The Italian ballerina who changed dance history, Virginia Zucchi: Women’s History Month in Dance, 2021

Women’s History Month in Dance 18, 19, 20, 21. We have too weak a sense of the Italian tradition of ballet, which antedates the French and Russian traditions. (Balthasar de Beaujoyeux, who choreographed the 1581 “Ballet comique de la reine” and earlier spectacles for Catherine de Medici as Queen Mother of France, was originally Baldassarino del Belgioioso, bringing Italian ballet tradition to the French court.) Repeatedly, from the late sixteenth century to the late nineteenth, this Italian tradition refertilised the ballet cultures of France and Russia - but our sense of it remains sketchy, seen largely from sources outside Italy itself. (How I miss the scholar Giannandrea Poesio.) We mainly know of Virginia Zucchi (1849-1930) as she appeared to Russians: it’s generally acknowledged that her relatively short time in Russia changed the history of Russian ballet and therefore ballet worldwide.

Ivor Guest’s biography of Zucchi, “The Divine Virginia”, is well worth reading carefully not least for the sense he provides of the lively Italian ballet culture of the nineteenth century. (Other sources say she was born in 1847; Guest says 1849.) One of his book’s incidental revelations (see page 14) is the true Italian meaning of the title “prima ballerina assoluta”. When Zucchi was just sixteen, she was appointed the second of two prime ballerine assolute to the ballet company of Reggio Emilia. (Later that year, still sixteen, she became the first of two prime ballerine assolute to the Teatro du Borgognissanti in Florence, a city that had just become capital of Italy and which had more than one theatre featuring a ballet company.) As Italians confirm, a prima ballerina assoluta was and is simply a female principal dancer. The notion that a prima ballerina assoluta was a truly unique and exalted being was a characteristically Russian misunderstanding of terminology; this, like so many other features, shows that Russian ballet was often a provincial tradition, full of misunderstandings of the Western heritage it tried to adopt. (Guest is too gentle a historian to make this point. I’m afraid I’m not.)

The many leading roles Zucchi soon acquired included, at age twenty, two that would later be part of her legend: the title role of “Esmeralda” and the role of Padmana in “Brahma”. Her first lover - by no means her last - was the Italian king’s illegitimate son Emmanuele Alberto Guerrieri; at age twenty-one, she had a daughter by him. Emmanuele Alberto wanted her to renounce the theatre; loving him, she was tempted to do so, but knew the pressures on him to marry elsewhere. (Their daughter died at age eight.) Zucchi continued her career across Italy. Reviews tell us that she had points of steel, the precision of a “chronometer”, and acting talents of rapturously expressive intensity.

In 1876, at La Scala, aged twenty-seven, she created the lead role in the “Dance of the Hours”, the ballet divertissement in the world premiere of Amilcare Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda”. Yes, this was the “Dance of the Hours” whose music led to classic comedies by Walt Disney (“Fantasia”) and Bob Newhart, but its music has often been choreographed with serious effect too (twice by George Balanchine, once by Christopher Wheeldon). With the great Romantic tenor, Julián Gayarre (with whom she would later, in 1884, have a passionate affair), she became one of the two foremost stars of La Scala’s 1876 Carnival season. 

Berlin, London, and Paris followed; so did a second daughter, by another lover; so did the role of Lise in “La Fille mal gardée”, another of her most touching vehicles. One of her Milan seasons, in 1881-1882, prompted what was recognised as a new epidemic: “Zucchitis”. Her Parisian portrait by Georges Clairin hangs in the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra (photo 18).

The body language of her photographs and portraits is often open-legged, overtly sensuous, close to sexual invitation. She danced in shorter dresses than were accepted everywhere in Europe; she also often made an effect by making her profuse dark hair come loose over her shoulders while she danced. Today, when we read a review of her 1883 Paris debut. it’s a shock to discover how acutely physiques were displayed and examined in those days: “a bust which she proudly displays in every respect, a bust that is perfectly white with a light pink make-up on the nipples, for Mlle Zucchi hides nothing of her nipples.” But the French, like other nations, soon recognised that Zucchi’s sensual charm was surpassed by the superlative acting skills that set her beyond all other ballerinas. 

