A Girl Among the Allieve: Marking 140 Years

One hundred and forty years ago today, on July 23, 1886, Giuseppina Morlacchi died at her farm in Billerica, Massachusetts. In her lifetime she was the most famous ballerina in America, "The Peerless" to the press, the woman who introduced the can-can to this country, the first Dove Eye in The Scouts of the Prairie, and the wife of Texas Jack Omohundro. She was buried from St. Joseph's in Lowell, three priests officiating, the attendance small.

I had planned to publish a long biographical piece about her today. But that piece kept growing, and I think the story it contains, like Morlacchi herself, is worth getting right. But I didn't want this anniversary to pass unmarked. So today, something smaller and, in its own way, just as satisfying: the two earliest mentions of Giuseppina Morlacchi we have found anywhere, and the earliest physical artifact of her career.

Spring 1851: Two Ballets at the Canobbiana

Both mentions come from Libretti per musica dell'Ottocento nella Biblioteca Universitaria di Padova, Lia Cavaliere's 2005 catalog of the roughly 700 nineteenth-century opera and ballet librettos held by the University Library of Padua, a collection assembled largely through Austrian-era legal deposit, which is how a pair of Milanese ballet programs came to rest in the Veneto. Her first two entries, numbers 575 and 439, describe two works by the choreographer Giovanni Casati, staged in the spring of 1851 at Milan's Teatro alla Canobbiana. The Canobbiana, now the Teatro Lirico, was then La Scala's smaller sister house, where the students of the Imperial Regia Scuola di Ballo regularly appeared.

The first is I Misteri delle Scene ("The Mysteries of the Stage"), a "ballo comico di mezzo carattere" or "comic ballet in the demi-caractère style" in four acts with music by Giacomo Panizza. This was a backstage comedy about an impresario, a ballet master, and his struggling students, which must have felt close to home for the young performers dancing it. The second is La Rosiera, a "balletto in tre parti" or "three act ballet."

The printed librettos for both productions included a roster of the ballet school itself: Augusto Hus as director and perfecting master, assisted by his wife Savina Galavresi; the ballet teachers Carolina Filippini and Donato Mazzei; Giuseppe Bocci as master of mime. And there, in the long list of Allieve, the student dancers of the school, between Giovanna Adamoli and Giuseppa Gorini, is the name Giuseppa Morlacchi. That was, of course, her given name. It is the name on her grave marker. She adopted Giuseppina, the diminutive, a year or so later.

She was fourteen years old.

These two entries matter more than they might appear to. The standard scholarship, including Caterina Pagnini's excellent recent work, places Morlacchi's first documented appearance among the allieve in 1852, in Casati's Diavoletta. These spring 1851 librettos push her documented performing life back a full year. It is a small correction, but small corrections are how a life gets recovered: a season here, a name in a roster there, a girl in the back rows of a Casati ballet two decades before she was the most famous dancer on another continent.

Autumn 1854: The Earliest Artifact

The catalog entries above are descriptions in modern bibliographic records of the original 1851 librettos, which survive on the shelves in Padua. But the earliest actual object we can put in front of you is this: the printed libretto for Ida Badoer, an "azione mimica in cinque parti" or  "pantomime-drama in five acts" by the choreographer Giuseppe Rota, staged at the Teatro alla Canobbiana in the autumn of 1854, with music by Paolo Giorza, printed in Milan by Luigi di Giacomo Pirola, and digitized by the Internet Archive.

1854 Ida Badoer.pdf

Download PDF • 1.38MB

Ida Badoer is a full-blooded Venetian melodrama in dance. The plot includes a Doge, a jealous noblewoman, a poisoned cup, a ghost, a regatta on the Grand Canal, and a heroine who dies of her own emotions in the final scene. And in its cast pages, among the Allieve dell'I. R. Scuola di Ballo, is Morlacchi Giuseppina, now eighteen years old, still in the student ranks, listed alongside names that appear beside hers in the 1851 rosters too: Salvioni, Damiani, Gorini, Tradati, Adamoli, Zappini, Barnabei. A cohort of girls growing up together on the Canobbiana's stage.

Within two years she would leave the student rolls for solo engagements; within three she would dance in London for Benjamin Lumley at Her Majesty's Theatre; within sixteen she would be the most celebrated danseuse in the United States. But in 1854 she was one name among twenty in the small type at the front of a sixteen-page pamphlet. And that pamphlet is, so far, the oldest surviving thing I can show you that carries her name from her own lifetime.

The full story, including the difference between how old she was and how old she said she was, where she was actually born, and how carefully she rewrote both, is coming. For today, on the 140th anniversary of her death, it seems right just to look at where it all began: a fourteen-year-old girl in the corps of a comic ballet about the mysteries of the stage.

Requiescat in pace, Peerless.

• - Matthew Kerns