This is a key point. Many dancers, perhaps following Balanchine, are suspicious of words, and understandably so: they spend their lives working with their bodies and with music, and words are simply not their trade. Words, moreover, can get in the way of dancing. They signal self-conscious thought, and the moment they play through a dancer’s mind her concentration and the way she responds physically to music risk changing. Words can distance a dancer from the music and from her own impulses, and make her movement appear remote and flat—her mind is literally elsewhere. Thus words, no matter how insightful or smart, can obscure the revealing spontaneity of pure dancing: “don’t think, just dance.”
Serenade has a way of preventing words from seeping in. In the opening tableau each dancer is asked, through the simple gesture of turning out the feet, to enter the ballet—to set aside the concerns of the real world and focus entirely on the music and dance. The choreography builds from small movements to more complicated and engrossing steps that are so full-bodied there is no time to think or reflect. The steps flow seamlessly: they feel like the music sounds and any dancer willing to give herself over to the music and choreography and trust its patterns and her own years of training will lose herself and—like the dancer held aloft and arched in surrender—achieve a kind of transcendence (even when she is also sweaty and short of breath). This is what the ballet is about, and this is what the audience sees: it is about dancing, physical and metaphysical. “I feel like I’m talking about a religion.”
Serenade was Balanchine’s American beginning, but the ballet also firmly established the Russian roots of his art and Tchaikovsky’s towering presence. “The world Tchaikovsky lived in no longer exists,” Balanchine once reflected. “I’m not very old, but I still remember that world, which is gone forever. I was born and raised in the old Russia … some ten years after Tchaikovsky’s death. Petipa died when I was about six years old. But Tchaikovsky and Petipa were alive for me. And people around me talked about them as if they were alive.” It mattered too, Balanchine once explained, sounding a familiar theme, that Tchaikovsky was of the Orthodox Church: “Religion is primarily faith, and people today are used to treating everything skeptically, mockingly. That cannot be.” Indeed, true to Orthodox tradition, in which ghosts and the dead are an accepted and commonplace presence in the world of the living, Balanchine thought of Tchaikovsky as a constant companion and guide: “When I was doing Serenade, Tchaikovsky encouraged me. Almost the whole Serenade is done with his help.”48
With Tchaikovsky came Petipa, another pillar of Balanchine’s art (“my spiritual father”), and Balanchine created many ballets that paid homage to the Imperial tradition. Serenade was one, in its attention to classical detail and in its religious atmosphere, but there were others where the debt was even clearer. Ballet Imperial (1941) had a glittering Petersburg backdrop and an array of Petipa-like steps, “stolen,” as Balanchine liked to put it, from his memories of old ballets, many of them never produced in the West. Raymonda Variations was Petipa’s Raymonda without the story: just the dances, reinscribed and elaborated in Balanchine’s hand. Theme and Variations began, like Serenade though in a very different key, with a tribute to classical principles and the geometry of ballet’s basic positions—dancers performing strict classroom exercises. It ended with a magnificent polonaise in a regal Imperial style.49
Of all his ballets evoking old Russia, The Nutcracker (1954) is of course the best known. Although most people know this ballet as an American tradition, it was drawn from Balanchine’s memories of Petipa and Tchaikovsky’s 1892 ballet, revivals of which he had seen as a child, and from his memories of Russian Christmases.50 The party scene cast back to traditional holiday parties Balanchine had once attended at the Bolshoi Hall, with children dressed in their finest and playing games. The spectacular tree that grows and grows to fantastic heights was like the tree in his childhood home—grandly pictured in a child’s mind, lit with candles and bursting with chocolate and oranges, gold paper angels and stars “tangled up in silver ‘rain’ or tinsel.” The land of the sweets brought to mind Eliseyevsky’s, the grand Petersburg shop full of delectable treats. His idea, he explained, was to evoke the fun but also the mystery and spirituality of Christmas. “It wasn’t the way it is now, with everyone shouting, running around panting as if it’s a fire instead of Christmas. Back in Petersburg there was a stillness, a waiting: who’s being born? Christ is born!” Petipa had originally made the ballet as a tribute to Russian Christmases he had known; Balanchine carried the tradition forward. His Nutcracker was a memory of a memory.51
