October
17, 2006 - January 20, 2007
The Vincent Astor Gallery
The New York Public Library
for the Performing Arts
Dorothy
and Lewis B. Cullman Center
500 Years of Italian Dance: Treasures
from the Cia Fornaroli Collection pays tribute to the multifaceted history of Italian
dance and to one of The New York Public Library's richest collections. Assembled
by Walter Toscanini (1898-1971), the Cia Fornaroli Collection
documents the full sweep of Italian dance history from the Renaissance
to the early twentieth century. It underscores his belief that Italy played a seminal role in the genesis and
development of Western theatrical dance and exerted a profound
influence on performance, choreographic, and pedagogical traditions
throughout Europe and in the United States,
on stages both elite and popular.
Fifteenth-century Italy--a patchwork
of kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and states--produced the
earliest known treatises on the art of the dance. Some were manuscripts, others splendid published
volumes recording the dances performed at festive and ceremonial
occasions by the aristocracy. (For
conservation reasons only a few of the collection's very oldest
treasures are exhibited.) Formal, elegant, and refined, these court dances
linked physical control with elevated class status, and laid the
foundation for the danza seria or danse noble, the
heroic style that gave birth to classical ballet and its ideology. Still other treatises evoked the popular traditions
of the commedia dell'arte, with its tumbling and comic antics,
brought to heights of virtuosity by the grotteschi or "grotesque" dancers
of the eighteenth century. In no other country were these styles so highly
developed; in no other country would they commingle so freely and
create so compelling a synthesis.
For much of its history,
ballet existed in tandem with opera, although in combinations that
differed from country to country. In France the
tendency over time was to link the two arts under the umbrella
of a single work. In Italy, on the other hand, they tended
to retain their separate identities, with two self-contained and
unrelated ballets--the first "serious," the other "comic"--being
performed between the acts of an unrelated opera. (In the eighteenth century a third ballet sometimes
followed the last act of an opera.) Italian
audiences loved ballet. They
might talk through the act of an opera, but they gave undivided
attention to the ballet that followed, and if something had to
go to shorten a program, it was always an act of the opera.
The eighteenth century
was the golden age of Italian ballet. It
flourished in the numerous theaters and opera houses that dotted
the pre-unification landscape. (Italy
did not become a single country until 1870.) Dancers--often
in extended families that emerged in the seventeenth century--traveled
all over the peninsula, performing with local troupes in Florence,
Milan, Rome, Venice, Turin, Naples, and other cities, usually during
the Carnival season that began after Christmas and ended in Lent. The existence of multiple centers gave rise
to an exceptionally rich dance culture. La
Scala, founded in 1778, may have been the largest and most influential
of Italian opera houses, but it did not dominate national taste
or lay the foundation for a national repertory until the nineteenth
century. Scores of ballets were produced in other Italian
cities, and individual theaters developed their own artistic signatures.
Influence from abroad,
through foreign visitors as well as Italians who had worked outside
the country, added to the brew. Thus,
the advent of "pantomime" or narrative ballet in the
mid-eighteenth century produced a number of variants, some indigenous
(coupling mimetic action and flamboyant virtuosity), others linked
to developments in France and Austria, including Gasparo Angiolini's danza
parlante ("dance that speaks") and Jean-Georges Noverre's ballet
d'action ("action ballet"). Despite bitter controversy between the two
innovators, which came to a head in the mid-1770s, the twenty years
that followed were a time of wide-ranging experiment and innovation. Ballets became more complex and scenically
elaborate; casts and companies grew. Before
1740 companies of six to eight dancers were the norm. By 1820 major theaters such as La Scala, the
San Carlo in Naples, La Fenice in Venice, and the Teatro Argentina in Rome had 80 to 120 dancers on their payroll. The
turmoil and uncertainties that followed the French Revolution,
coupled with the stultifying artistic policies of the Paris Opéra,
led to an exodus of French dance talent, above all to La Scala. Here
in the early 1800s the "pantomime ballet" reached a zenith
in the poetic humanism of Salvatore Viganň's choreodramas, the
historical sweep of Gaetano Gioia's ballets, and the architectural
splendors of Alessandro Sanquirico's stage sets. The
combination of virtuosity and corporeal expressiveness, sweeping
narrative and grand spectacle associated with La Scala became defining
elements of nineteenth-century Italian ballet.