Her 1885 debut in St Petersburg was a slow-burn affair. The Imperial Theatres were closed; she appeared in the suburbs, in a theatre on one of the islands. In words that became part of her legend, the critic Constantin Skalkovsky wrote of the passionate expression in her eyes and throughout her marvellously proportioned body: “At a time when the majority of ballerinas have legs that are developed to the detriment of other parts of the body, Mlle Zucchi, who possesses the legs of Diana, has also delicate hands of great beauty, perfect shoulders, a well-formed bust and a spine in which there is more poetry than in half of the contemporary Italian poets put together.” (Her back and shoulders were often praised.) The fifteen-year-old Alexandre Benois fell under her spell, with effects that may well have led Benois in later years to bring his friends, Diaghilev not least, to see ballet as an art capable of greatness.

Fanny Elssler had conquered Russia with her dramatic qualities over thirty years before. Now, one veteran connoisseur proclaimed “We have lived to see a second Elssler’”

She was invited to dance for the Imperial Theatres in the winter of 1885-1886. Marius Petipa, though initially sceptical about her style, seems to have been conquered by the temperament she could reveal as an artist. Her debut was in the role of Aspicia in his “The Daughter of Pharaoh” (1862), a ballet ludicrous to us today (both on paper and in reconstruction) but capable then of causing intense dramatic excitement (photo 19); she followed this as Lise in Petipa’s version of “La Fille mal gardée” (photo 20). Ballet had sunk in terms of popularity; Zucchi single-handedly reversed that trend. She was hailed as a star of the first magnitude; she filled the theatre at every performance. She was not an orthodox technician, not a dancer of notable elevation or classical perfection (though of exceptionally strong pointwork), but she was a new kind of dance actress, startling in aspects of emotional and dramatic realism. Her main partner was Pavel Gerdt, who later paid tribute: “Working with Zucchi opened my eyes to many things.”

She returned for the 1886-1887 and 1887-1888 seasons, when her roles included the title role of “Esmeralda” in a new production (photo 21): Petipa now added a pas de six to music by Riccardo Drigo, the new Italian conductor-composer who would become Petipa’s colleague for the rest of the ballet-master’s career. (This is the pas de six now presented by the Mariinsky as attributed to Agrippina Vaganova. Some feel it is the most authentically Petipa item left from “Esmeralda”.) Here her performance had career-changing impact on the teenage student Mathilde Kschessinskaya (1872-1971), who had been wondering about changing career until Zucchi’s Esmeralda revealed the expressiveness of which ballet was capable. “For me Zucchi was the genius of dancing, a genius which had inspired and directed me in the true way at a time when I was still on the verge of adolescence end about to begin my career.”

Zucchi also danced in Warsaw and Moscow. On her return to Italy - she was now in her forties - her acting was compared to that of her great contemporary Eleonora Duse. In 1891, Cosima Wagner brought her to Bayreuth to dance in the Venusberg ballet of Cosima’s late husband’s opera “Tannhäuser”; there Zucchi rejoiced in an atmosphere of greater artistic dedication than she had ever known. In Italy, she became a good friend to the young Carlotta Zambelli, the future star of the Paris Opera. She also became good friends with her own daughter, and lived to be photographed with daughter, granddaughter, and baby great-granddaughter. And she, who had done so much to inspire Russian ballet to the new peak with which it then reached its climax in the 1890s, lived to see Russian ballet sweeping the world, while the Italian ballet that had produced her declined into the minor league. In her late sixties (photo 22), she drawn - wonderfully - by Léon Bakst. The Russians never forgot her importance.

Tuesday 9 March 

17: Portrait of Virginia Zucchi, 1883, by Georges Clairin. (Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, Paris.)

19: Virginia Zucchi as Aspicia in Marius Petipa’s ballet “The Daughter of Pharaoh”, 1885.

20: Virginia Zucchi as Lise in “La Fille mal gardée”.

21: Virginia Zucchi in the title role of “Esmeralda”.

22: 1917 drawing of Virginia Zucchi by Léon Bakst.