Balanchine never met Petipa, who died in 1910. But the teachers at the ballet school recalled the elegant old man with the neatly trimmed beard and gold pince-nez. The old-timers liked to repeat his comical Russian expressions (after sixty plus years in Petersburg, Petipa hadn’t learned to speak Russian properly), remembered with awe his temper and demanding nature, and delighted in the wealth of his choreographic imagination. Petipa created his finest works at the close of his life. Ill and weak, he continued to rehearse; work was for him, as it would be for Balanchine, the best medicine. But Petipa’s final years were clouded by conflict with Telyakovsky, the director of the imperial theaters, who considered the choreographer “old hat” and an obstacle to the progress of the Petersburg ballet.
On January 19, 1904, ten days after the birth of Georgy Balanchivadze, Petipa wrote in his diary: “They are rehearsing
Balanchine read Petipa’s diaries and memoirs attentively, describing them to me with his sympathetic half-smile as “sad.” He was struck that Petipa had died an “unneeded and embittered old man.” The older Balanchine saw Petipa as the ideal choreographer. Petipa was not only enormously talented; for Balanchine, he was the right man at the right time in the right place. Balanchine saw him firmly established in the social landscape of his time, yet still free enough to compose dances not under the whip but out of an inner drive. Petipa felt proud to be “in his majesty’s service.” The Frenchman was lucky; Russia at that time, in Balanchine’s opinion, had a much greater life force than Petipa’s homeland. One of the main proofs of that for Balanchine was the well-known fact that the tsar’s treasury was the most generous in all of Europe for ballet.
Once Balanchine recounted to me an episode, recorded in Petipa’s memoirs, that apparently took on a special significance for the Georgian. Petipa was at the theater rehearsing the “grand pas with rifle” from Jules Perrot’s ballet
The director of the imperial theaters, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, once declared, “We must first of all please the royal family, then the public taste, and only third must we satisfy the purely artistic demands.” Balanchine, of course, was uncompromising on important artistic issues, but he also never forgot the choreographer’s duty to the public. And I suspect that in his American period Balanchine sometimes regretted the lack of august patrons.
That was the reason for Balanchine’s desire to establish contact with Jacqueline Kennedy when her husband was president. In modern America, the Kennedys were the closest approximation of a royal family. Mrs. Kennedy seemed to Balanchine to be a new empress who could become, in his words, the “spiritual salvation” of America. Characteristically, Balanchine remarked approvingly of one American who donated a substantial sum for the production of a ballet, “In Russia he would have been a prince.”
Another gift from Russia to Petipa, as far as Balanchine was concerned, was the “human material.” Choreographers express themselves through dancers, and much depends on the particular gifts of each dancer. Elizaveta Gerdt, a Petersburg ballerina Balanchine adored, liked to recall how Petipa invented variations for a dancer as Gerdt looked on. The dancer’s face showed that she was not happy. Petipa said, “Don’t like, I change it.” Then he started showing her another combination. Balanchine agreed that the choreographer could not be dogmatic and had to orient himself to a certain extent according to the individuality of each dancer.
