Enrico Cecchetti

K.C. Patrick

The century's greatest teacher

Have you heard the terms Cecchetti Society, Cecchetti Council, Cecchetti method, Cecchetti syllabus? They all flow from a diminutive Italian named Enrico Cecchetti, who changed the world of ballet forever. Before Nijinsky or Nureyev, Cecchetti is said to have shown the Russians in St. Petersburg how to fly onstage. He was the most sought after ballet teacher of his time wherever he went in the world. And his manual of training—still used today—with exercises for each day of the week, marks him as one of the greatest pedagogues of the twentieth century.

Enrico Cecchetti was born into a dancing family. His mother, Serafina Casagli, and father, Cesare Cecchetti, toured Europe in the 1840s as dancers. During their time on the road, three little dancers were born: Pia, Enrico, and Giuseppe. Enrico was born in the dressing room of the Teatro Tordinonia in Rome on June 21, 1850.

Trained in the basics of ballet by his father, Enrico convinced his parents that he, too, had the passion to dance, and so he was sent to Florence for further education by Giovanni Lepri, who prepared accomplished dancers of the day. Young Enrico also studied with two more of his father’s colleagues: Cesare Coppini, who taught at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, and with Filippo Taglioni, the taskmaster father of the celebrated ballerina, Marie Taglioni. These teachers had been students in the lineage of Jean-Georges Noverre and of Carlo Blasis, who has been called the most important ballet theorist of the nineteenth century, and so Cecchetti learned the purest classical tradition. This early training created a background for Enrico Cecchetti’s method of teaching, which followed the lines of Blasis’ own theory. (Blasis had codified ballet teaching methods in “An Elementary Treatise Upon the Theory and Practice of the Art of Dancing”, which was published in 1820.)

Cecchetti’s stage debut is variously reported as occurring as an infant in his father’s arms, as a child of five in Genoa, at sixteen, partnering his sister Pia in a ballet choreographed by his father, and at age twenty on the stage of Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Almost immediately he received rave reviews for his stage presence and mime ability as well as his athletic leaps and turns and his brilliant footwork. He was considered by many to be the finest male dancer of his time. He married Giuseppina De Maria, also a dancer, and they pursued their dance careers while their family grew.

In 1887 he was 37 and at the height of his success as a dancer when he traveled to St. Petersburg and captivated audiences with brilliant feats of batterie, amazing leaps, and multiple pirouettes. The technique of Italian dancers was newly discovered and much coveted in Russia then. He was hired first to perform as premier danseur, then to be second ballet master with the czar’s own Maryinski Ballet (1890), and to teach at the Imperial Ballet School (1892). For twenty years he performed and then taught, helping to polish and strengthen the technique of generations of Russian dancers. His illustrious pupils included Adolph Blom, Tamara Karsavina, Nicholas Legat, Leonide Massine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, and Agrippina Vagonova. Through Cecchetti (and previously Christian Johansson) the mainstreams of European classic dance traditions and training combined and became a unique Russian style of ballet. As a performer, Cecchetti created the virtuoso role of the Blue Bird and the mime role of the wicked fairy Carabosse in Petipa’s “The Sleeping Beauty”.

From 1900 forward, there was considerable political unrest in Russia: rise of Bolshevism, Rasputin’s influence on the czar, the Russo-Japan war, the Balkan War, culminating in World War I and, in 1918, the execution of Czar Nicholas and his family. Against this background, Cecchetti continued to grow and thrive.

In 1902 he had moved to become ballet master of the Imperial School in Warsaw, again influencing a national style of classical dancing through his training. In 1905 he returned to Italy, but returned to Russia, opening a private school in St. Petersburg and devoting much of his time to private work with Pavlova. In 1909 he became official teacher for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, and, as a master of mime, created roles with that company, notably the Charlatan in “Petrushka” and Astrologer in “Coq d’Or”. By the end of World War I, the old Ballet Russes, with Nijinsky and with its ties to the Imperial Theaters, was dead. Diaghilev had to build a new company, and he chose to build that around Massine, with Cecchetti as the company’s teacher.

In 1918, in the last decade of his life, Enrico and his wife Giuseppina opened a school in London where his pupils included nearly every famous dancer of the time, including Ninette De Valois, Alicia Markova, Ruth Page, and Marie Rambert. To it flocked all the Diaghilev dancers from the Ballet Russes when that company was in London, and also British dancers and teachers who recognized the exceptional merit of his teaching system.

It was the English critic and ballet historian Cyril W. Beaumont, who had the idea to codify “the Maestro” ’s system of teaching. At Beaumont’s instigation, and with Stanislaus Idzikowski, a “Manual of the Theory and Practice of Classical Theatrical Dancing—Methode Cecchetti” (London 1922; rev ed 1940) was published. Margaret Craske and Derra de Moroda prepared subsequent volumes (New York 1975).

A Cecchetti Society was formed in London in 1922 to preserve and perpetuate the work, and watch over the standards of teaching. This society was incorporated into the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing in 1924. (The ‘Imperial’ had been founded twenty years previously but until this time had been primarily concerned with social dancing.) Today, their work is carried on and respected throughout the world.

Cecchetti had returned to Italy in 1923 and became ballet master at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala in 1925. Still he continued giving occasional classes to the Diaghilev Ballet Russes dancers.

During the run of “The Sleeping Princess” in London, he celebrated his golden jubilee on stage as Carabosse for one performance, and made his last stage appearance in 1926 as Charlatan in Petrushka in Milan.

He died in 1928 and is remembered as one of the greatest teachers in ballet history.

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