Living Dolls: Coppélia at the New York City Ballet

"Because they're impossible, absolutely impossible," replied George Balanchine when dance critic Nancy Reynolds asked why he had waited so long to stage Coppélia for his New York City Ballet:

I'm not interested in Coppélia. So I didn't do it [for decades, that is, until 1974]. I was doing something else that was much, much more important, because it was not Ballet Russe. I didn't do The Sleeping Beauty. I didn't do a full-length Swan Lake. I didn't do Giselle Nutcracker—it was beautiful music and a title, so it brings people.

Balanchine's "something else," his "much more important" mission, consisted of nothing less than the complete modernization of ballet, a systematic stripping away of dance's literary trappings of plot and character to reveal the essence of his art. Our modern idea that, above all, dance means bodies moving with music grew largely from Balanchine's rejecting Serge Diaghilev's Ballet Russe vision of ballet as an ideal synthesis of all the arts, and his creating choreography so powerful it not only could, but needed to, stand alone.

Balanchine's svelte, modernist aesthetic, leading ultimately to his famous, non-narrative leotard ballets on bare stages, sprang as much from economic necessity as from first principles. Eliminating expensive productions like Diaghilev's, with their sets and costumes by artists like Picasso, Matisse, Derain, Braque, and Rouault, Balanchine could both focus on choreography and get his audience to focus on it too.

He knew, however, that economic necessity sometimes meant more is more. Pressed by the management at City Center, where NYCB performed from 1948 until Lincoln Center opened in 1964, to come up with hits as well as experiments, Balanchine bred several cash cows, including his 1949 one-act Firebird and his 1951 one-act Swan Lake, topping both with his 1954 Nutcracker, his first full-length work for NYCB, which kept the company in the black for over half a century. Healthy box office freed him to create such challenging and mesmerizingly pure dances as Ivesiana, Agon, Episodes, and a cluster of masterpieces for the 1972 Stravinsky Festival—all of which drew crowds as well. "We did it, finally," Balanchine said of Coppélia, "because of Saratoga," the upstate New York resort, where the company's open-air summer home has five thousand seats to fill. "It's special for them. And . . . for the children." When he needed to, he took on the "absolutely impossible."

The New York City Ballet's Coppélia has turned thirty-five this year—on July 17, 1974, it premiered at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, as Balanchine promised—and its coral anniversary finds this most sunny of nineteenth-century ballets in high spirits, especially with the débuts of two exceptional young ballerinas in the role of its heroine, the improbably named Swanilda. Principal Sterling Hyltin, with Gonzalo Garcia as her moony fiancé Frantz, and soloist Tiler Peck, partnered by Andrew Veyette, when added to the still-young principal Megan Fairchild, who has danced the role since a teenager in 2003 and now pairs with Joaquin De Luz, give NYCB as strong a gaggle of Swanildas as the company has ever had. During the Winter and Spring 2009 seasons I happily watched all three casts at Lincoln Center's Koch Theater, Hyltin and Garcia in their joint début on January 10, Fairchild and De Luz on May 2, and Peck and Veyette on May 3.

Coppélia demands such a strong Swanilda because she stands at the ballet's center. The clever village girl outwits the eccentric inventor Dr. Coppélius, saves the life of Frantz, her beloved, and teaches him the meaning of romantic commitment. Loosely derived from E. T. A. Hoffmann's macabre tale "The Sandman," Coppélia feels like the comic flip side of its morose inspiration. Both story and ballet involve the mysterious Coppélius, who creates a female automaton, the object of the male hero's obsession; but there the resemblance ends. In the ballet, Frantz's infatuation with Coppélia, whom...