entry
August 2009, large box added Mar 25-7, 2022
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
then in general use.*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 for
instrumental music and dance. 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 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. 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 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 survives.)
Our modern sense of ballet as a
cohesive performance of dancers moving to music to
tell a story originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and more specifically under the influence of Catherine de' Medici. She was born in 1519 in Florence and in 1589 in Château de Blois in France. She was the Queen consort of France from 1547 until 1559, by marriage to King Henry II and was the mother of French kings Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III. These court ballets were elaborate and extravagant. They were performed in large chambers with viewers on three sides. Aristocratic money dictated the ideas, literature and music used in these ballets, and they were created primarily to entertain the aristocracy of the time. The first formal 'court ballet' ever recognized was staged in 1573, Ballet des Polonais. Catherine commissioned it to honor the Polish ambassadors visiting Paris upon the accession of Henry of Anjou to the throne of Poland. In 1581, she commissioned another court ballet, Ballet Comique de la Reine, however it was her Italian compatriot, Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx, who organized the ballet. Catherine and Balthasar (also cited as "Baltasarini") de Beaujoyeulx were thus responsible for the first court ballet ever to integrate poetry, dance, music and set design to convey a unified dramatic storyline. We know very little of Baltasarini except that died c. 1587 in Paris and is cited as an "Italian violinist, composer, and choreographer." He moved to Paris originally in 1555 specifically to serve at Catherine's court. He tutored two of her sons and displayed a talent for arranging elaborate entertainments for the court. added Mar. 25, 2020 added: Mar 27 Still, the calendar was a great idea. |
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. (This was
when a "gentleman" could dance; this means simply that he
would have been in a group of seven or eight dancers
performing a dance that he, himself, had worked out —or
"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,
but original program notes have not survived. It would
have been plausible 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), however, points out 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,
he was on the lookout for new talent, new composers, new
operas. One who benefitted from Grossatesta’s willingness
to help young composers 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 until Paisiello,
Cimarosa and the generation of
Mozart-competitors in Italy. In Naples, Grossatesta was
also the Maestro di
ballo delle Serenissimi Reali Infanti ("Dancing
Master to the Most Serene Royal Children").
There is no
consensus as to why Grossatesta left a job that most
persons of that era would have kept until death. It may
have been 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 knows 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.
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]
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