There are dances for Indian Moor women, Arab jugglers, a Chinaman, and a Turk (“his clumsy and ridiculous manners stir a sneering reaction in Civilization”), for American telegraph operators and a spry Englishman. In the “Quadrille of Nations” the prima ballerina enters in a sedan chair carried by four porters and waving the Italian flag. At the end of the ballet the tunnel is blasted and French and Italian “engineers and the workers rush into each other’s arms.” To round things off, Light banishes Darkness (“for you it is the end; for Human Genius, Excelsior”) and at her beckoning the earth opens and “swallows” the dark spirit. A grand apotheosis shows Light and Civilization standing high on a platform in warm embrace. Light holds a torch, Civilization carries the flag, and the Nations below bow to their genius and then rise with a “cheerful waving of flags. Hurrah.”28
Excelsior boasted a cast of more than five hundred, including twelve horses, two cows, and an elephant, and no expense was spared on fantastic scene changes and lighting, especially after La Scala was outfitted for electricity in 1883. Manzotti, however, was no choreographer and the dance sequences—and there were many—consisted largely of routine and interchangeable bravura steps, the details of which were often left to the dancers (who typically took the opportunity to show off their best tricks). The rest depended on vast choreographic drills and maneuvers executed with military discipline by masses of dancers and extras: circles, triangles, diagonals, and converging lines with hundreds of people marching, stepping, or gesturing in perfect unison.29
To achieve these effects, Manzotti depended on throngs of extras and supplementary performers—not least among them groups of brawny working-class men known as tramagnini (after the Florentine family that first organized them into clubs). These were artisans and laborers who took to assembling after work to practice gymnastics, sword fighting, and the use of sidearms. By the 1870s they had formed companies with as many as one hundred men, and they were routinely deployed by theaters to “enrich the ‘action’ element” of ballets—or to lift ballerinas. As for the women, Manzotti drew on dozens of low-grade dancers whose sole job was to move their arms gracefully and in strict time behind the corps de ballet. There were also children, perfectly arrayed. In fact, Excelsior was not really a ballet at all: it was a regimented celebration, more political spectacle than art. One critic called it a “practical application of the ideas of Mazzini” to the theater. And so it was.30
Excelsior was more successful than any Italian ballet ever, before or since. In its first year it received one hundred performances at La Scala alone. The ballet was then staged across the country by armies of Manzotti’s students, who cropped it when necessary to fit smaller stages: Naples (staged by the ballet master himself), Turin, Florence, Trieste, Palermo, Bologna, Genoa, Padua, Rome, Pisa, Leghorn, Brescia, Catania, Ravenna, Lecce. Manzotti became a celebrity. He was awarded the Order of the Crown of Italy in 1881, and Excelsior was featured at the Milanese Exhibitions of 1881 and 1894 and at the Antwerp Exhibition in 1885. Miniature postcards of the ballet even came in packages of Liebig meat-stock cubes, a staple for middle-class families. Most important of all, the libretto was published by Ricordi (in 1886 the publishing house astutely secured the copyright for all of Manzotti’s future productions). Manzotti joined a newly formed Authors’ Society and several scores for the ballet were created by the dancers responsible for staging it (of which three still exist). This was possible because so much of the ballet consisted of formal patterns: the score explained in diagrams and text exactly how dancers should be moved around the stage—one observer likened their complicated diagrams to the “tables of General Mieroslawski’s war game”*—and although they were hardly a formal notation, they proved an invaluable memory aid.31
Thus—like Italian opera, or today’s Broadway hits—Excelsior was sold and staged in music halls and theaters across the globe: in South America, the United States (where advertisements proudly noted the “Novel Electrical Effects by the Edison Electric Light Company”), Berlin, Madrid, Paris (where it ran for three hundred performances, not at the Paris Opera but at the Eden Theater, purpose-built for the occasion), St. Petersburg, and Vienna. Modifications were made to flatter local tastes: in the Ballet of the Nations, for example, Civilization carried the flag of the host country, and in Vienna the Mont Cenis tunnel was replaced by the Arlberg (built by the Austrians in 1880–84). In Paris, the final scene took place against a backdrop of the Eiffel Tower.32
Enrico Cecchetti was one of several ballet masters to document Excelsior. The ballet’s drill and parade-like choreography comes through in this page of his notation.
