On Change in Balanchine: “Ballet Imperial” and “Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto no 2.”
1, 2. I post these two contrasting photographs, taken sixty-four years apart, of the sensational concluding tableau of the same Balanchine ballet: Ballet Imperial or Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto no 2. 1, a superb photograph, was taken at Covent Garden in 1950 by the excellent Roger Wood, showing the full impact of Eugene Berman’s sets and costumes in enhancing the “imperial” nature of Balanchine’s choreography for the 1950 production by the Sadler’s Wells Ballet (today’s Royal): the ballerina is Margot Fonteyn, the kneeling soloist Beryl Grey. 2 is a freeze-frame from a live action film taken of New York City Ballet in 2016 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris: the ballerina is Sara Mearns, the soloist Lauren King.
Balanchine made this classic as Ballet Imperial in 1941. He supervised it in a number of “imperial”-looking productions that evoked his intense fantasy of St Petersburg’s historic architcture and Tsarist dimensions. The Berman production came to the end of its shelf life in 1959. In 1963, it was replaced at Covent Garden by one designed by Carl Toms. But the atmosphere that the Berman had created on dancers and audiences was profound. Nadia Nerina, one of the demi-soloists in the 1950 premiere, graduated to the ballerina role later in that decade. In 1960, she visited Leningrad (St Petersburg) for the first time, dancing with the Kirov (Maryinsky): when she visited the Winter Palace (Hermitage), she remarked that she had already inhabited its aura by dancing in Ballet Imperial.
Balanchine never staged it for New York City Ballet (founded in 1948) until it moved to Lincoln Center in 1964, when evidence suggests he also established faster tempi (especially in the last movement) and eliminated the ballerina’s most famous step, the double sauts de basque (happening twice in successive phrases). Balanchine was a serial reviser of his own ballets. In Ballet Imperial, he changed steps from ballerina level to corps level; in its second movement, he also sometimes added mime gestures and sometimes subtracted them.
Then, in the early 1970s, announcing that “Nobody knows what imperial is any more”, Balanchine had the ballet re-named Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto no 2 and redesigned with its women in loose - roughly knee-length - shifts, which freed up his dancers’ impetus. Later, he approved the spelling “Tschaikovsky”, because that is how the composer signed himself on his visit to New York. (Balanchine also said, in a 1979 conversation published after his death, that the ballet had never looked ballet than it was looking now. Patricia McBride and Merrill Ashley were alternating in the lead role. Kyra Nichols, for some of us the greatest exponent of all those we have seen in the role, made her debut in it in 1980-1981. Great days.)
It’s hard to say how unforgivable many people found Balanchine’s decision to change the ballet’s look. Some companies, notably the Royal Ballet, could not bear to present the ballet without its imperial look: it was not danced at Covent Garden in the last ten years of Balanchine’s life.
Once Balanchine died (1983), however, the Royal and several other companies reverted to the tutus and to the name Ballet Imperial. (In 1993-2006, the Royal resurrected the 1950 Berman production, but unfortunately with a new kind of white wig for the women that looked awkwardly artificial.) A number of other companies, American Ballet Theatre not least, also presented their own stagings of Ballet Imperial with tutus in the post-Balanchine era.
New York City Ballet, keeping the ballet in regular repertory and retaining the name Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto no 2, has taken the shifts/dresses through several changes of design, each one worse than the last. Miami City Ballet is among the other companies I’ve seen dance Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto no 2 with loose dresses.
The New Yorker critic Arlene Croce accepted the redesign but always stated her preference for the old Ballet Imperial nomenclature. As I remember, that is how the Maryinsky Ballet has presented the ballet during this century: Ballet Imperial but with loose dresses.
I’ve loved this ballet both ways and with both names, chiefly with American companies: the greatest accounts in my experience have been by New York City and Miami City companies. (I’ve also deplored some versions of both tutus and dresses.) I never saw it until after Balanchine’s death; I’ve had to piece together parts of its performance history since then.
The numerous differences between these two photos takes time to analyse: not one 2016 dancer is in the same position as her or his 1950 predecessor. I love Balanchine’s need to keep altering his own creation, as if passing light through a prism.
If you came to Balanchine’s ballet in his lifetime, the Master’s revisionism was a very present part of the Balanchine experience, and a constant source of controversy. In January 1980, for example, I happened to attend the very first performance of Apollo at New York City Ballet at which Balanchine introduced what proved to be his final revision (the restoration of Apollo’s first solo, which he had cut the first year). Nobody in the audience knew it was coming; I later discovered that Balanchine only made the change that afternoon, allowing Peter Martins (the evening’s Apollo, making his first New York appearance in the role for eight or more years) and the orchestra a limited time to prepare. Argument was still rife then over the changes he had made in 1976 to the Elegy of Serenade (with its leading three women performing with loosened hair). Many of his changes were puzzling: why did he keep the title Concerto Barocco when he jettisoned that of Ballet Imperial? Why did he name it Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto no 2 when he insisted on the Siloti edition of the score, one to which it was now known to which Tchaikovsky objected? Why had he used the title Divertimento from “Le Baiser de la fée” (1972) as if honouring Stravinsky’s score of that name, when he had made large changes to that score, omitting parts while adding one extensive non-Divertimento chunk and then, in 1974, adding a yet longer one? (It’s a great ballet, but it calls for another name.)
There are many answers to these questions. In the case of Ballet Imperial, one factor is surely that Balanchine’s returns to St Petersburg/Leningrad, the city of his birth and education, had persuaded him that it was a mistake to hark back to a culture that he knew changed beyond recognition. Yet the restoration of Apollo’s first solo in 1980 showed that even Balanchine sometimes recognised he needed to correct his own recent change. I did not know when he was alive that I would miss his need to go on fixing ballets he had made decades before; but I do. Part of the Balanchine experience was the author’s way of telling the audience “You think you know this ballet? Oh no - you don’t.”
Thursday 5 August
1: The concluding tableau of George Balanchine’s “Ballet Imperial”, as staged by Balanchine for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet at Covent Garden in 1950, with new designs by Eugene Berman. There were eighteen curtain calls.) Margot Fonteyn is the ballerina, Beryl Grey (kneeling) the soloist.
2: The concluding tableau of “Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto no 2”, as danced by New York City Ballet in Paris in 2016. Sara Mearns is the ballerina, Lauren King (kneeling) the soloist.