Mata Hari dancing at the Musée Guimet, Paris, 1905. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Milan, Thursday 4 January 1912. At the Teatro alla Scala the ballet Bacco e Gambrinus is on the bill, music by Romualdo Marenco, choreography by Giovanni Pratesi, revived for the occasion by Vincenzo Dell’Agostino. The part of Venus goes to a thirty-five-year-old Dutch dancer whom Paris has known for seven years under a Malay name that means eye of the day, Mata Hari. The house is full, and according to the account published on the site dedicated to Marinetti, Gabriele d’Annunzio and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti are in the stalls as well. In the same company, in a mime role, a twenty-one-year-old girl who has not yet finished school makes her debut that evening. Her name is Teresa Battaggi.
The two careers cross for five performances, as many as Bacco e Gambrinus had in that revival, and they start from opposite points. Margaretha Zelle, born in 1876 in Leeuwarden, in Friesland, and come through an unhappy marriage to a colonial officer in the Dutch East Indies, had invented Mata Hari in 1905, dancing at the Musée Guimet in Paris among the Oriental statues of the collection, and with that persona of exotic priestess had toured the salons and theatres of Europe. She had come to La Scala a few weeks earlier, in December 1911, for an appearance in the fifth act of Gluck’s Armida. The January ballet was not a novelty written for her, as is sometimes told: the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, in its entry on Marenco, places the premiere of Bacco e Gambrinus at La Scala on 14 January 1904. Marenco was also the composer of Excelsior, staged at La Scala on 11 January 1881 with choreography by Luigi Manzotti, and Milanese ballet still lived on that school of grand allegorical tableaux. Eight years after the premiere, the theatre revived Bacco e Gambrinus with a celebrity in the goddess’s role.
Teresa Battaggi was born in Cuccaro Monferrato, in the province of Alessandria, on 26 March 1890, and had entered La Scala’s ballet school in 1902, at the age of twelve. She had studied with Caterina Beretta and Raffaele Grassi. Ten years of barre, of exercises, of moving up from class to class, before she set foot on the stage in a silent part, beside a woman who had learned dance on her own. In that same 1912, according to the entry the Dizionario Biografico devotes to her, Battaggi graduated as prima ballerina.
That evening La Scala showed, without meaning to, the two ways a dancer could arrive on its stage. The first was fame: a persona built elsewhere, in the newspapers and the salons, which the theatre bought as an attraction and put into a role where appearing was enough, because Venus is someone you look at. The second was the school, which since 1813 had trained girls and boys for the theatre’s corps de ballet and turned out artists at the pace of a workshop. The bill sold the first. The theatre lived on the second.
The later trajectories follow the same divide. After 1912 Mata Hari’s career declined; the last performances we know of date from 1915, and on 15 October 1917, convicted of espionage in France, she was shot at Vincennes. Battaggi left for America with the company of the conductor Cleofonte Campanini, from New York to Philadelphia and Chicago; she returned to La Scala as the Grail Bearer in the 1921-22 Parsifal; in 1924 the Romanian government called her to run the new ballet school of the Bucharest Opera, and in 1937 she was named head of the dance school of the Teatro Reale dell’Opera in Rome. She died in Rome on 10 July 1957. Her school, at that moment, had more than a hundred pupils.