Ironically, Manzotti’s tremendous success proved his undoing: Excelsior priced him out of the market. In 1886 he created Amor—meaning “love,” but also Roma spelled backward—which was inspired by Dante and billed as a tribute to the power of love. It began with Adam and Eve and moved through the Greeks and Romans (orgies!) and on to the battles of Barbarossa, Pontida, and Legnano, meant to show, as one obliging critic noted, that the real love, the most important love, was love of patria. Manzotti dedicated the ballet to Milan, “the second Rome,” and Amor premiered on a program that began with Verdi’s Othello. The problem with Amor, however, was that it was even bigger and more unwieldy than Excelsior: with a cast of more than six hundred (including twelve horses, two oxen, and the inevitable elephant) and weighted down with 3,100 costumes, 8,000 props, 1,600 square meters of painted scenery, and 130 flats, it proved impossible to stage anywhere but La Scala. Sport (1897) was more cumbersome still.33
This did not mean that Manzotti’s influence faded. Indeed, Excelsior had a very long life: it was revived at La Scala several times in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1907, when the theater was faced once more with fiscal difficulties and reduced its production of ballets to one a year, management did not take any chances. Looking for a surefire success, they fixed once again on Excelsior, this time under the direction of the ballet master Achille Coppini (Manzotti had died in 1905) and including updated effects such as film footage, airplanes swooping across the backdrop, and sensational lighting (220 lightbulbs stuffed into the costumes of the dancers). In 1913–14 this version of the ballet was used as the basis for a film (set against real footage of Egypt, Mont Cenis, etc.) by Luca Comerio with choreographic direction by Enrico Biancifiori, a longtime Excelsior performer. Accompanied by a sixty-piece orchestra, the film opened in Genoa (and then across Italy) to huge and approving crowds who (as one newspaper reported) “cheered wildly.”34
Nothing, it seemed, could distract Italian audiences from their love affair with Manzotti. When the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes arrived in Naples in 1917 for a series of performances (conducted by Igor Stravinsky), the company met with a cool reception; instead, Excelsior was revived to resounding and repeated success (eighty performances). When the Russian choreographer Mikhail Fokine saw Excelsior he wrote a sharp letter to the press criticizing the ballet’s poor taste. Offended, the director of the La Scala ballet school shot off an indignant reply. “These judgments,” she blustered angrily, “have the same effect on me as would a baby who tried to demolish a colossus of granite with a straw.” Excelsior, moreover, was infinitely versatile: in a 1916 staging the plot was modified to begin with the barbarians and end with the invasion of Belgium; a 1931 staging showed the “progress” of fascism. Indeed, in the interwar years Manzotti was much admired for what one Fascist critic called his “brains, heart, muscle.”35
The truth about Excelsior, of course, was far less flattering. It had all but killed Italian ballet and represented a sad betrayal of the legacies of Viganó and Blasis. It is difficult, however, to know where to assign blame. Manzotti was but a cipher who absorbed and replicated the worst characteristics of an insecure nation. His ballets struck a strong chord with the public, even as they also exhibited an utter lack of critical and artistic judgment. Yet he had been given little to build on: Viganó’s dances were in many ways a direct ancestor, b
ut by the 1880s they were little more than a faded memory. Blasis was a talented teacher, but Manzotti was too young to have benefited from his knowledge and training. Ballet, moreover, had been badly damaged by the chronic ruptures and financial instabilities that plagued Italy’s theatrical and political life. Verdi, who was a vastly more interesting artist than any Italian ballet ever produced, kept pocket scores of Beethoven and Mozart string quartets by his bedside. Manzotti had nothing. He was really just another mime: poorly educated and ill-suited to lead an art, his greatest talent was imitative—he held a mirror to Italy but never thought to question what he saw. Indeed the story of Italian ballet from Viganó to Manzotti is perhaps best summed up by Mazzini’s sad reflection, in the last years of his life, on the political culture as a whole: “I thought to evoke the soul of Italy but all I find before me is its corpse.”36
The history of ballet in Italy raises the question: why did Italy produce so much truly great opera and so little significant ballet? The political and economic conditions, after all, were the same: ballet and opera were performed side by side in the same opera houses, and both passed through the exhilarating and difficult years of the Risorgimento and unification. That opera won a larger share of a shrinking pot was as much effect as cause, and although it is true that opera’s tremendous success eventually had a demoralizing effect on some dancers, no one could claim that Manzotti was lacking in confidence or resources. With Viganó and Blasis, Italian ballet had gotten off to such a promising start; who from the vantage point of 1820—or even 1840—would have predicted ballet’s subsequent sharp decline? Why did opera go on to produce Verdi and Puccini, whereas ballet got Manzotti and then nothing?
