| | The illustrious pat of the Teatro alla Scala Ballet Company 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.
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 experimented his personal interpretation of ballet d’action, which he called choreodrama. This had an enormous influence on the creators of dance at the time, on such favorite star dancers as the danseur noble Carlo Blasis, whose name is forever linked to the glories of the Scala school founded in 1813.
A great teacher and theorist of romantic ballet, Carlo 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 favors 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 Tchaikovsky / 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, among the greatest teachers in the history of theatrical dance of all time, Cecchetti projected the Italian teaching of academic technique into the world. | |
