Clive Barnes admired Fracci, who “looked for all the world like the debut of a girl destined to make her mark on the role”. This encouraged critics to compare their interpretations. He loved to present audiences with contrasting ballerinas, and cast Markova, Chauviré and Fracci to perform consecutively in Giselle. Dolin invited her first to dance at London Festival Ballet’s annual birthday gala, then to join the company. It was this that launched Fracci’s international profile. ![]() Noting the rising star’s resemblance to Fanny Cerrito, who had danced in the original, Dolin asked the young Fracci to join the established ballerinas Alicia Markova from Britain, Margrethe Schanne from Denmark and Yvette Chauviré from France in his production. The same year Anton Dolin was reworking his Pas de Quatre, originally a divertissement for a quartet of ballerinas of the 1840s, for the Nervi festival in Genoa. Her breakthrough came in 1957 when she substituted for Violette Verdy in the title role of Cinderella and the following year was promoted to ballerina. In 1954 Fracci graduated into the ballet company at La Scala. I studied her every move … That’s when I really began to work very, very hard in my ballet classes.” Margot Fonteyn danced Aurora and was a revelation to the 12-year-old Carla: “It was then I really knew I wanted to become a ballerina. It was Fracci’s first stage appearance and the first time she had seen ballet independent of opera. It was in May 1949 that Fracci took the opportunity to appear as a mandolin-playing page in the Sadler’s Wells Ballet production of The Sleeping Beauty on tour to Italy. Erik Bruhn and Carla Fracci performing in American Ballet Theatre’s Coppélia in 1968. Returning to Milan after the conflict she was accepted by the ballet school attached to La Scala. ![]() To avoid bombing during the second world war, Carla was sent to stay with relatives in the countryside. That may be why she could cover such a range of styles so convincingly.”īorn in Milan, she was the daughter of Luigi Fracci, a tram driver, and Santina Rocca, a factory worker. ![]() She was always totally present in whatever she was doing. She was nevertheless a great interpreter of dramatic work and, as a recent collaborator, the choreographic reconstructor Millicent Hodson, said, what was “most amazing about Carla was how she could so perfectly create the 19th-century Romantic style and at the same time constantly change style with a wide variety of ballets and choreographers. ![]() Photograph: Mondadori/Getty Imagesįracci was universally acclaimed as a great Romantic dancer, she could skim, apparently effortlessly, across the stage with incredible lightness, but she was not so at ease with the academic ballets of Marius Petipa. Carla Fracci at La Scala, Milan, in 1969. Her warm temperament and style recall Italian bel canto in balletic terms.”įrom the 1960s, whenever new ballets were created in Italy, it was the hope of the choreographer and producer that Fracci would wish to be part of the project, and she played a vital role in securing a stronger appreciation of ballet in Italy than it had had in the first half of the century. In discussing ballerinas who were key to national identities, Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp noted in Ballerina: The Art of Women in Classical Ballet (1987) that: “Fracci speaks for Italian dance, for something both gracious and graceful. From 1967 she became a regular guest with companies such as American Ballet Theatre, but her first loyalty was to Italy. She was admired throughout the country, where she danced in many cities, at summer festivals and on television. Carla Fracci, who has died aged 84 of cancer, was Italy’s prima ballerina of the 20th century.
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