In 2021, I was asked to write Carla Fracci's obituary for Dancing Times magazine. The great Italian ballerina died three years ago today, on 27 May 2021. Below we reproduce that article.
Carla Fracci was not just an Italian ballerina, but Italy's ballerina. She represented dance for the person in the street in Italy since the 1960s – everyone knew La Fracci, with her flowing white apparel, black centre-parted hair, and widow's peak. A fairy tale became reality when the girl from the council estate on the outskirts of Milan became the star of La Scala. She fulfilled the dream of the post-war boom years.
Fracci's father, Luigi, drove Milan's route 1 tram, which still passes in front of La Scala, and he would ring its bell three times so that his daughter, inside rehearsing, would know that he was passing. It is an oft-told anecdote but crucial to understanding her popularity – she'd been the girl next door, and she was proud of it. The day before Fracci's funeral people filed past her coffin in La Scala's foyer to pay their respects, many of them laying down white flowers. Each time a tram passed, its bell was rung three times, and now one of those trams has been painted Fracci-white with her name on the side. She was the people's ballerina. She is only the fourth person to lie in repose at La Scala, the other occasions were for the conductors Arturo Toscanini, Victor De Sabata, and Gianandrea Gavazzeni. Immediately after the news of her death broke, on 27 May, television schedules were upended as colleagues, politicians, actors, and journalists discussed her importance in Italian life. Her funeral was broadcast live on Italy's main television channel.
Television and magazines were crucial in building her vast appeal – her first television special was in 1967 – but so was her insistence on taking ballet to the provinces. Fracci had grown up having no idea of what ballet was and when, aged ten, she went to audition for La Scala's school she thought she would be dancing the tango. So she would return from prestigious performances in the United States to appear in circus tents with mist rolling in from under the tarpaulin.
Her television appearances were countless – her last was in January this year [2021] when she exited waving and dancing out of the studio backwards – yet she'd been diagnosed with cancer three years previously and unsuccessful chemotherapy treatments had been carried out in secret. Between hospital visits she would receive and award prizes across Italy, judge competitions, and in January this year she revisited, after two decades, La Scala's rehearsal studios to coach parts of Giselle.
Fracci was born on 20 August 1936 and, serendipitously, her rags-to-riches story began when she danced Cinderella. She replaced an indisposed Violette Verdy at La Scala on New Year's Eve 1955 when she was 19, just a few months after graduating from the school. The steely determination under her graceful exterior pushed the ambitious teenager to ask the management to give her that opportunity. She rocked the boat again in 1958 when John Cranko chose her instead of one of La Scala's prima ballerinas to be the first to perform Juliet in his Romeo and Juliet, and then he took her to the Edinburgh Festival the same year for his ballet Secrets.
Fracci rapidly became the quintessential Romantic ballerina. In 1957, Anton Dolin chose her to join Yvette Chauviré, Margrethe Schanne and Alicia Markova for his Pas de Quatre at the Nervi Festival, the following year he invited her to take part in a gala with the London Festival Ballet, and in 1959 she returned for her first important Giselle. The role became her calling card and it was with this ballet that she was welcomed to the American Ballet Theatre in 1967 with Erik Bruhn, and two years later their performances were preserved by the well-known ABT film. She danced fourteen ballets with the company. Her last performance was in 1991, once again as Giselle, this time with the young star Julio Bocca, 30 years her junior. In three decades, she danced with almost thirty Albrechts.
Like many people, writer John Gruen felt her “ethereal beauty echoed the nineteenth-century precepts of the Romantic ballerina, all gossamer lightness and transcendent tenderness.” However, ABT quickly discovered that there was more to her art and that her impish sense of humour made her perfect for Coppélia and La Fille mal gardée, and her mastery of the dramatic situation made for riveting performances as Lizzie Borden in Fall River Legend and Medea with Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Her ability to inhabit successfully so many roles stems from her being a diva in public but never in private. She observed people and situations keenly with her penetrating black eyes and never sought attention. That is what gave her such insight into behaviour and allowed her to convincingly imbue so many contrasting roles with absolute believability. She didn't repeat performances and approached her dancing as an actress approaches a role, thus provoking her partners to give fresh performances too. She also worked as an actress: in the film Nijinsky with Alan Bates, The True Story of the Lady of the Camellias with Isabelle Huppert, and as Giuseppina Strepponi in the television series Verdi with Ronald Pickup.
Away from the theatre, the spotlight was left for her husband the director and librettist Beppe Menegatti, a showman to the core whose passionate cultural curiosity led to the couple restaging rarely seen works from the Ballets Russes' repertoire, recreating lost ballets, and devising new ones such as Filumena Marturano from Eduardo de Filippo's play and Mirandolina based on that by Goldoni. The considerable number of productions were devised especially for their own touring company, the CompagniaItaliana di Balletto, and when the couple headed ballet companies in Verona, Naples, and from 2000 to 2010 the Rome Opera Ballet. One touching scene in a late work called Diaghilev Musagète for Rome Opera in 2009 was with her frequent partner Vladimir Vasiliev as they echoed their performances in Giselle as in a dream. Fracci was also invited to create works for many choreographers including Roland Petit, Carolyn Carlson, Maurice Béjart, Millicent Hodson, Alicia Alonso, John Butler, and Glen Tetley. Mario Pistoni's La Strada, based on the Fellini film, showed her aptitude for tragicomedy, and Rudolf Nureyev made the most of her technical abilities when she created his Aurora in the 1966 Sleeping Beauty at La Scala.
Fracci's collaboration with La Scala continued until 2000 when she gave her last performance with the company in the 19th century Milanese ‘gran ballo', Excelsior.
Carla Fracci is survived by her husband Menegatti, whom she married in 1964, and her son Francesco, who was born in 1969. When she was five months pregnant, at Milan's Sforzesco Castle for La Scala's summer season, she was still dancing.
Milan, 21 October 2021
Today, in a private ceremony, Carla Fracci's ashes were interred in Milan's Cimitero Monumentale(Monumental Cemetery) in Milan.
The main entrance to the vast cemetery is via the imposing Famedio (literally ‘Temple of Fame') where Milan's most illustrious children have been laid to rest. There are only seven tombs in the main building – including the novelist Alessandro Manzoni and the philosopher and writer Carlo Cattaneo – and Carla Fracci becomes the first woman to join them.
Gramilano( Editor )
Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano') about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.
His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman's Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia' column for Dancing Times magazine.
