Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  Yet there were also ways in which Italian ballet was insecure and uncertain, lacking the focus and prestige of the French tradition. It was not concentrated in a capital city or court but instead was dispersed across many smaller and often competing states. This had its advantages: dancers were mobile and independent, and the routine commingling of styles and tastes gave Italian dance a distinctive resilience and creativity. But it also made it hard to build or sustain a tradition or school. Even more handicapping was the constant outflow of talent and energy from Venice, Milan, Rome, and Naples to wealthier and more powerful courts and theaters in Vienna, Berlin, Stuttgart, Paris, London, and St. Petersburg. Opera and ballet in Italian cities and states were supported not by kings but instead by civic-minded noblemen, foreign authorities, and enterprising impresarios who sought to turn a profit—usually by harnessing gambling to art. At least into the 1860s, moreover, like the country itself, “Italian ballet” had no set bounds and was marked by sharply contrasting local traditions. In Turin, for example (where the elite spoke French well into the nineteenth century), ballet was distinctly Parisian; Naples under the Spanish Bourbons also preferred French ballet, but theirs was much more heavily accented by Italian “grotesque” dancing. In Rome, where ecclesiastical authority was especially strong, ballets were performed only by men en travesti; women were forbidden to take the stage until 1797. Venice and Milan, by contrast, were under Austrian rule and their artists felt the constant pull of that imperial court.

  It did not help that Italian dancing was widely considered—even by its own practitioners—to be lower than the French noble style. Theaters ranked French (or French-trained) seria dancers above Italian grotteschi performers, and foreigners more accustomed to the French style often found Italian dancers “violent,” “exaggerated,” and utterly lacking in what Magri called the “splendid body” and “hidden control” of dancers from the Paris Opera. “It is surprising,” wrote the English writer John Moore in 1777, “that a people of such taste and sensibility as the Italians, should prefer a parcel of athletic jumpers to elegant dancers.”3

  The extent of the prejudice was made especially clear in 1779 when Gennaro Magri published in Naples his Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Dancing. As the book went to print, Magri was attacked by an unknown dancer, Francesco Sgai, in a vicious eighty-page essay. Sgai was a self-appointed advocate of French ballet, but he impugned Magri on distinctly Italian grounds: language. Claiming Florentine descent, he insisted that Magri’s use of the Italian language was full of gaffes and a rude affront to “real” Tuscan, which was regarded by a new generation of self-consciously Italian writers as high literary Italian as opposed to the local dialects that most people spoke. He buttressed his claims with a pompous dissertation on the antique and classical origins of dance. Magri, he insinuated, was not a dancer but merely a low-life mountebank with no claim to represent Italian civilization or art: grotteschi-style dancing was little more than a provincial vernacular.4

  Magri was defiant: “That the dance might be invented by the Corybantes in Phrygia, or by the oldest Ruler of Egypt is as indifferent to me as it will be to all the dancers in the world.… Plautus, Terence, Phaedrus, Cicero and Martial have about as much to do with dancing as crabs have with the moon.” Other ballet masters, however, were less sure. Indeed, by the late eighteenth century, the idea that Italian dancers were lesser and forever “elsewhere” hawking their wares began to rankle in ways that it hadn’t before. In the 1770s the ballet master Gasparo Angiolini, who had earlier disparaged the dancing of grotteschi performers as the lowest of all genres, made a complete and self-conscious U-turn: he now aspired, he said, to elevate Italian dancing to a high balletic art, la danza parlante. Circumstances and the limits of his own talent prevented him from making much headway, but his change of heart marked the beginning of a long reversal in which several important ballet masters would turn their talents and energies to making ballet, once and for all, Italian.5

