Balanchine felt that his first successful attempt was a piece to the art song “Night,” by Anton Rubinstein. This work already showed traits that would be present in Balanchine’s later productions: no plot, quasi-classical steps, and eroticism.
As Danilova recalled, “At the end of the piece the young man lifted the girl in an arabesque and carried her offstage. Today that is the usual thing, but then it was shocking. The impression was that the girl had given herself to her partner without a word.” The inspectress, “hateful Varvara,” cried in shock, “It is amoral!”111 But the students of the Petrograd ballet school, at whose graduation concert in 1920 “Night” first saw the light of day, were delighted. The number quickly became popular.
Another production by Balanchine that appeared on many Petrograd stages was “Valse triste” to the music of Sibelius, which Balanchine did for Lydia Ivanova. She appeared before the audience as if fleeing some evil pursuer, perhaps Death itself. Like a blind woman or a somnambulist she moved toward the edge of the stage, and just as the spellbound public expected her to fall into the orchestra pit, she turned abruptly and froze with her back to the audience.
In the finale of “Valse triste,” Balanchine boldly used an expressionist device reminiscent of the works of Edvard Munch but undoubtedly reflecting the influence of silent movies: emoting horror, Ivanova opened her mouth in imitation of a cry for help, without uttering a sound. The effect was extraordinary. The number was repeatedly staged in Russia after Balanchine left for the West, but without his name; it became public property. He later revisited and developed the motif of somnambulism in his ballet
The young Balanchine’s reputation was also based on the respect his musicianship elicited. They knew at the Maryinsky Theater that even Marius Petipa had never learned to read a musical score. As Lopukhov recalled, the ballet school usually graduated “poorly educated people, even though they knew how to wear a ballet costume and conscientiously perform their dance parts.”112
Of course, Michel Fokine played the mandolin well, and Lopukhov was known as an excellent guitarist. But Balanchine, with his broad musical education, had moved far beyond that. Even in the ballet school he had amazed his peers with his piano improvisations. He had also organized an amateur orchestra for which he arranged music using some very eccentric “instruments”: pots and pans, jars, tubs, and combs. As a friend of those years, Pyotr Gusev, recalled, in the finale of the overture to
In 1919, while still a student at the ballet school, Balanchine decided to enter the Petrograd Conservatory. With the encouragement of the director, the composer and author of the ballet
The sixty-three-year-old Zurmullen had reason to be pleased with her student: Balanchine quickly learned quite difficult works, soon playing Beethoven sonatas and Chopin etudes. In those years Balanchine enjoyed improvising at the piano and also composed a lot, primarily piano pieces in the style of Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, as well as art songs.
Balanchine wrote an art song to the poetry of Yevgeny Mravinsky, later a celebrated conductor and the first interpreter of many of Shostakovich’s symphonies but at the time an extra at the Maryinsky Theater and a pianist at the ballet school. In 1982 Balanchine recalled wryly, “I wasn’t very knowledgeable about poetry then, and I thought, well, he seems sensible, a poet. So why shouldn’t I write music to his poem? And so I did.”113 Balanchine set great store by Mravinsky’s interpretation (with his orchestra, the Leningrad Philharmonic) of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies. Mravinsky’s recordings of the symphonies were kept in a conspicuous place in Balanchine’s office at the New York City Ballet.
Balanchine even showed his compositions to Leonid Nikolayev, a respected composer in Petrograd who was famous as a professor of piano at the Petrograd Conservatory. His students included three rising stars—Vladimir Sofronitsky, Maria Yudina, and Dmitri Shostakovich. Later in life Balanchine felt little love for Shostakovich, finding his work esthetically alien. But Shostakovich admired Balanchine in his Petrograd years both as a choreographer and as a dancer.
