s home.
[ff] For example, among the items not mentioned in the online
catalogue as Walter’s gifts are Raffaello Barbiera’s many books
on min-nineteenth-century Milan, which include several portraits
of ballerinas; Giuseppe Rovani’s famous historical novel, Cento
anni (One Hundred Years), crowded with intellectuals who belonged
to the Milanese Englightenment and applauded contemporary ballets;
and the twelve volumes of letters written by two outstanding eighteenth-century
intellectuals, the brothers Pietro and Alessandro Verri, filled
with hints about ballets by Angiolini and other contemporary choreographers,
and published between 1911 and 1940. The same applies to books
on the Teatro alla Scala, like Giovanni Aldini’s Memoria sulla
illuminazione a gas dei teatri e progetto di applicarla al Teatro
alla Scala, as well as to a number of volumes by the eighteenth-century
poet and ballet librettist Pietro Metastasio. A very limited check
can be done, thanks to copies of the several list of books and
other items given to the library (WTA).
[gg] A list of 124 boxes of microfilms passed into the ownership
of the Dance Division in 1970. It included many librettos by Angiolini
and Noverre, and many issues of the nineteenth-century L’Incice degli
Spettacoli Teatrali, as well as other important periodicals.
[1]. Stewart, On Longing, p. 152.
[2]. Walter Toscanini, letter to Irma Merolli Tondi, February
10, 1955. Copy, Walter Toscanini Archives (hereafter WTA).
[3]. John Martin, untitled article in The Fifth Annual Capezio
Award, Honoring Genevieve Oswald, March 7, 1956, program
booklet.
[4]. Genevieve Oswald, interview by the author, New York, 1997.
The book in question was Raffaele Carrieri’s La danza in Italia
1500-1900 (Milano: Editoriale Domus, 1955), whose rich iconography
was largely drawn from Toscanini’s collection.
[5]. Ibid.
[6]. Walter Toscanini, letter to Stefano Vittadini, December
17, 1954. Copy, WTA.
[7]. Press release, May 27, 1955. WTA.
[8]. Walter Toscanini, letter to Genevieve Oswald, August 3, 1955.
Copy, WTA.
[9]. Walter Toscanini, letter to Genevieve Oswald, July 30, 1956.
Copy, WTA.
[10]. Walter Toscanini, letter to Bianca Maria Galanti, August
13, 1955 (WTA). Professor in ‘Literature of Popular Traditions’ at
the University of Rome, in 1942 Galanti published a monograph on
the danza della spada, or sword dance.
[11]. Genevieve Oswald, letter to Walter Toscanini, November
23, 1955. WTA.
[12]. Walter Toscanini, letter to Genevieve Oswald, August 3,
1955. WTA.
[13]. Ibid.
[14]. Genevieve Oswald, interviews by author, New York, 1997
and 2004.
[15]. Genevieve Oswald, letter to Walter Toscanini, December
1, 1961. WTA.
[16]. Walter Toscanini, letter to Genevieve Oswald, April 17,
1962. Copy, WTA.
[17]. Genevieve Oswald, interview by author, New York, 1997.
See also Lillian Moore, “The Dance: A Gift to the Library,” New
York Herald Tribune, June 26, 1955. WTA.
