Stravinsky takes pleasure in bringing to life the sounds, smells, and colors of Petersburg of the late nineteenth century, insisting on their connection with his later musical work
The books of Stravinsky’s conversations with Craft became perhaps the most influential of their kind in the intellectual life of America in the sixties. They were avidly read in Europe, too, by the cultural elite. At the same time, Nabokov’s
The American cultural climate of the 1960s was especially receptive to that flowering. The fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, observed in 1967, drew much interest in Russian history and focused the attention of large audiences on “the remote, almost legendary, almost Sumerian mirages of St. Petersburg,” in the words of Nabokov. The mystery of the city, its historical fate, its rulers and inhabitants were analyzed and described on various levels and from different points of view in such disparate works as
Against the background of this heightened interest in Petersburg in the “high” and “low” spheres of American culture, Balanchine’s role and influence became very prominent. He succeeded in combining disparate aspects of the Petersburg mythos into a single enduring iconic image that had an enormous impact on the perception of Petersburg traditions by the American, and ultimately, the world audience.
When Kirstein invited Balanchine in 1933 to come to the United States to head a ballet company, the choreographer set one important condition: “But first a school.” Kirstein’s agreement determined in great part the future of American ballet, because for Balanchine schooling was never merely a question of technique. Kirstein recalled how the mother of one of the first potential students asked Balanchine, “Will my daughter dance?” Balanchine’s answer, in French, was neither simple prognosis nor polite avoidance: “La Danse, Madame, c’est une question morale.”141 Treating dance as a moral consideration was something Balanchine had inherited from the Petersburg masters, especially Petipa.
The school, according to Balanchine, had to lay the foundation both of the craft and of morality; they were not mutually exclusive. The attitude toward ballet as an entertainment did not hinder a serious opinion of its possibilities within the framework of high culture. Petipa saw himself simultaneously as court confectioner and enlightener. This Petersburg dualism unmistakably colored Balanchine’s activity in America.
And it was in New York City that Balanchine felt he was continuing Petipa’s work. It was only there that he could see himself as a sophisticated European, who had arrived—as Petipa had come from France to Petersburg—in a country of unlimited opportunity with a mission of converting the natives to the classical ballet. And like his illustrious forebear, Balanchine almost completely integrated himself into the culture of the country that had taken him in, in the process, as Petipa had done in Russia, molding from a traditional, highly stylized and constricted endeavor a vital, contemporary, and unquestionably national form of artistic expression.
In the United States, Balanchine’s neoclassicism, whose roots went back to the aesthetics of Petipa, took on unheard-of modern traits to become the “American style.” In Petersburg Petipa used the extraordinary Russian human material in building up the grandeur and lyricism of his ballets; in New York Balanchine was able to choose from that great American pool “bee-like little girls”—big thighs, nipped-in waists, pin-heads—who seem to be bred to the eminent choreographer’s specifications.”142