Balanchine’s identification with Tchaikovsky was so deep that toward the end of his life, when he was ill and knew he might be dying, he created Adagio Lamentoso (1981) to the fourth movement of the composer’s Sixth Symphony (Pathétique). This ballet, which has never been staged since, was performed with solemnity and awe: the dancers understood its significance. There were flocks of angels in gilt wings, and dark monk-like figures who formed the shape of a cross. The lead dancer was Karin von Aroldingen, one of Balanchine’s few European dancers (born in East Germany) and a performer of great theatrical imagination. This time, the weight of tradition was part of the point, and Balanchine later told her, “You know how to mourn.” At the end of the ballet a small child in white stood alone in the dark center stage with a lit candle; as the music died, he blew out the light. Balanchine later described the moment: “The melody goes down, down, dies out: strings, then woodwinds. Everything stops, as if a man is going into the grave. Going … going … gone. The end. Tchaikovsky had written his own requiem!” So had Balanchine.52
Serenade and Adagio Lamentoso were bookends: at the beginning and the end of his American life, Balanchine returned to Tchaikovsky. It is not always easy, however, to characterize what came in between. Balanchine’s oeuvre was huge—more than four hundred ballets, many unfortunately lost—and extraordinarily diverse: it does not neatly divide, for example, into comedies and tragedies, or into historical or biographical periods. Indeed, Balanchine did not so much progress as circle back over and again to the themes that preoccupied him throughout his life. His most radical ballets, for example, did not follow one from the other but emerged instead over nearly half a century: he created Apollon Musagète in 1928, Four Temperaments in 1946, Agon in 1957, and Violin Concerto in 1972. The same could be said of his best waltz ballets, all of which cast back to a lost or dying European past: La Valse came in 1951, Liebeslieder Walzer in 1960, and Vienna Waltzes in 1977. Balanchine also frequently reworked and revised: Apollon Musagète with Serge Lifar in 1928 was elaborately costumed and recalled Louis XIV, but Apollo, as it was now called, with Jacques d’Amboise in 1957 was a stripped-down, black-and-white modernist essay. (D’Amboise later recalled resisting the golden Louis XIV curls—he wanted to dance his way, black hair slicked back Elvis-style. Balanchine agreed.)
What Balanchine did in the course of it all was to give classical ballet a tradition. This might sound simple, but it was not. He did not mount classic ballets from the past, as Lucia Chase and Ninette de Valois were doing. Indeed, Balanchine was always suspicious of revivals and insisted that old dances, however great (and including his own), did not always make sense in the present day. Because ballet is ephemeral, tied to fashion and the look of an age, its tradition is limited by memory and generation. Music, however, had better notation and more access to the past. Thus, rather than tying ballet back to its own ancestors through Petipa to Bournonville, Viganò, or Noverre, Balanchine (following Diaghilev’s lead) anchored it instead in the long, distinguished, and infinitely more retrievable Western musical tradition. His taste was broad and serious: he made dances to (among others) Bach, Mozart, Gluck, Schumann, Brahms, and Hindemith; to Bizet, Ravel, Glinka, and above all to Tchaikovsky’s Russian heir and Balanchine’s closest collaborator: Igor Stravinsky.
The point was never just to use music to take the dancers back to old ballet styles. When Balanchine created Le Palais de Cristal (late
r retitled Symphony in C) to Bizet’s Symphony in C Major for the Paris Opera Ballet in 1947, for example, he did not ask the dancers to assume faux romantic poses or to tie their hair into low-knotted buns, Taglioni-style. To the contrary, the ballet captured the essence of the French school of ballet (tinged with Imperial Russia), with its formal rigor and decorative flair—which Balanchine knew firsthand from his work in Paris and Petersburg. There were other French ballets too: “Emeralds” from the three-act Jewels, to music by Fauré and originally danced by the French ballerina Violette Verdy (another of Balanchine’s European exceptions) was more intimate and perfumed, with simple, lace-like walking movements and a reflective mood: evocative of the Paris of Fauré, circa 1900.
