|
choreography
Gaetano Grossatesta
(born c. 1700, in Modena — died c. 1774, probably in
Naples.)
 When Gaetano
Grossatesta moved to Naples in 1745, he already had
behind him some 20 years of experience in northern Italy
as a respected choreographer or direttore di ballo
[dance]. (The term coreografo
was not in general use and really meant something else.*note)
He was well primed to take over the job of ballet
director at the new San Carlo
Theater. By the end of his life, some 30 years
later, he had composed the dances (and music for those
dances) for the first performances of about 100 operas
in both northern Italy and in Naples and had
collaborated with composers of distinction such as
Vivaldi, Albinoni, Hasse and Gluck. Today he is almost
totally forgotten. It’s hard to say why except that the
passage of time and changing artistic tastes can
conspire to make almost anyone obscure. (See the series
on “Obscure Composers.”)
Ballet, perhaps, has special problems in that it didn’t
really exist as a separate art form until the early
1800s.
Today, it makes sense to say “Let’s
go to the ballet” or “opera” or “concert” because we see
dance, melodrama, and symphonic music as separate
disciplines. In the late 1600s, however, it made no
sense at all because everything revolved around opera;
opera was the vehicle within which instrumental music
and dance were presented. There were not yet such things
as “symphony number this” or “piano concerto number
that.” And though there were social dances and court
dances in Paris, the capital of early ballet, such dance
was a long way from appearing separately on a stage for
you to enjoy.
Ballet, in the form of staged
versions of social and court dances, was incorporated
into early opera (meaning all of the 1600s) either
within an act or as an interval between acts. The
dancers wore elaborate court or theatrical costumes of
the day (women wore formal gowns down to the ankles);
that type of dance is referred to today as “Baroque
dance.” There were no tutus, ballet slippers, pointe work or
flying Russian dancers in tights bounding over the stage
almost like low-flying trapeze artists. That Baroque
situation passed from France into Italian ballet of the
early 1700s where the direttore
di ballo was
usually mentioned in printed programs but was otherwise
somewhat neglected. Very importantly, while you can
easily find notated music from that period, very few
examples of notated dances have survived (in the
Beauchamp–Feuillet notation, for example, from the
1600s, a sample of which is seen in the photo insert,
above). Thus we can't really say with precision what
dance in early opera looked like. (Fortunately, some
notation from Grossatesta’s ballets survive.)
Grossatesta’s career rose with opera seria (the
name given to those operas from the 1600s and 1700s that
were based on themes from Greek mythology and, thus,
"serious") where dance often helped to move the plot
along; his career faded with age and with the advent of
Ballet d'action,
a new ballet movement started by French choreographer
Jean Georges Noverre in 1760, in which dancers expressed
their character and emotion through their movements
rather than through elaborate props and costumes—in
other words, the beginning of modern ballet.
There is little information about Grossatesta’s family
and background. The earliest reference to his work is
from 1720 in Venice. He had at least one brother,
Antonio, who is mentioned in one of Casanova’s letters.
The brother became the impresario of the Teatro San
Cassiano in Venice and engaged Gaetano as choreographer
in 1729. Gaetano may also have performed as a dancer on
the stage. (Bear in mind that this was when any
gentleman could dance; this means simply that he would
have been one in a group of seven or eight dancers
performing a dance that he, himself, had worked
out—"choreographed.")
Ballet Dancer
by Edgar Degas
 After
Grossatesta moved to Naples, the situation of ballet
started to change for the better; that is, the librettos
offered progressively more information on the dances and
these balli
are often described in detail. It isn’t clear if
Grossatesta composed the ballet parts of the opera that
opened the San Carlo Theater on November 4, 1737, Achille in Sciro
(with music by Domenico Sarro
and libretto by Metastasio).
San
Carlo literature on the subject says that Grossatesta,
indeed, directed the balli.
Original program notes, however, that would say for sure
have not survived, but it wouldn’t have been improbable
even though the date is some seven years before he moved
to Naples; it was common for those in the theater to
maintain working relationships throughout the Italian
peninsula even without a unified nation. One source
(Giordano) points out, however, that Grossatesta was
verifiably not
the choreographer for the second opera to appear at San
Carlo; thus, in absence of proof, there is no reason to
assume that he was there on opening night a few weeks
earlier.
In any event, Grossatesta was composer and director of balli for San Carlo
from 1745 to 1752 and its impresario from 1753 to 1769.
As a choreographer, he was an innovator, and as
impresario, in general, he was always on the lookout for
new talent, new composers, new operas. One who
benefitted from Grossatesta’s willingness to give young
composers a break was Niccolò
Piccinni, who debuted at San Carlo with the opera
Zenobia in
1756. Piccinni became the best-known Italian composer of
opera for the next 20 years, that is, until Paisiello, Cimarosa and the generation
of Mozart-competitors in Italy. In Naples, Grossatesta
was also the Maestro
di ballo delle Serenissime Reali Infante
("Dancing Master to the Most Serene Royal Children").
There seems to be no consensus as to why Grossatesta
left a job that most persons of that era would have kept
until death. It may have had to do with the working
conditions. Under the intellectual and cultured Charles III—by all accounts,
the classical “benevolent monarch”—the conditions were
excellent: essentially, Here is a fine new theater; do what you will
to make it a great one. When Charles abdicated
to return to Spain, his minor son, Ferdinand, took
over—the infamous Re
Lazzarone (Beggar King). Again, by all (!) accounts,
Ferdinand was a dunce and a lout. (One such account is here.) Grossatesta apparently
had a good working relationship with the young king’s
regent, Bernardo Tanucci,
but the child monarch came of age in 1767. Ferdinand had
no ear for music, but they say he liked the dancing
parts enough to wake up in the royal box and follow
them. Maybe that wasn’t enough for Grossatesta. Two
years later, he left and disappeared so quietly that no
one seems to know where he went or even exactly where or
when he died.
*note: The first to use the term "choreography"
was Raoul-Auger Feuillet in 1700: “Chorégraphie, ou
Art de décrire la dance par
caractères, signes et figures
démonstratives [Choreography, the art
of describing dance through characters, signs and
graphic symbols.] The author's name is remembered
today in the name of the dance notation system,
Beauchamp-Feuillet.
[back up to text]
sources:
—Croce, Benedetto. I teatri di Napoli.
Secolo XV-XVIII. Naples. Pub. Pierro, 1891.
—Giordano, Gloria and Jehanne
Marchesi. "Gaetano Grossatesta, an Eighteenth-Century
Italian Choreographer and Impresario, Part One The
Dancer-Choreographer in Northern Italy," and "Part
Two: The Choreographer-Impresario in Naples." In Dance Chronicle,
Vol. 23, No. 1 (2000), pp. 1-28 and Vol. 23, No. 2
(2000), pp. 133-191 (respectively). Published by:
Taylor & Francis, Ltd. London.
—Smith, Marian. Ballet and Opera in the
Age of 'Giselle'. Princeton Studies in Opera.
Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, editors. Princeton
University Press. 2000
[See also Ballet
in Naples]
to encyclopedia index
to portal
index for music & dance
|