  Among the first was Salvatore Viganó (1769–1821). Viganó is a mythic figure in the history of ballet: the lavish and enormously successful productions he staged at Milan’s La Scala in the years 1811–21 created a wave of interest and enthusiasm in literary and artistic circles and gave Italian ballet newfound prestige abroad. Stendhal, who had fought with Napoleon’s army in northern Italy and later lived in Milan for several years, energetically acclaimed Viganó’s “pure genius,” which he set right alongside that of Rossini, whose operas were performed at La Scala in these same years. For Stendhal, Viganó and Rossini represented a welcome departure from the “aridity” and “tinselly glitter” of Parisian opera and ballet—and from the cynical politics of the French Restoration. But Milanese audiences were no less enthralled, and Viganó’s life and art quickly acquired the aura of legend. With Viganó, Italian ballet seemed finally about to come into its own and take its rightful place at the forefront of European dance. His unexpected death from a heart attack in 1821 inspired effusive eulogies and an outpouring of genuine appreciation: all of Milan turned out for his funeral. They mourned the artist, but also the fragility of what he had created. Stendhal was not alone in lamenting that “he carried his secret forever with him to the grave.”6

  Viganó’s life and career began conventionally enough: he was born in Naples to a clan of dancers. His father, Onorato Viganó, was a grottesco dancer who had begun his own career performing female roles en travesti in Roman theaters; he then graduated to Vienna, where he worked with Angiolini from 1759 to 1765—just when Angiolini was staging his “reform” operas with Gluck and Calzabigi—and married the sister of the composer Luigi Boccherini, herself an accomplished dancer. Onorato had a commanding personality and independent mind: when Empress Maria Theresa offered to send him to Paris to complete his studies with the best French masters, he steadfastly refused, preferring instead to rely on “the fruits of his early training in his homeland.” He worked instead in Rome, Naples, and Venice and staged dozens of ballets, including dances for the inaugural 1792 performance at Venice’s new opera house, La Fenice, where he also acted briefly as impresario.7

  Following in his father’s path, Salvatore too began his career dancing female roles in Rome. But the continuities stopped there: Salvatore was given a solid musical education (in part by his uncle Boccherini) and was an active composer all his life; he read widely and would draw on a broad range of sources for his ballets, from Greek and Roman mythology to Shakespeare, Schiller, and the Italian dramatist Vittorio Alfieri. He was trained to dance, but not in the manner of the grotteschi: he was a “serious” dancer in the French style. In 1788–89 he was summoned to Madrid to perform at the coronation of Charles IV, where he met the French ballet master (and student of Noverre) Jean Dauberval and married the glamorous Spanish dancer Maria Medina. The couple wanted to go to Paris, but when the French Revolution erupted they opted instead to study and perform in Bordeaux and London with Dauberval. In 1790, however, Viganó returned to Venice to help his father (who had fallen ill) and for the next two years he and his wife performed there together while he staged his first ballets.

  Viganó’s dances, however, turned out to be more than the usual French fare. He and his wife shocked the Venetian nobility by performing languid Grecian-style dances in scanty costumes, she in a translucent white tunic and he in close-fitted hose. They wore sandals or flat slippers, and sketches of their dancing show them in statuesque poses, with limbs folded one over another and elegantly draped arms. Their dances were sexy, stylish, and luxuriant but also classical—and markedly different from the quaint shepherdesses and peasant girls typical of late eighteenth-century French ballet. The Venetian authorities, however, were unimpressed: Onorato’s contract the following year expressly stipulated that all ballets must be “serious in character” and never “low or indecent,” and in 1794 the Council of Ten pointedly legislated against ballets with “costumes of immodest styles and equivocal and scandalous colors.”8

  Viganó, however, wa
s serious. No doubt he understood (and capitalized) on his wife’s beauty, but there was more to his dances than sex. Indeed, Medina’s image bore a striking resemblance to that of Emma Hamilton, whose performances in the salons of Naples were the talk of the European elite in the late 1780s and 1790s and perfectly illustrated the ideals and look Viganó was after. Emma (formerly Amy Lyon, alias Emily Hart) was a voluptuous blacksmith’s daughter and failed actress before she met Sir William Hamilton, diplomat, collector of antiquities, and British envoy to the Neapolitan court from 1764 to 1800. Hamilton was deeply involved in the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii (his impressive collection of antiquities eventually ended up in the British Museum), the dramatic rediscovery of which in the early eighteenth century galvanized artists and writers across Europe, making Naples a mandatory stop for the educated classes on their Grand Tours of Italy.

