Australia Dancing - Bartho, Catherine

Bartho, Catherine

Talma: Portrait of Catherine Bartho, 1893

Catherine Bartho toured Australia in 1893 accompanying the Grand Italian Opera Company, also known as the Musgrove-Williamson Italian Opera Company. Billed as the premiere danseuse assoluta of the Imperial Theatres of Moscow and St Petersburg, Bartho had studied at the Imperial Ballet School, Moscow, and privately with Enrico Cecchetti. Bartho along with prima ballerina Enrichetta D’Argo of Teatro San Carlo, Naples, led a specially formed company of one hundred dancers, complementing the opera company. The composite company included eight coryphees, selected from the ballets at the Empire and Alhambra Theatres, London, and ninety dancers selected from the principal theatres of Australia and New Zealand.

The Grand Italian Opera Company was brought to Australia by J. C. Williamson to present the operas of Leoncavallo and Mascagni, whose works were lauded in Europe. The company’s tour opened on 9 September at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne. Three operas were presented during the six-week Melbourne season: Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci, and Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz and Cavalleria Rusticana. At the conclusion of each evening the ballet company presented Sketches in Turquoisette, or A Study in Blue. Of the opening nights performance a critic in the Australasian wrote:

‘The two leading danseuses, Mdlle. Catherine Bartho and Signorina Enrichetta D’Argo… are of attractive appearance, and in point of grace, deftness, and skill no exponents of their art who have yet visited Australia can be said to approach them. Their steps fall with the softness of snow-flakes on a swan’s back. Their execution of the most difficult poses and pirouettes is accomplished with an ease which is only attained by the most finished dancers.’

The Grand Italian Opera Company’s tour continued on to Adelaide, where they performed at the Theatre Royal, opening on 21 October. From Adelaide the company travelled to Ballarat and Melbourne, before concluding their tour the Lyceum Theatre, Sydney, where they opened on 6 November. During the Sydney season Gounod’s Faust was introduced to the company’s program, which was accompanied by a divertissement, created on Bartho for the occasion by Madame Phillipini.

On 9 February 1894 Catherine Bartho made her final appearance in Australia, prior to her departure for Italy, where she was engaged to appear at the Festival of Milan. Of Bartho’s farewell performance it was reported in a newspaper of the day:

‘As a choreographic artiste she combines a remarkable degree of that grace of line which may be called ‘sculpturesque’, with that rhythm of movement so aptly called ‘the poetry of motion’. In every dance of Mlle Bartho’s, the outline of the figure always falls into a succession of curves, which communicate the same sense of pleasure to the eye their repetition does in landscape scenery.’

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