St Petersburg полностью

This observant comment of Stravinsky’s is inaccurate on only one point: “Balanchine’s ballerinas,” as they were soon to be called, were not little but as a rule tall women. They moved with incredible speed, accuracy, and musicality. They had that specifically American combination of athleticism, unbounded physiological joy in doing their turns and leaps, and a natural feel for complex, syncopated rhythms.

This made American dancers the ideal performers for Balanchine’s ballets set to Stravinsky’s music. Two émigrés from Petersburg formed a unique duo in the United States. In his lifetime, Balanchine choreographed almost thirty works by Stravinsky, from Ragtime in Petrograd in 1922 to Perséphone in New York in 1982. The great majority of these productions occurred in the American period. Balanchine felt much more the missionary about Stravinsky’s music than Petipa did about Tchaikovsky’s. Many people considered Stravinsky a father figure to Balanchine.

It was Balanchine’s achievement that Stravinsky’s late serial compositions—such as Movements for Piano and Orchestra—which initially met with resistance in the concert halls, were received rapturously when danced at the New York City Ballet. The 1957 production of Agon, the composer’s third ballet “on Greek themes” after Apollo and Orpheus, was a turning point. Agon’s tense and “alienated” eroticism and its modernist sparseness stunned American intellectuals.

The dance critic Arlene Croce recalled that “After one of the first performances of Agon a well-known New York writer said joyfully, ‘If they knew what was going on here, the police would close it down.’”143 Tickets were impossible to get for the “twelve-tone nights,” performances at Balanchine’s theater composed exclusively of ballets set to avant-garde music. Balanchine sensed the parallel between the discipline of classical dance and the discipline of twelvetone composition, a comparison that was gradually absorbed also by the intellectual audience of his modernist ballets. First drawn to Balanchine’s theater by the innovation of his repertoire, they began to accept classical dance in his interpretation as a truly modern phenomenon, worthy of the most serious attention. This was a cultural event of the greatest importance. As Nathan Milstein, a witness to this aesthetic revolution, commented to me later, “Balanchine saved ballet as an art form for the twenty-first century.”144

In the early decades of the twentieth century the international appeal of ballet was the result of the proselytizing of Diaghilev, who considered himself the child of Petersburg aesthetics. With Diaghilev’s death in 1929, the Petersburg connection with classical dance weakened and perhaps would have come to naught if not for the efforts of Balanchine. Balanchine also revived the Petersburg aura of Tchaikovsky’s music, which had waned significantly by the middle of the century.

Balanchine’s love of Tchaikovsky did not fluctuate with fashion. Among the first ballets he choreographed in America were Mozartiana and Serenade, to Tchaikovsky’s music. Each ballet evolved in its own way into signature pieces of Balanchine’s theater. The melancholy Serenade, with its flowing lines and an allegorical subtext, became one of Balanchine’s most popular works. Mozartiana, after several revisions, turned into an enigmatic homage to Tchaikovsky.

Returning regularly to Tchaikovsky’s music and to the works of Glinka and Glazunov, Balanchine set these compositions and his choreographic interpretation of them in a Petersburg context. This tradition began with Ballet Imperial (later renamed as Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2), produced in 1941 with scenery by Mir iskusstva member Dobuzhinsky as a specific “tribute to St. Petersburg, Petipa, and Tchaikovsky.” Subsequently, the imperial and court associations were persistently used in Balanchine’s Petersburg works.

This is particularly interesting because there was nothing “imperial” or “courtier-like” in Balanchine’s character, habits, and tastes. Of course, he was a courteous Petersburg gentleman, but it would be hard to call his behavior overtly aristocratic. As Milstein noted, Balanchine “was a monarchist and a democrat, one does not preclude the other at all.”145 His monarchism was nostalgic and aesthetic. Though Balanchine loved hamburgers and cowboy movies, in the rehearsal hall he became an autocrat. In that sense his theater could be called a tiny monarchy, with the choreographer at its head.