Blasis, however, did not just teach: he embarked on a searching reevaluation of ballet technique and style. He pored over Leonardo (his model in all things) in an attempt to uncover the precise mechanics of an expressive body. In L’Uomo Fisico, Intellettuale e Morale, an ambitious and far-reaching book written in the 1840s but not published in full until 1857, he expounded a “theory of the center of gravity” and dropped plumb lines (as Leonardo had done) through the body posed in ballet positions and pictured in the nude—even posed statuesquely on a stone base. He charted the weights and balances and contemplated the physics of moving thus and so without compromising balance and line. Above all, he analyzed the relationship between posture and emotion and sketched stick figures with dotted lines showing the gaze and geometry of “stupor,” “enthusiasm,” “meditation.” “We will portray,” he wrote enthusiastically in another work, “ ‘lightness’ using the figure of an upside-down pyramid, and we will then demonstrate that in order to give a body a quick and light air, it is necessary, as far as possible, to diminish its base.”21
Blasis thus turned ballet technique through all possible angles and scrutinized its every joint and working part. He did not imitate; he analyzed. As a result, his dancers acquired an unprecedented level of mastery—they could do anything, and with more freedom and precision than ever before. This mastery did not depend on the clever physical ruses or brute strength of “grotesque” dancing, nor even on the willful distortions of the Vestris school: it was sheer hard-earned skill, what the Ancients called tekhne or art. The point was twofold: first, to oil the physical machine—to make every movement as efficient and coordinated as possible—and second, to pass on (as one student put it) the “intellectual” and classical ideals Blasis associated with his art. A pirouette was not only a matter of skill; it was also a question of truth and beauty. Steps or poses, no matter how impressive or bravura, had to appear soft and gracious, with the rounded arms and symmetrical balance of Canova’s Danzatrici or Winckelmann’s “noble simplicity and calm grandeur.” Blasis even asked his pupils to read. In recognition of his cultivation and the results he inspired, his students were popularly known as the “Pléiade.”22
This, then, was the Italian school. Almost immediately, however, problems surfaced. Virtuosity, so essential to art, was pushed too far and became an end in itself. Dancers took the hard analytic skills Blasis offered but gradually forgot or disregarded their softer humanist justifications. This was not entirely their fault, since the prevailing fashion in the 1830s and ’40s was for ballets packed with acrobatic feats and dazzling displays of technical prowess couched in melodramatic pantomime plots (Théophile Gautier complained: “It is as though the stage were on fire and nobody can put his foot down for longer than a second. This false animation is tiring”). Skills that might have been turned to genuine theatrical effect were thus diverted or reduced to mere bravura displays. Worse still, precisely because of their formidable skills, Blasis’s students could make even the most empty-minded tricks appear convincing: form masquerading as substance. Milanese audiences were not unaware of this drift to false and purely mechanical effects. In the 1850s the theatrical journal Il Trovatore published a caricature of one of Blasis’s prize students, Amini Boschetti: she stands strongly on full pointe executing an astonishing turn—except that a man crouched under the stage boards is turning a crank.23
In this robust artistic environment, the airy and self-consciously spiritual French Romantic ballet did not stand a chance. As we have seen, Marie Taglioni and others had international careers and achieved unprecedented celebrity status across Europe, America, and Russia—but not in Italy. When Taglioni arrived in Milan in 1841 to perform La Sylphide, the response was tepid and she left after three performances. Fanny Elssler, with her earthy, sensual style, might have had more success, but she was Austrian and when she appeared at La Scala in 1848 she was booed from the stage and forced to curtail her contract. Should we be surprised? The fierce idealism of the Risorgimento, the colorful theatrical flair of its leaders, and the palpable feeling that Italy was in the midst of a gripping national drama—none of this had anything to do with the melancholy nostalgia of wispy Parisian sylphides. Not to be outdone, Italian ballet masters made their own versions of La Sylphide and Giselle that were more voluptuous, less spiritual, and replete with virtuosic dancing. Thus the French cult of the ethereal ballerina gained little currency in Italy; conversely, male dancers were spared the scorn they experienced in Paris. If anything, Italian dancers of both sexes pushed ever further into flamboyant virtuosity.