  It was not just the quantity and detail of the art and artifacts found in the ruins of these ancient cities that filled the European mind: it was the drama they evoked. Herculaneum and Pompeii had been unexpectedly engulfed by ash and lava from the volcanic explosion at nearby Vesuvius in A.D. 79 and instantaneously petrified: not just as they were, but as they were at a particular moment. With the publication (in several languages) of Le antichità di Ercolano esposte (1757–1792), including lavish engravings of many artifacts, antiquity seemed to spring to life with newfound immediacy: theaters, temples, barracks, houses; kitchenware, lamps, coins, baths; statues, mosaics, and wall paintings all emerged in astonishing color and detail. It felt (as it does still today) that one could actually touch the ancient world and glimpse its people.

  In Lord Hamilton’s salon, as one observer put it, Emma “single-handedly created a living gallery of statues and paintings.” Draped in Grecian shawls, hair down, and standing in a life-size box with a gold frame and black backdrop similar to those in Pompeian wall paintings, she “performed” the artifacts William devoted his life to collecting. Audiences played at matching her poses to those found at Herculaneum or Pompeii (“Bravo la Medea!”) and Emma studied and copied these images as accurately as possible: here she assumed a profile taken from Sicilian coinage, there she posed as the famous “Herculaneum dancers” (no matter that they were from Pompeii and probably not in fact dancers) that came to be reproduced on dinnerware, furniture, and the walls of country homes, especially in England. Emma took care not to speak or to break the flow of her performance, as her lower-class accent and manners were notoriously gauche. Like Viganó’s dances, her silent performances were fanciful theatrical evocations of a lost ancient world. Horace Walpole called her “Sir William Hamilton’s Pantomime mistress.”9

  We can also find traces of what the Viganós’ dancing must have looked like in the sculptures and drawings of the neoclassical artist Antonio Canova (1757–1822). Canova lived and worked in Rome, went to the theater often, and had a deep sympathy for dance—not its tricks or poses but a more free-flowing kind of movement in the classicizing spirit that characterized his own art: Venus and the Graces Dancing in the Presence of Mars (which he created for his own home) and The Graces Dancing to the Music of Cupid, depicting women in white gossamer tunics dancing against a black background, à la Pompeii. His series entitled Danzatrici (Dancers, painted in 1798–99) captures the spontaneity and flow so apparent in images and accounts of Medina’s dancing: swirling feminine figures caught in midstep, but also carefully poised and symmetrical in composition.

  The Viganós traveled: Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Padua, Venice, Milan. Salvatore mounted dozens of ballets, many in the French style, and continued to perform with his wife. In Vienna, Medina’s Grecian-style dancing inspired coiffures, shoes, music, and social dances “à la Viganó”—but critics there also complained that Salvatore’s ballets were too packed with French dances. It was not until Viganó settled in Milan in 1811 that the full force of his talent and ambition emerged. His life changed: he and Medina separated—her frequent infidelities and the childhood deaths of all but one of their children finally broke their marriage. And in an unlikely turn, Salvatore inherited a comfortable sum of money, which afforded him newfound artistic freedom. His La Scala ballets were meticulously planned and rehearsed (he was known to hold a large cast and full orchestra for hours while he worked out an idea) and their grandeur and layers of carefully wrought detail owe much to the sheer time and attention he lavished on them.

