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entry August
2009
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]
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