Balanchine on Stravinsky

When George Balanchine wrote "The Dance Element in Stravinsky's Music" in 1947 for the issue of Dance Index on Stravinsky in the Theatre,¹ he had known the composer and worked with his music for over twenty years. The two met in 1925, soon after the twenty-one-year-old Balanchine left the USSR and joined the Ballets Russes as dancer and choreographer under the great impresario Serge Diaghilev. After setting a series of opera-ballets for the Monte Carlo Opera (including the premiere of Ravel's L'Enfant et les sortilèges), Balanchine's first assignment for the full company was a restaging of Le Chant du rossignol, followed three years later by Apollon Musagètes, which he came to see as a key influence on his development as a choreographer. It was from Apollon's "oneness of tone," Balanchine said, that he learned the need for restraint and to simplify, to eliminate. In this respect, for the rest of his life Stravinsky's example was to be a constant inspiration and stimulation. Fifty-four years later, in 1982, at the second Stravinsky Festival, the New York City Ballet performed Balanchine's last ballet: a solo to the Variations in Memory of Aldous Huxley. In between he had commissioned three major works by Stravinsky (Jeu de cartes, Orpheus, and Agon),² choreographed at least twenty-three others (several of them more than once), and staged both the American premiere of The Rake's Progress for the Metropolitan Opera in 1950, and in 1962 the television premiere of Noah and the Flood. In 1972, a year after Stravinsky's death, he celebrated the composer with a festival that remains a high point in the memory of those of us fortunate enough to be there, premiering on opening night alone two masterworks, the Symphony in Three Movements and the Violin Concerto.

What brought Stravinsky and Balanchine into what became an increasingly close artistic and personal relationship was not merely the Diaghilev connection, or their shared Russian background. Unlike most choreographers, Balanchine was not only musical (as one hopes all choreographers to be) but a trained musician: along with his dance training he studied piano and theory for three years at the Petrograd Conservatory in hopes of becoming a composer, like his father. Realizing that he would never achieve distinction as a composer, he decided to continue with dance rather than becoming a concert pianist or conductor. Balanchine could both read orchestral scores and use them to create piano reductions. As Stravinsky remarked, "The world is full of pretty good concert pianists but a choreographer such as Balanchine is, after all, the rarest of beings."³

Certainly Balanchine's focus in this essay—on Stravinsky's use of pulse, time, and silence, as well as his remarks on abstraction in music and dance—reveals a deep understanding of music far beyond works intended for ballet. See for instance his comments on the twovoiced fugue in the Elégie for solo viola (a work he set three times in totally different versions, always insisting that the solo instrument must not be doubled); or note how he finds passages in the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (a work he didn't set) "irresistible in the way they bring dance phrases to mind." Particularly interesting is Balanchine's remark that in "the Symphony of 1945 [Stravinsky] reviews almost everything he has done before," for in retrospect the period in which Balanchine wrote this essay was to prove critical for both choreographer and composer. Balanchine was making a definitive return from freelancing and staging musicals to directing the New York City Ballet, the company that would involve him for the rest of his life.⁴ At the time, he and Stravinsky were working on Orpheus, whose music and choreography are masterpieces in and of themselves. Stravinsky was already mulling over his next project, The Rake's Progress, after which he would set off on the journey that would lead him in unexpected new directions, culminating in 1957 with Agon, a breathtaking achievement that remains a twentieth-century focal point in the meeting of music and...