Maurice Ravel held a special place. Balanchine and Ravel had crossed in Paris in the 1920s, and a half century later, in 1975, Balanchine paid tribute to the composer in his Ravel Festival. Balanchine’s dances to Ravel’s music were wide-ranging and drew on a variety of dance and musical forms, from the baroque-inspired quadrilles of Tombeau de Couperin (François Couperin was court composer to Louis XIV) to the ballroom dances in La Valse. La Valse—probably Balanchine’s greatest ballet to Ravel’s music—was choreographed in 1951 for Tanaquil Le Clercq. The music comprised two pieces, Valses Nobles et Sentimentales (1911) and La Valse (1920), which had originally been commissioned by Diaghilev. It had been composed at a difficult moment in Ravel’s life. Distraught by the First World War and weakened from dysentery acquired during his military service, he was also suffering from the loss of his mother, who had died in 1917. The music, with its disturbing moodiness and undercurrents of violence, evoked the decadence of the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire. He called it “a fatefully inescapable whirlpool” and an “apotheosis of the Viennese waltz” and wrote darkly in notes to himself (quoting the Comte de Salvandy), “We are dancing on the edge of a volcano.”53
Which is how the ballet feels to watch. We see a glamorous young woman at a ball, three Fates, and a looming black figure of death. It begins in a ballroom (the chandelier is glittering but black) where the Fates, in tulle gowns and long white gloves, perform elegant—too elegant—movements with limbs that extend luxuriously only to retract, and careless flipping hands. Their cold beauty and the dark musical undercurrents hint at events to come, but at first we hardly notice: all is glassy and smooth as couples waltz with apparent order and poise—except that the Fates are always there, overshadowing with their disrupted movements and collapsing postures. Even the costumes, designed by Karinska, tell a story of ambiguity and hidden shades of feeling, the women’s skirts, which looked soft and pale, were in fact composed of several layers of bright color: red, orange, purple, and pink with a single layer of translucent gray over the top. The headpieces were made of black-rimmed rhinestones woven with black horsehair.
Gradually the dances begin to fray; a girl in white enters and tries to dance with a man, but she is self-absorbed and their encounter is full of vulnerabilities and missed opportunities—steps that build only to fragment and dissolve, uncertain embraces. Finally Death (suave and in black) arrives at the ball and seduces the girl with black jewels and finery until she finally succumbs. Now fully clad in black elegance, she dances with Death—it is a crippled dance, almost violent, full of broken, flinging movements and contractions—and finally collapses dead on the floor. The waltz goes on and the other dancers, with the Fates triumphant, whirl furiously around her body in a churning, ritual circle dance. In an image reminiscent of the death of the Chosen One in Nijinsky’s Sacre du Printemps, she is lifted overhead, limp and supine, above the dizzying fray, which continues as the curtain falls.
Years later Balanchine returned to the theme of the waltz in Liebeslieder Walzer, premiered in 1960 to music by Brahms. We find ourselves in a nineteenth-century parlor where four couples are waltzing. In the first half of the ballet the women wear heeled shoes, not pointe shoes or special ballet slippers, and Balanchine gave them a proliferation of waltz steps, lilting, romantic, and suffused with quiet emotion. Then the curtain briefly falls. In the second half the dancers return, but this time the women are in pointe shoes and the garden doors are flung open. These two seemingly unrelated facts have changed everything: we have moved from social convention to the inner world of feeling (these are their “naked souls,” as one dancer put it). Yet there is no story of love or thwarted desire, no grand announcement of feeling—there is only the waltz. And if we are transported from the parlor to another emotional plane, it is not a leap away from social conventions to some faraway spiritual world, as in ballets past; this is not the humid woods of romantic sentiment or even the repressed psychological landscape of Tudor’s dances. If anything, Liebeslieder is an argument for convention and artifice: the dancers need the formality of the salon to get to the intimacy of the garden.
