Elssler, Franziska , DIT Fanny (23 June 1810, Vienna; 27 November 1884, Vienna), ballerina, was born into a family of professional musicians, and her father was able to support his wife and children in relative comfort as long as he was valet and copyist to Joseph Haydn (see eighteenth-century volume for Haydn). After the composer’s death in 1808, her mother had to become a laundress to support her five offspring, while Thérèse and Fanny went to the ballet school at the Theater an der Wien to…