One answer is that the Risorgimento and unification were hard on opera, and that Verdi and Puccini were the exceptions rather than the rule; opera fared better than ballet only through the sheer good fortune of exceptional talent. Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini, after all, had belonged to the old world of the Austrian and Bourbon courts and a cultivated urban aristocracy. The Risorgimento and the birth of the Italian state destroyed this world and threw opera (like ballet) into disarray: instability and closures, dwindling resources, box office pressures, and the repertory system (later compounded by competition from radio and cinema) all drove opera to commercialization, popularization, and eventual decline. It is no accident, to take just one example, that after 1848 Verdi spent more and more time in Paris, and when he did finally settle in Italy in 1857, he found working in Italian opera houses increasingly trying. When Un ballo in maschera was censored by Neapolitan authorities in 1858, he withdrew the work (it premiered in Rome instead) and many of his subsequent major productions premiered outside of Italy: La forza del destino (1862) in St. Petersburg, Don Carlos (1867) at the Paris Opera, and Aida (1871) in Cairo (followed by La Scala). Although Italian opera burned brighter and lasted longer than ballet, its overall trajectory was comparable.
However, while true, this still does not account for the gross artistic disparity between the “Verdi exception” and the “Manzotti rule.” The explanation for why ballet failed while opera flourished derives from two simple but related facts: first, that ballet was an inherently weaker and more fragile art form than opera; and second, that the particular character of Italy’s political and cultural life amplified these weaknesses and pushed ballet to its breaking point. Consider, for example, the problem of notation. The fact that ballet had no viable standardized notation was a problem everywhere, but it was more debilitating in Milan or Naples than in Paris or Vienna, where the imperial court acted as a cultural impresario and traditions were centralized and sustained from above. When La Scala, La Fenice, or the San Carlo abruptly closed or altered course, local dance traditions were (as in the case of Blasis) often severed or broken in ways that they rarely were at the Paris Opera. Opera was far less vulnerable to such ruptures: a score, however fluid and changing, could always be retrieved and consulted at a later time. Opera thus had an autonomy and integrity across time that ballet would never possess.
Moreover, ballet took its identity from the aristocracy: without the weight and example of a court or nobility behind it, ballet training could easily lapse into a narrow and meaningless set of gymnastic exercises. Musicians were less vulnerable to such social and political transformations, since their art required mastery of a self-contained and sophisticated musical language that demanded and developed analytic skills that dancers and ballet masters often did not have—or need. The enormous gap in cultivation and intellect between a Verdi and a Manzotti was more than chance or circumstance. Verdi stood in a long line of composers, many of whom he could “talk” to across geographical and historical divides. Manzotti, by contrast, operated in an artistic vacuum, with no broader cultural roots, and his artistic memory (through no fault of his own) was shallow. He had lost sight of the bigger humanist picture Blasis had so carefully cultivated, and so he fell back on pageantry.