Caricature showing the bravura technique of Italian ballerinas, whose astonishing tricks could appear mechanical and machine-like. (6.1)
In 1850 Blasis left La Scala. In addition to teaching, he had been responsible for staging ballets, and his shortcomings as a choreographer combined with the destabilizing revolutionary events of 1848 prompted the authorities to replace him. They chose the less talented but more predicable bravura dancer Augusto Hus. The result was an abrupt end to Blasis’s efforts to mold Italian dance to a neoclassical style: Hus’s gymnastic teaching methods, characterized by one dancer as “severe and rigid,” reflected his own athleticism and the prevailing tastes. Blasis went abroad where, with some success, he established or reorganized ballet schools attached to the state theaters of Lisbon, Warsaw, and Moscow. Everywhere he continued to uphold the standard of ballet classicism against a rising tide of more popular music hall genres—and to fight against the runaway virtuosity he had inadvertently done so much to inspire. In 1864 he returned to Italy and dedicated himself to writing until his death in 1878.24
Blasis’s influence in Italy, like Viganó’s, was thus short-lived. He trained several generations of dancers and they in turn would train others, but without his presence (and even at times with it) the humanist and classical vision he espoused was difficult to hold on to. Looking back we can see that between them Viganó and Blasis, each in his own way, tried to set the terms for a new Italian classicism that would be both cultivated and innovative. They represented the path Italian ballet might have taken, but only briefly did.
The revolutions of 1848 and the wars of Italian unification ruined Italian ballet. The extent and duration of the upheavals had a dramatic impact on theatrical life. In 1848 uprisings and revolution spread across Italy: in Milan there were insurrections and five days of violent street fighting against the Austrians; the neighboring independent kingdom of Piedmont tried (and failed) to take Lombardy; in Venice, the Civic Guard turned against the armed Austrian forces and the Republic was restored for a short time. The Bourbons fled Naples and the Sicilians declared their independence. In Rome the Pope was forced out; when the Austrians, French, Spanish, and Neapolitans joined forces to restore him, the revolutionary leader Giuseppe Mazzini—who saw Italian unification as a religious project sanctioned by God—led a heroic resistance to their siege. In the end, however, these wars and revolutions buckled under the strain of long-standing rivalries and conflicting local ambitions, allowing the old powers to restore their authority with relative ease. It was an exhausting and sobering reminder of the difficulties facing those who hoped to see Italy unified.
When unification was finally achieved in 1859–70, even the most romantic patriots were painfully aware that it came at the price of destructive civil wars and national humiliation. Piedmont succeeded in conquering neighboring Lombardy and expelling the Austrians in 1859—but only with French military backing. In a secret deal with the French emperor Louis Napoleon, the Piedmontese secured French help in return for the annexation to France of Savoy and Nice. Central and southern Italy joined the new Kingdom of Italy the following year, after the charismatic republican adventurer Giuseppe Garibaldi landed in Sicily with his thousand “red shirts.” But to the intense disappointment of the patriots of the Risorgimento, this was no national uprising. Garibaldi, who had planned to march up the peninsula and unite Italy “from below,” was forced instead to concede authority
to the newly expanded Kingdom of Piedmont to the north—a move that unleashed a grisly five-year civil war across the south. In effect, under the guise of unification, Italy was annexed by the northern kingdom—something to which the rebellious south would remain bitterly irreconcilable.
Meanwhile, in the north itself, Venice and its hinterland were only won from the Austrians in 1866 because the Austrians were themselves defeated by the Prussians. In the international settlement that followed, Venice was a pawn in the German chancellor Bismarck’s hands: in order to spare the Austrians the humiliation of losing even more territory to their former Italian subordinates—and to assuage French anxieties at the military triumphs of the Prussians—he handed Venice to Louis Napoleon, who (for his own reasons) passed it on to the new Italian state. Four years later, when France itself fell victim to the seemingly invincible Prussian armies, the French garrison in Rome—dispatched there twenty years earlier to protect the Pope—was withdrawn. The Italians marched into the unguarded city and duly joined it to Italy, leaving only Vatican City itself in the hands of the beleaguered pontiff.