  When he arrived in Milan, the city was in transition. In 1796 Napoleon had defeated the Austrians and occupied Lombardy, putting an end to nearly a century of rule from Vienna. What followed, however, was a period of dizzying political instability in which the French and the Austrians vied with each other and the local population for control of the city and region. By 1799 the Austrians were back and had reasserted their authority in Milan—but they had done it with uncharacteristically harsh and repressive measures, deeply resented even by those who had supported the return of Austrian rule. The following year, the French invaded again. This time they stayed until 1815, when Napoleon was finally defeated by allied European forces and Lombardy was returned to the Austrians at the Congress of Vienna. The restoration (here and in most places down the Italian peninsula) lasted uneasily until the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 and the wars that led to Italian unification.

  One result of these tumultuous events was that in Milan the French and Austrians alike were increasingly resented. The idea that the city was being taxed to fill coffers in Paris or Vienna and its men sent to fight Napoleon’s wars prompted increasingly heated discussion and fueled the emerging Italian nationalist movement or Risorgimento (resurgence). At the same time, public life took on new forms—especially under Napoleon, whose taste for military bands, republican ceremony (liberty trees), and administrative efficiency undercut the old hierarchies and forms of aristocratic life: the hitherto constant rounds of entertainment, opera, ballet, lavish meals, and masked balls seemed suddenly outmoded. This did not mean, however, that theatrical life diminished. On the contrary, as the capital of Napoleon’s Italian realm, Milan assumed new and lasting importance and La Scala emerged as a leading cultural center. There was more money too: the French had few moral compunctions about gambling and the tables at the theater generated a steady flow of income. Ballet (like opera) entered an age of extraordinary creativity, fed in part by a heightened sense of the drama of political life and above all by the Romantic and Risorgimento idea that music and dance might somehow express the inner life of a people—the Italian people.

  In 1813 Viganó created Prometheus. He had first presented a version of this ballet in Vienna in 1801 in collaboration with Beethoven, who was not happy with the ballet master’s choreography. For the Milan production, Viganó extended and elaborated the original scenario and added his own music along with selections from (among others) Mozart and Haydn. In a series of lavish tableaux, the ballet told the legendary story of the Titan Prometheus, who steals the sacred fire from the gods and returns it to mankind, attempts to civilize the brutish human race by giving it the arts and sciences, and is eventually punished by a resentful Zeus and chained to a rock where eagles feed on his liver.

  Prometheus was a suitably grandiose and heroic affair, magnificently produced with a cast of more than a hundred and an impressive array of spectacular effects—including special lighting (color filters and oil lamps instead of candles), gods in chariots descending from the skies, and tableaux that formed and dissolved with cinematic precision. None of this, however, was gratuitous: Prometheus, one observer noted, was a “moral spectacle” and Viganó took pains to convey the story’s larger themes. Thus fruit sent from the gods was passed from hand to hand until it was greedily seized by the strongest, and when Prometheus brought fire to earth, flames poured into the forest as torch-bearing genies (nestled high in the trees) attempted to light reason in mankind. The idea was to build vivid, larger-than-life portraits of Prometheus, of the Muses, Graces, Sciences, and Arts who presided over the glorious temple of Vi
rtue, of the Cyclops hammering a diamond nail into Prometheus’s chest as buzzards swooped down to tear out his heart. When Prometheus was finally rescued by Hercules and crowned by Immortality, Viganó staged an apotheosis of baroque proportions, with the gods seated in council and floating high in the clouds.10

  As if to outdo himself, in 1819 Viganó produced The Titans (a favorite theme). It was a five-act pictorial extravaganza with a series of tableaux charting man’s fall from innocence (children and young girls arranged in harmonious groupings in a springtime landscape, playing with animals, gathering fruits and flowers) into an age of gold and greed, violence, and despotism; Titans surged forth from dark caves in the bowels of the earth to battle humans and gods; and Jupiter buried the Titans under “falling mountains” and summoned a magnificent scene of Olympian splendor. Viganó generally worked with the designer Alessandro Sanquirico, who cleared the stage of cumbersome sets in favor of simple but decorously painted backdrops with a single focal point; this opened large spaces for Viganó’s impressive choruses of dancers, not to mention horses charging across the stage and other (as Stendhal put it) “mass effects of form and color.”11