(b Naples, 25 March 1769; d Milan, 10 Aug 1821). Italian choreographer, dancer and composer. He was the son of Onorato Viganò and Maria Ester Viganò (née Boccherini), who were both dancers; as early as Carnival 1783 he was dancing female roles with great success at the Teatro Argentina, Rome, where his father was impresario and ballet-master. He also studied composition with Boccherini (his uncle) and provided music for some of his father’s ballets (the earliest known is Cefalo e Procri, Carnival 1786) and later for some of his own. In summer 1786 he had a farsetta, La credula vedova, performed in Rome. He had moved with his family to Venice by 1788 and danced with them at the S Samuele theatre. In 1789 he went to Spain with an uncle, Giovanni Viganò, to perform in the coronation festivities of Charles IV. There he met the dancer Maria Medina, whom he married, and the French dancer and choreographer Dauberval, who took him as a pupil to Bordeaux and, early in 1791, to London. By autumn 1791 he was back in Venice, where he and his wife achieved great success as a team, and where he choreographed his first ballet, Raoul de Créqui; in 1792 the family moved to the new theatre, La Fenice. On 13 May 1793 Viganò and his wife made a highly successful début in Vienna, where on 15 June Salvatore produced Raoul de Créqui and on 15 October a Semiramis ballet, Die Tochter der Luft, using a scenario by his father Onorato (after Carlo Gozzi). His work there was the subject of highly partisan support and condemnation. After extensive tours the couple returned to Vienna in 1795, and Salvatore produced, among other works, Richard Löwenherz, based on the famous opéra comique by Sedaine and Grétry, which caused more controversies. Critics such as Ayrenhoff and Richter accused Viganò of ignoring the rules of dramatic ballet pantomime and so destroying the new art of dancing established by Noverre and Angiolini. However, Viganò was part of a new movement espousing virtuosity and more formal composition in choreography. This new tendency, which was represented by dancer-choreographers like Viganò and Auguste Vestris, was to free ballet from the bounds of Aristotelian poetics, and from too close an imitation of nature, which reduced dance to mere pantomimical action.
Between 1795 and 1798 Viganò and his wife toured Germany and the Austrian territories. From spring 1798 to Carnival 1799 Salvatore appeared at his father’s theatre in Venice, S Benedetto, at first with his wife, but during this period they separated. He was ballet-master in Vienna from 1799 to 1803. His Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (for which Beethoven wrote the music) was performed in early 1801 and seemed to represent the new autonomical dance. The ballet was not a great success because the critics and public were too irritated by the absence of dramatic situations and the obvious preference for pure dance. In 1804 he returned to Italy and produced ballets in many Italian cities, making a short visit to Vienna in 1806–7.
The most important period of Viganò’s career began in 1811 with his engagement at La Scala, Milan, where he mostly remained until his death. There he found the resources and the opportunity to bring his ideas to complete fruition. He was an intuitive artist and often worked out his grandiose conceptions during rehearsals which frequently stretched over many months. Even in Milan he experienced opposition and occasional artistic and popular failures, but Prometeo (1813) established his reputation as a choreographer of genius. Viganò’s dramatic ballets (or ‘choreodramas’, as they were called by Ritorni) were considered unique in style and in their overwhelming effect. According to Ritorni and other contemporary writers, they represented a departure both from the ballet pantomime, which was limited by an attempt to translate spoken dialogue too literally into gesture, and from the French ballet, which put greater emphasis on formal dance. Viganò attempted to create an immediately comprehensible gestural language that would exist in its own right rather than as a translation of spoken dialogue and that would require no programme. He was drawn to mythological and allegorical treatment of contemporary themes (Prometeo; I titani, 1819), partly because their message could be conveyed more effectively through the subtle language of movement than through the precision of speech. Although he took subjects from tragedies, both spoken (V. Alfieri’s Mirra, 1817; Shakespeare’s Othello, 1818) and operatic (La vestale, 1818), he largely reworked them to reflect his view of ballet as a genuine visual and theatrical art form. The dramaturgical disposition of Viganò’s ballets (as some years later in grand opéra) was based on tableaux instead of narrative structures; it was this imaginative synthesis of scene, music and choreography which caused Stendhal to describe Viganò’s ‘choreodramas’ as representing ‘the Romantic spirit’ in its highest degree.
For an illustration of Salvatore and Maria Viganò, see Ballet, §2(i), fig.12
C. von Ayrenhoff: Über die theatralischen Tänze und die Ballettmeister Noverre, Muzzarelli und Viganò (Vienna, 1794; repr. in Sämmtliche Werke, v, Vienna, 1814)
C. von Ayrenhoff: Schreiben des Eipeldauers über Richard Löwenherz (Vienna, 1795; repr. in Sämmtliche Werke, v, Vienna, 1814)
J. Richter: Die Eipeldauer Briefe (Vienna, 1785–95); ed. E. von Paunel (Munich, 1917)
‘Über Herrn Viganò's neustes Ballett: Das gefundene Veilchen’, Wiener Theater Almanach auf das Jahr 1796 (Vienna, 1796), 52–76
C. Ritorni: Commentarii della vita e delle opere coreodrammatiche di Salvatore Viganò (Milan, 1838)
A. Saint-Léon: Portraits et biographies des plus célèbres maîtres de ballets et chorégraphes anciens et nouveaux de l’école française et italienne (Paris, 1852)
F. Rust: ‘Ueber Salvatore Viganò's Originalscenarium zu L. van Beethovens Ballett “Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus”’, Neue Berliner Muzikzeitung, xlv (1891), 124–5, 133–4, 143–4, 152–4
H. Prunières: ‘Salvatore Viganò’, ReM, iii/1 (1921), 167–90
A. Levinson: ‘Stendhal und Viganò: eine Seite aus der Geschichte der Romantik’, Meister des Balletts (Potsdam, 1923), 69–94
C. Floros: Beethovens Eroica und Prometheus-Musik (Wilhelmshaven, 1978)
E. Raimondi, ed.: Il sogno del coreodramma: Salvatore Viganò, poeta muto (Bologna, 1984)
K. Hansell: ‘Il ballo teatrale e l'opera italiana’, SOI, v (1988), 252–72
FRIDERICA DERRA DE MORODA/MONIKA WOITAS