The Italians, then, did not gain Italy: rather, piece by piece, Austria and France lost it. Indeed, by any traditional criteria the country was hardly a country at all: most Italians spoke mutually incomprehensible regional dialects and were divided by fierce local rivalries, entrenched interests, and vast disparities of culture and wealth. Roads connecting the country’s cities and regions were poorly maintained (and in the south almost nonexistent) and did little to encourage Italians to know each other; few ventured far from their native environs. Weights, measures, coinage, and the forms of government and law, moreover, varied significantly, and the newly established national government, facing the daunting task of bringing these disparities into some kind of synchrony, was itself famously unstable: thirty-three cabinets in the thirty-five years between 1861 and 1896. The formerly Piedmontese and now Italian king, Vittorio Emanuele II, was woefully unsuited to unite the country around his person or the symbols of state: formal and martial, he rarely wore civilian dress and surrounded himself with crass and unappealingly militaristic army elites. His successor, Umberto, who came to the throne in 1878, was if anything worse: his taste for foxhunting and formal etiquette and his rigid and ostentatiously aristocratic queen hardly made him a popular national figure.
Thus even after unification Italy had yet to be made. Ambitious projects to connect the new country to the rest of Europe were launched or completed: the Mont Cenis tunnel was blasted through the Alps to link French and Italian rail lines, a new road and rail line across the St. Gotthard pass joined Italy to central Europe, and the Simplon tunnel opened a direct link to Switzerland. Although these projects were largely financed and supervised by foreign (especially French and Austrian) companies, they signaled Italy’s intense desire to modernize and catch up to the stronger and wealthier European nations.
Behind the headlong modernization, however, lay a profound sense of insecurity and cultural despair. In spite of impressive gains, Italy—especially the south—was still deeply backward: racked by chronic poverty and disease (cholera, malaria, malnutrition), lacking in natural resources, and crippled by fiscal difficulties and relative military weakness. Indeed the country had no sooner unified than many began to fret—loudly—about its international stature and reputation: they desperately wanted Italy (“the least of the great powers” as the historian A. J. P. Taylor called it) to be recognized as a major European player. Within a generation the optimism and idealism of the Risorgimento thus shaded into pessimism and ressentiment. As the century wound to an end, politics and culture took on an increasingly troubling and belligerent tone. Reckless colonial projects and warlike posturing found their equivalent in the disturbing rhetoric of writers such as Gabriele d’Annunzio and in a new literary realism that sought to expose—and in some quarters to glorify—the violence and superstition endemic to Italian life.
What did all of this mean for ballet? First, chronic instability. La Scala closed abruptly (ostensibly for restoration) between 1848 and 1851; La Fenice shut its doors for seven years between 1859 and 1866, and its ballet school closed briefly in 1848 and permanently in 1862. At the San Carlo in Naples the dancers were not paid in 1848 and went on strike. Their ballet master, Salvatore Taglioni, was accidentally shot during the uprisings, and although he regained his health, the ballet did not: the Neapolitan court, which had funded ballet, retreated and after 1861 was no more—poor Taglioni died impoverished and forgotten. In 1868 the impecunious Italian parliament cut off funding for all opera houses; in addition, they imposed a 10 percent tax on receipts. Theaters across the country were thus thrown back on municipalities for support. This was no hardship in the case of wealthy Milan, which profited richly in the years following unification from urbanization and the rise of a well-to-do commercial class, but for others it was a debilitating setback.
Ballets, even in Milan, were the first to go. The story is in the numbers: the Carnival-Lent season at La Scala before 1848 typically featured an average of six ballets, but after 1848 this dropped to three or even two. Worse, ballets were cut from the customary two per three-act opera to a single ballet tacked on at the end; audiences often did not stay—or stay awake—and the ballets played to near-empty houses. The situation was only made worse as French grand opera, and eventually Wagner, entered the Italian repertory and as Italian operas themselves expanded to new dimensions. Ballets were pushed into later and later time slots, and those operas that did include ballets subsumed them into the opera in the French manner. More and more, Italian audiences (not to mention composers) found ballets an unnecessary distraction, no longer a welcome interlude.
