In 1945, when Violetta Elvin joined the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in London, she opened a new window for the dancers of Ninette de Valois’s company. Elvin, who has died aged 97, was the first Soviet-trained ballerina whom the company had been able to observe at close quarters and aspects of her style were quickly adopted by her fellow dancers. Elvin, said Margot Fonteyn, “influenced our dancing long after the 10 years she stayed with us”.
Only 22 when she arrived in the UK, Elvin had been marked out for a high-flying career with the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, and formed by some of the very best teachers, including the St Petersburg trained Elizaveta Gerdt and Mariya Kozhukhova, the latter bringing to Moscow the methods of Agrippina Vaganova that underpinned all Russian training. Such was Elvin’s talent that she began her professional career at soloist level without the usual period in the corps de ballet.
She was blessed with great physical beauty, a natural glamour and remarkably beautiful port de bras (movement of the arms). These qualities are enshrined in the roles made for her by Frederick Ashton, the Fairy Summer in Cinderella (1948) and the seductress Lykanion in Daphnis and Chloë (1951), and the solo he created for her in Birthday Offering (1956), all of which showed off her lovely arms, supple back and the expansive nature of her dancing.
Many observers assumed that after Fonteyn’s retirement Elvin would become the company’s leading ballerina. As one critic wrote, she was the only dancer who “could give Fonteyn a run for her money”. But as it turned out, Fonteyn continued to dance until she was into her 60s while Elvin left the stage for marriage and motherhood in her 30s.
She was born in Moscow, the daughter of Irena Grimouzinskaya, an actor and artist, and Vassilie Prokhorov, a pioneer of aviation. Violetta’s training at the Bolshoi academy began before her ninth birthday and when she was 10 she appeared on stage dancing Amour’s variation in Don Quixote. On graduation in 1942 she was taken into the company as a soloist, but with the Nazi invasion of Russia and the evacuation of Moscow she moved to Tashkent.
There, the recently graduated Prokhorova danced the leading roles in Swan Lake, The Fountain of Bakhchisarai and Don Quixote. Her success in this varied and demanding repertoire resulted in a summons from Kuybyshev (now Samara), where the Bolshoi had been based for the duration of the second world war, and she reassumed her rank as a soloist with the company.
In 1943 the ballet returned to Moscow and Prokhorova danced the lead in Swan Lake on the famous stage of the Bolshoi theatre. Her performance was received with considerable acclaim and she was promised the title role in Petipa’s Raymonda, one of the most demanding in the classical repertoire. But the authorities frowned on her contacts among the foreign community in Moscow and instead of rehearsing the new role she found herself on loan to the less prestigious Stanislavsky theatre, where she had the consolation of a good working relationship with the choreographer Vladimir Bourmeister.
It was at about this time that she met and fell in love with Harold Elvin, an architect attached to the British embassy in Moscow. She obtained Soviet government permission for them to marry in 1944 – in part due to the intervention of the British prime minister Clement Attlee – and moved with him to London. She attended classes with Vera Volkova, who was then teaching at Sadler’s Wells, and it was there she was seen by De Valois and invited to join the Sadler’s Wells Ballet.
Her first appearance with the company was at the second performance of the memorable production of The Sleeping Beauty which opened its first season at the Royal Opera House in 1946. She danced the role of Princess Florine in the virtuoso Bluebird duet and made an immediate impression.
Other parts soon followed and she was eventually to dance all the classical leads as well as many of the roles created for Fonteyn or premiered by her. One such was the virtuoso lead in George Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial, which Fonteyn abandoned after the first run in 1941. Elvin was to dance the role 37 times, more than any of her contemporaries. Her range was considerable, embracing both the light-hearted comedy of the Miller’s Wife in Le Tricorne and the drama of the Black Queen in Checkmate.
Sadly, only a few further roles were made for her, the most notable being the Queen of the Waters in Ashton’s coronation ballet Homage to the Queen (1953). She also created leading parts in Roland Petit’s Ballabile (1950) and Andrée Howard’s Veneziana (1953).
Besides touring with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, Elvin made numerous guest appearances with companies in Europe and spent extended periods at La Scala, Milan and at the Theatro Municipal in Rio de Janiero.
In her last season with the company, Ashton created for her a beautiful variation in Birthday Offering, and she also gave four performances of the title role in The Firebird, a part that she had long coveted but which Fonteyn had guarded jealously. Elvin’s last appearance with the Sadler’s Wells company was as the heroine of The Sleeping Beauty. At the end of the performance De Valois spoke of Elvin’s “poise, grace and all the special qualities that belong to the Russian ballet”.
Her marriage to Harold had ended in divorce in 1952, as had a second, in 1953, to the US impresario Siegbert Weinberger. In 1959 she married Fernando Savarese, a lawyer who also managed his family’s hotel on the Sorrento peninsula in southern Italy. Elvin settled happily there, giving birth to a son, Antonio (known as Toti), in 1960.
In 1985, she was persuaded out of retirement to direct the ballet of the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, but found the working conditions difficult and remained for only one season.
She made three films, playing the Gypsy dancer in an adaptation of Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades (1949), the prima ballerina in Melba (1953) and Florence la Riche in Emeric Pressburger’s Twice upon a Time (1953). She also features in an archive recording, released on DVD in 2011, of Les Sylphides, danced for the BBC in 1953 with Svetlana Beriosova, Alicia Markova and John Field. Elvin maintained, however, that the cramped conditions of the television studio give a poor impression of the dancers.
Elvin appeared once more on the stage at Covent Garden in 1981 with a number of her colleagues and contemporaries as part of the Royal Ballet’s 50th anniversary celebrations and was greeted with tumultuous applause. She continued to travel widely, with both London and Moscow on her itinerary, and read widely in three languages.
Fernando predeceased her; she is survived by Toti.
Violetta Prokhorova Elvin, ballerina, born 3 November 1923; died 27 May 2021
Judith Cruickshank died in 2016
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