Carla Fracci at La Scala, Milan, in 1969. Her warm temperament and style recall Italian bel canto in balletic terms.”įrom the 1960s, whenever new ballets were created in Italy, it was the hope of the choreographer and producer that Fracci would wish to be part of the project, and she played a vital role in securing a stronger appreciation of ballet in Italy than it had had in the first half of the century. In discussing ballerinas who were key to national identities, Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp noted in Ballerina: The Art of Women in Classical Ballet (1987) that: “Fracci speaks for Italian dance, for something both gracious and graceful. From 1967 she became a regular guest with companies such as American Ballet Theatre, but her first loyalty was to Italy. She was admired throughout the country, where she danced in many cities, at summer festivals and on television. Her renowned interpretation was filmed with American Ballet Theatre in 1969, and she inspired a determined revival in the reputation of La Scala and its school.Ī new wave of exceptional Italian dancers from the La Scala stable included the recent ballerinas of the Royal Ballet, Alessandra Ferri and Mara Galeazzi, and leading men such as Roberto Bolle and Massimo Murru.Carla Fracci, who has died aged 84 of cancer, was Italy’s prima ballerina of the 20th century. Her career was remarkably long and international, and she performed her most famous role, Giselle, until she was in her late fifties. Soon after, with Gilpin, the 22-year-old Carla made an auspicious international debut as Giselle with London Festival Ballet. He then cast her in two new ballets he made for the Edinburgh Festival, Secrets, and a showcase duet, Piece d’occasion, for her and London Festival Ballet’s star John Gilpin. It was another British connection that gave Carla Fracci her first professional break, when the Sadler’s Wells Ballet choreographer John Cranko chose her to play Juliet in his new open-air production of Romeo and Juliet for La Scala Ballet in Venice in 1958. That evening, Carla Fracci told an Italian newspaper, Fonteyn lit “a spark that became a fire and that has never left me”. The discipline was, she said, “a crashing bore and a terrible chore”, but her first stage performance was a walk-on part in a La Scala production of The Sleeping Beauty, starring the visiting Margot Fonteyn. One critic complained: “Why were Rudolf Nureyev, 43, Carla Fracci, 45, and Margot Fonteyn, 62, playing characters whose ages Shakespeare put at late adolescent, 13 and late 20s at most?”īorn Carolina Fracci on Auginto a poor Milanese family, the child only just scraped into La Scala ballet school aged 10 her war-deprived body was thought too undernourished for the training ahead, but she was accepted because of her pretty face. When he and Carla starred in his first production of Romeo and Juliet, on the 1981 La Scala tour of the US, Fonteyn played Fracci’s mother. Identified as the supreme La Scala ballerina of the era, she in fact made her name by quitting La Scala in her early twenties to manage her own career, and her combination of a captivating expressive stage personality and fortunate timing – arriving in America just when two of the world’s greatest male stars, Rudolf Nureyev and Erik Bruhn, needed a partner – brought her immortality.Īs Bruhn left the stage and Fonteyn entered her fifties, Nureyev increasingly danced with Carla Fracci, causing certain tensions for the older ballerina. In the ballerina battles of 1970 New York, balletomanes labelled her “The Incomparable”.Ĭarla Fracci was a pure product of the Italian ballet training of La Scala Ballet in Milan, founded in 1778, but whose noble dancing traditions had been eclipsed in the 20th century by newer countries to ballet, notably Britain and the US. Carla Fracci, the ballerina, who has died aged 84, was a tram driver’s daughter who became Italy’s answer to her idol Margot Fonteyn, whom she succeeded as a favourite partner of Rudolf Nureyev’s.Ī woman of remarkable beauty and ethereal grace, she became world-famous in the 1960s and 1970s for her exquisite sense of style in the early 19th-century Romantic ballets, La Sylphide and Giselle, in which she seemed to evoke the physical elusiveness of the original ballerina on pointe, Marie Taglioni.
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