It was a point that did not go unnoticed at the time. Balanchine created Liebeslieder just as America entered the 1960s, and a vortex of newly relaxed ideas about culture, love, and so much more. John Martin, writing for The New York Times, commented:
How radical can you be, after all? Avant-garde or no avant-garde, George Balanchine has really plowed up our established mores, esthetic and social, this time.…what has he done? What has he done, indeed! He has created a ballet that takes love out of the clinic. After all!…What are they [the waltzers] concerned with? Well, certainly not reefers or pellagra or the prenatal stigmas of their maternal grandmothers. They are absorbed by the vital and intense preoccupations of youth in the throes of romance.…We find ourselves transported, not into a remote period but into a rusty awareness of a long disestablished verity. Love, indeed, has been restored to respect.54
In 1977 Balanchine returned once again to the waltz and its Austro-Hungarian world in Vienna Waltzes, to music by the waltz kings Johann Strauss Jr., Franz Lehár, and Richard Strauss (from Der Rosenkavalier). The ballet is a tour through the waltz, from the Vienna woods to a grand mirrored ballroom where Suzanne Farrell, alone and melancholy, encounters a man who briefly passes through her life; the lights go up and the stage floods with women in white silk gowns partnered by men in elegant evening dress, poised and spinning in a glorious evocation of elegance and romance. The production was extravagant, with more than sixty gowns, waistcoats, and vests made from the best fabrics imported from Paris and a myriad of hand-sewn detail (tucked into the folds of Farrell’s gown was a small gold rose). When Balanchine was asked why it was necessary to spend so much on fine silk, he responded tartly, “Because it moves. It’s natural, made by worms. Nylon doesn’t move, it’s made by machines.” Karinska, who created the costumes, with their secret and hidden details, had her own answer: “It’s for the soul.”55
In these three ballets Balanchine traced the waltz backward from its twentieth-century decline to its glorious Vienna Congress apogee. Indeed, the further the nineteenth century receded, the more he seemed to want to pull it back and re-create its world onstage. The waltz had long been a metaphor, in literature and art, for romantic visions and decadence, and so it was with Balanchine. Part of him belonged to the nineteenth century; when he made La Valse in 1951 this past was still not so distant, and he and Ravel had both grown up in its shadow. By 1981, though, it was all but extinct. The waltz was just the waltz, beautiful in and of itself, but it also stood for a way of life Balanchine valued, for courtship, manners, and an old-world European civility. He seemed to be insisting that we remember, and experience, all of that and not lose sight of it in an age that increasingly prized novelty and forgetting. And if the dancers suffused the waltz with their own here-and-now urgency and energetic modern style, that too was the point. Balanchine’s nostalgia was never wallowing; it always had a sharply forward glance. To him and his dancers the waltz mattered now.
Balanchine brought other traditions forward as well. The Danish ballet master August Bournonville was there, not in his ballets but in the male dancers and teachers Balanchine imported from Copenhagen. The Italian players were
represented too: Harlequinade (1965), with music by the Italian-born, Maryinsky-based composer Riccardo Drigo, drew on commedia dell’arte and pantomime while also paying tribute to Petipa (who had first staged Les Millions d’Arlequin in Petersburg, where Balanchine later danced it as a student). Tarantella was inspired by the boisterous Neapolitan folk dance, transposed into American daredevil athletic bravura. Both of these ballets featured Edward Villella—himself of Italian descent—who has written of Balanchine’s careful coaching in the commedia dell’arte tradition. But it was not only commedia dell’arte that interested Balanchine. He also made dances to the music of Christoph Willibald Gluck, whose Orpheo and Eurydice, with choreography in Vienna by the Italian ballet master Angiolini, had been so important in the history of late eighteenth-century ballet. In 1963 Balanchine choreographed dances for a staging of Gluck’s opera in Hamburg, and in 1976 these dances became the basis for Chaconne (titled after the baroque dance form traditionally performed at the end of a court ballet).
Apollo’s Angels Page 64