The economics of opera and ballet changed too. Beginning in the 1840s but picking up pace in the 1860s, opera houses moved to a new “repertory” system. Rather than depending largely on premieres, theaters started also to program revivals of old favorites, from Rossini to Verdi. This had the distinct advantage of reliability: Rossini always sold well, and the proceeds considerably offset the financial and artistic risks of a new work. In a related development, opera was no longer controlled by impresarios; publishing houses—Ricordi in particular—took the reins instead. They purchased the rights to works directly from artists and then sold them to theaters, often with carefully worded stipulations from the composer regulating local production. Moreover, as the cult of the star singer took hold, Italian opera spread across a widening circuit of theaters, from Italy and Europe to the growing Italian diaspora in South America. Such a repertory system, however, depended on the existence of a written score, and ballet masters had none. As opera became big business, ballet looked more and more like an anachronism.
The choreographer Luigi Manzotti (1835–1905) changed all of this—or so it at first seemed. Hailed at the time as the savior of Italian ballet, Manzotti did not so much fix ballet’s problems as exploit them; he was a sign of just how badly things could go wrong. His life was part of his legend, rehearsed over and again in the lavish praise that graced his extraordinarily successful career. Born in Milan in 1835 to a fruit and vegetable seller, he was drawn to theater and made his way to La Scala, where he was trained chiefly in mime, although he was also an accomplished singer. His idols were not dancers but the actors Tommaso Salvini and Ernesto Rossi; of Rossi, Henry James once quipped: “He is both very bad and very fine; bad where anything like taste and discretion is required, but ‘all there,’ and much more than there, in violent passion.” The same could have been said of Manzotti, who made up for his limited dance skills with a keen instinct for melodrama and political spectacle. His first ballet set the tone: The Death of Masaniello (1858) drew on the story of a heroic Neapolitan fisherman who led a rebellion against Spanish rule. It was a thinly veiled Risorgimento theme with a distinguished revolutionary past: Auber’s La Muette de Portici (1828) on the same theme had famously sparked uprisings in Belgium in 1830.25
Manzotti made his name with Pietro Micca, fi
rst staged in Rome in 1871 and mounted at La Scala in 1875. The ballet told the story of a soldier and Italian folk hero who valiantly defended Turin against a French siege in the early eighteenth century; to stop the enemy advance he sacrificed his own life by exploding dynamite in the tunnel where he was stationed. The ballet had an affecting scene of Micca (performed by Manzotti himself) parting from his wife, but the real attraction came at the end, when the tunnel exploded onstage. The theme and special effects were convincing enough that when the ballet was first performed in Rome the police had to be called in.
Pietro Micca, however, was nothing compared to the extravaganza of Excelsior (1881). First performed at La Scala after the opera Ruy Blas, Excelsior had music by the composer Romualdo Marenco (1841–1907), who made a career of capturing the swelling emotion of the Risorgimento in sound: his first composition was for the ballet The Embarkation of Garibaldi in Marsala, and he soon became a partner to Manzotti, composing scores for Pietro Micca and all of his subsequent major productions. Excelsior, a “historical, allegorical, fantastical, choreographic action,” was brash and extravagant—a “phantasmagoric” or (as an American critic later put it) “monster” spectacle. It told the story, if it can be called that, of what Manzotti himself described as “the titanic struggle sustained by Progress against Regression.”26
The ballet begins with the sixteenth-century Spanish Inquisition (a symbol for Spanish rule over the oppressed Italian people) and ends with the near-contemporary blasting of the Mont Cenis tunnel linking Italy to France. The main characters are Light and Darkness (the lead mime roles) and Civilization (danced by the prima ballerina), who are joined by Invention, Harmony, Fame, Strength, Glory, Science, and Industry, among others. Between the Inquisition and Mont Cenis, the ballet depicts (as the 1886 scenario put it) “the gigantic works of our century,” ranging from the invention of the first steamboat to the discovery of the telegraph and electricity. Light, for example, is shown blessing an inventor who, “charged with a superhuman power,” touches two wires to form the first battery. Darkness attempts to destroy it, but Light protects the brave scientist, who is filled with the “dominating principle of Will is power.” One scene even shows the building of the Suez Canal, including a sandstorm and mounted bandits who charge across the stage with rifles and pistols firing—a scene which may have been inspired in part by the success of the sumptuous seven-act Egyptian-styled ballet Le figlie di Chèope (1871) and that of Verdi’s Aida, which opened at La Scala in 1872.27
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