The problem seemed to reproduce itself at every turn. Italian opera, for example, was fed from many sources: when German and French musical styles arrived in the second half of the century, they expanded and enriched Verdi’s work—even if some critics at the time worried about the corruption of pure Italian musical forms. Dance had no such good fortune. By Manzotti’s time, ballet across western Europe was a beleaguered art, unsure of its own identity and merging fast with more popular and music hall forms—a situation that owed much, as we have seen, to the collapse of courts and aristocracies in the wake of revolutions and political upheaval. Thus when Italian opera got Wagner, Italian ballet got Paul Taglioni’s fatuous Berlin concoction, Flick et Flock, which played to enthusiastic audiences but did little to stimulate (much less elevate) the art.
There were other problems too. Italian ballet masters stubbornly—and inexplicably—persisted in writing their own scenarios. French Romantic ballet benefited immensely when poets and professionals took this important job away from ballet masters, who had never been noted for their imaginative writing or literary skills. Italian ballet masters, however, paid little heed to this important Parisian development and persisted in producing weighty, witless librettos. Opera composers, however, had always depended on the talents of librettists. Verdi was particularly adamant on the subject and took great pains to seek out (and perfect) a good libretto: “A libretto, just give me a libretto—and the opera is written!” How he must have cringed at Manzotti’s flatulent and pompous scenarios! The same was true of music. Viganó at times worked with more interesting scores (Beethoven), but this was the exception. Most ballet masters stuck instead to old habits and formulas, churned out by able but undistinguished composers.
The result was predictable: lacking the security and raison d’être of a court, and without internal or critical resources of its own to sustain it, Italian ballet became an unthinking and gymnastic art. This made it especially susceptible to fashion and popular taste, not to mention political spectacle. Thus while Verdi and Italian opera more generally managed to absorb and express the Risorgimento in interesting and creative ways, Manzotti and Italian ballet did not. In this, however, Italy was not alone. It is no accident that ballet was weakest in Italy and Germany, both of which came late to political unification, and strongest in France, Austria, and Russia, home to Europe’s most established royal and imperial courts. The German example is particularly illuminating. In the eighteenth century, as we have seen, many German courts imported ballet from Paris, but the art never quite settled or established itself. With the rise of cultural nationalism, Prussian militarism, and a new middle class, ballet lost whatever appeal it once had: too effete and far too French, it had no place in the emerging German nation. German culture, like its Italian counterpart, thus coalesced around music and opera instead. Lacking purpose and a constituency, ballet became marginal or slipped, once again, toward pageantry and acrobatics.
And yet, the postscript is deeply ironic. Manzotti’s “revolution” did in fact precipitate the radical renewal of b
allet: not in Italy, but hundreds of miles away, in Russia. As we have seen, Manzotti spawned a generation of Italian performers—Excelsior performers—many of whom traveled abroad staging his ballets and hawking their impressive virtuosity in the capital cities of Europe. Among them was Enrico Cecchetti (1850–1928), who would later rank as one of the great teachers of classical ballet in the twentieth century. His childhood was a picture book of the Risorgimento: born in Rome to a family of dancers, Cecchetti spent his childhood on the road, affording him a front-row seat to the unfolding drama of Italian unification. When he was nine years old, the family was in Turin, and Enrico watched Garibaldi and King Vittorio Emanuele ride through the city with regiments of Italian troops—a theatrical event he never forgot—and it was Cecchetti’s father who choreographed Marenco’s ballet The Embarkation of Garibaldi at Marsala in Florence in 1860. In Rome, Enrico also marveled at the smartly uniformed French officers and richly clad cardinals and princes. Filled with boyish ambitions, he begged his parents to let him fight with Garibaldi (request refused) and in 1866 created his own solo dance to Garibaldi’s hymn. The theater management refused to program it, but when the audience got wind of its existence they apparently chanted and jeered until Cecchetti triumphantly took the stage.37
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