He then took her to the Edinburgh festival to dance his Secrets. The following year he created Juliet in his first Romeo and Juliet, premiered at Verona for her. While Dolin was championing Fracci, the choreographer John Cranko also recognised her talents, casting her as the heroine, Belle Rose, in The Prince of the Pagodas, when he took it from Covent Garden to La Scala in 1957. Rudolf Nureyev and Carla Fracci after their performance of Giselle in Rome in 1980. Giselle was a part that Fracci constantly reinterpreted throughout her career, and earlier this year she was invited to return to La Scala to give a recorded masterclass on the ballet. 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. Returning to Milan after the conflict she was accepted by the ballet school attached to La Scala.Įrik Bruhn and Carla Fracci performing in American Ballet Theatre’s Coppélia in 1968. 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.
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