Although the Romantic
ballet of the 1830s and 1840s is regarded as a preeminently French
phenomenon, its identity--both in terms of origins and embodiment
in performance--is far more complex. Technically
and choreographically it owed a debt to Vienna,
an international crossroads where many Italian pioneers of ballet
Romanticism worked in the 1820s, and where the practice of pointe
reached a remarkably high artistic level. Many
outstanding ballerinas of the first Romantic generation, including
Marie Taglioni, the first Sylphide, Carlotta Grisi, the first Giselle,
and Fanny Cerrito were Italian. Italian choreographers, exemplified by Filippo,
Salvatore, and Paul Taglioni but also including Pasquale Borri,
Antonio Cortesi, Giovanni Casati, Giuseppe Rota, and Domenico Ronzani,
worked all over Europe and even in a few cases reached the New
World. Although
Italian choreographers at home typically preferred historical themes
to otherworldly fantasy and folklore, Italian themes appeared in
many Romantic ballets produced north of the Alps. And, in Italy,
unlike France,
male dancers continued to share the honors on stage with women.
The virtuosity that transformed
nineteenth-century ballet was deeply indebted to another Italian,
Carlo Blasis. Through his
writings, his teaching, and as director of the school affiliated
with La Scala from 1838 to 1850, Blasis transformed the teaching
of ballet technique, systematizing the sequence of exercises and
insisting upon the need for a daily class. The result was a dancer of unprecedented strength
and virtuosity. By the second
half of the nineteenth century, Italian ballerinas, usually trained
at La Scala but also privately by Blasis or by teachers who had
studied with him, were unrivaled in the bravura of their jumps,
turns, and pointework. At once international stars and Victorian fantasy
objects, they reigned over the Paris Opéra and St.
Petersburg's Maryinsky Theater, originating the ballerina
roles in Sylvia, The Sleeping Beauty, and Swan Lake. They starred in productions such as The
Black Crook that toured the United
States for decades and headlined ballets in Europe's
music halls until World War I. The
Metropolitan Opera Ballet and its affiliated school, founded in
1883 and 1909, respectively, remained for decades dominated at
the upper echelons by La Scala artists. Meanwhile,
at La Scala itself, the monumental works of Luigi Manzotti, exemplified
by Excelsior, inaugurated an international vogue for huge
ballet spectacles. By the 1920s, Enrico Cecchetti, a La Scala
star of the 1880s who had danced in Russia and
toured with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, had ushered Italian technique
into the mainstream of twentieth-century ballet pedagogy in Russia, Western Europe, and the United States.
A bookseller by profession,
Walter Toscanini began collecting ballet material in his native
Italy in the 1910s, ultimately building a huge collection encompassing
some of the earliest Italian writings on dance, including one of
the very first Renaissance dance manuals, scores of books, letters,
programs, and libretti, and hundreds of prints, photographs, and
clippings from Italian-language newspapers. The
collection also includes Toscanini's personal research materials,
as well as memorabilia documenting the career of Cia Fornaroli,
the La Scala and Metropolitan Opera ballerina whom he married in
the late 1930s. In 1938
the couple settled in New York,
joining Walter's father, the celebrated conductor Arturo Toscanini,
who had fled fascist Italy and was
directing the NBC Symphony Orchestra. In
1955, as a memorial to his recently deceased wife, Walter presented
the Cia Fornaroli Collection to what is now the Jerome Robbins
Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing
Arts.
This
exhibition was curated by Lynn Garafola, with Patrizia Veroli,
after
a project conceived by José Sasportes and Patrizia Veroli.
The Tarantella led by Amalia Ferrais and Louis Merante in Pasquale Borri's ballet
L'Etoile de Messin
