Carolina was on the bill when La Fenice ended seven years of silence. The audience was tumultuous. The dancer would be credited with calming it.
On 31 October 1866, the thirty-one-year-old ballerina appeared in Un'avventura di carnevale at the reopening of Venice's great theatre. The ballet was by Pasquale Borri, her husband. Contemporary observers credited Pochini with soothing an excited, disorderly audience, a rather more practical contribution to the celebrations than the speeches and agreements which had made them possible.
La Fenice had been closed since 1859. Its proprietors had withheld performances during the struggle over Austrian rule, and the closure continued while Venice remained outside the new Kingdom of Italy. Money troubles kept it shut as well. A theatre could make a political declaration without putting anybody on its stage. In this case, it did so for seven years. Other Venetian theatres kept operating, but the city's foremost opera house stayed dark, its absence part of the public life of a place still waiting for its change of government.
By the autumn of 1866, that wait was ending. The peace signed at Vienna on 3 October set out Austria's surrender of Venetia. The handover followed later that month, and on 21 and 22 October a plebiscite recorded a vote for union with Italy. The formal annexation decree would come in November. Between the vote and the decree, La Fenice opened its doors.
There was a good deal for an evening's entertainment to carry.
Pochini arrived well equipped to carry it. Born in Milan, she was the eldest daughter of a tenor, Ranieri Pochini, and a seamstress, Angiola Filippini. Her first dance teacher was her mother's sister, Maria Carolina Filippini. Further training followed with Carlo Blasis and Annunziata Ramaccini. The women in that beginning matter: her mother's work belonged to one trade, her aunt's to another, and it was through her aunt that Carolina began learning the profession which would take her into the great theatres of Europe.
As a teenager she danced in Vienna in 1851 alongside Fanny Elssler. In December 1853, at eighteen, she was engaged as prima ballerina at La Scala. She was of medium height, with small feet and strong, muscular legs, and she built her work on dramatic expression as well as steps. In the ballets associated with Borri, movement and pantomime worked together, so that the story depended on what a performer could communicate with her body as well as on the difficulty of what she danced.
In London, the praise had come with a reminder of how hard it was to displace a favourite. Appearing in Esmeralda in 1857, Pochini impressed a critic who nevertheless ended by invoking the dancer associated with the role: "but oh! Carlotta Grisi". An audience could admire the woman in front of it and still be thinking of somebody else. Other notices praised Pochini's daring, grace and vivacity. Even a successful dancer had to contend with a theatre's memories as well as its immediate demands.
On 28 October 1858, in Milan, she gave birth to a son, Luigi. The record does not name his father. In March 1860 she married Borri, and she went on dancing. The boy turned eight three days before La Fenice reopened.
By 1866 she was not a promising newcomer waiting to be discovered. She was thirty-one, a leading dancer for thirteen years, and the ballet she brought to Venice was her husband's. Their marriage joined two working careers. Borri supplied the choreography; Pochini supplied the performance which an audience actually saw. A name on the programme could establish expectations. It could not do the dancing.
The reopening programme paired the ballet with Verdi's Un ballo in maschera. For those returning to La Fenice, the occasion itself was an event before a note had been played. The public welcome treated the theatre's return as part of Venice coming back to life. Yet the opera's first La Fenice production met a much less obliging audience than such a celebration might suggest. Discontent grew noisy.
Patriotic satisfaction did not make the public less exacting.
La Fenice had been silent for seven years, and its return had been welcomed as a city's revival. A reopening could be voted for, celebrated and announced in the newspapers. It could not quiet a room. The opera had already received its noisy verdict. What was remembered of the woman dancing in Un'avventura di carnevale was different: the house was excited and unruly, and she was the one who calmed it.
