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In 1971, the
publication of Letters from the Maestro: Enrico Cecchetti
to Gisella Caccialanza in Dance Perspectives
marked a turning point for dance historiography. Edited by
Sally Bailey and translated by Caccialanza herself, the
letters charted the history of Cecchetti’s relationship with
one of his favourite pupils, thus providing a psychological
reading of the almost legendary ballet teacher. The
monograph’s narrative, therefore, moved drastically away
from the set parameters of Western dance writing of the time,
replacing dance archaeology with a more innovative,
character-centred and non strictly context-bound study of
the artist’s persona. Although the 1971 monograph did not
factually bring to light new facts or events, its approach
to both the construct and the study of the past was to prove
immensely popular and inspiring, for it showed that there
was more to history than the compilation of reasoned
chronologies.
Other materials on Enrico Cecchetti have surfaced since. In
2006, Livia Brillarelli, an Italian music scholar and fond
historiographer of the Cecchetti family, was invited by
Professor Giorgio Cecchetti and Signora Elena Cecchetti
Caccini to take care of a number of letters to and from
their grandfather, which had long been kept in the family
archives. After cataloguing and reproducing a selection of
the writings in her Quaderni Cecchettiani,
Brillarelli contacted the author of these pages to enquire
whether those materials could be of any interest for
publication. What follows is thus the outcome of an idea
formulated by two people who share the same passion and
interest in one of the most complex and fascinating figures
of ballet history.
The letters are the ones that Enrico Cecchetti sent and
received between 1922 and 1928, the year of his death.
Because of his meticulous nature, he kept records and drafts
of almost everything he wrote, thus leaving to posterity an
almost complete correspondence. Such unique corpus of
writings has been integrated by the author with other rarely
seen and/or unpublished materials, such as the letters held
in the Theatre and Performance Collection at the Victoria
and Albert Museum in London, a set of letters and autographs
bought at an auction in New York in 1999, and some
Cecchetti-related documents donated personally by eminent
representatives of the Cecchetti’s dance legacy, such as
Brenda Hamlyn Bencini, the late Laura Wilson, one of
Cecchetti’s pupils in London, the late Diana Barker, former
Chairperson of the Cecchetti Society in the United Kingdom,
and the late Ria Teresa Legnani, who studied with Cecchetti
at La Scala Theatre in Milan.
(from Introduction)
* * *
Italian dancer,
choreographer, mime artist and ballet master Enrico
Cecchetti is regarded as the one who perpetuated the
artistic canons of a ballet tradition that otherwise would
have been lost. For many, he is the man whose ideas and art
influenced the era of the Imperial Russian Ballet as well as
that of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and who formulated a
training method that has remarkably stood the test of time.
There is no doubt that the 1922 publication of A Manual
of the Theory and the Practice of Classical Theatrical
Dancing played a decisive role in the making of
Cecchetti’s international reputation as one of dance
history’s greatest pedagogues and theorists. The Manual,
with its codified methods, is the still tangible proof of
Cecchetti’s genius as well as an outstanding artistic legacy.
Yet, it would be erroneous to consider the Italian “Maestro”
– as both his colleagues and his pupils commonly referred to
him – important solely because of the Manual, for his
contribution to the art of dancing goes far beyond that.
A significant aspect of Cecchetti’s life and career is that
he operated within three very different epochs and contexts
of theatre dance, namely the Italian ballo grande,
the Imperial Russian Ballet and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes,
moving from one to the other with unique artistic
malleability and eclecticism. In order to understand the
secret of such artistic adaptability to diverse artistic
environments, one must take into account the various stages
of the man’s career.
Early biographical studies on Cecchetti were written at a
time when political and geographical barriers prevented an
analysis of primary source materials. Authors such as Olga
Racster, Cyril Beaumont and Vincenzo Celli relied thus on
Maestro’s own recollections, which were often historically
inaccurate. Moreover, as each of those three authors had had
the chance of meeting Cecchetti towards the end of his life,
their works tended to focus more on the reality they had
witnessed than on a detailed study of the past. Maestro’s
early years in Italy were thus treated rather hurriedly, in
the absence of some substantial documentation. Similarly, as
the “iron curtain” long prevented a detailed survey of his
work in Russia and in Poland, those years were often
discussed in the light of his own unreliable anecdotic
reminiscing. Believing those works to be faithful and
accurate records of Cecchetti’s life and career, modern
authors have often reproduced those flawed historical
narratives, generating an intricate morass of debatable
common places, which, alas, are still informing the way many
think of Cecchetti today.
(from Prologue)
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