The genesis of Balanchine’s “Serenade”: a chronology and bibliography

Jim Steichen’s generous contributions, based on his research toward his forthcoming book on Balanchine’s first ten years in America, have been crucial for the years 1934-35.

An earlier version of this essay was published in 2016 in Ballet Review as Serenade - a chronological list of evolutionary changes and a bibliography.

George Balanchine was known, even notorious, for the many changes he made to his ballets over the years. Even by his own standards, however, the revisions he made to Serenade are exceptional. Since the 1950s, it’s been known as a romantically classical work with its women in long dresses and with continuity between the four movements. Until 1950, however, it went through successive productions, all with women in skirts ending at the knee or above it; until 1940, it used only the first three movements of its four-movement score and presented them as isolated entities. In 1976, he made the women of the Elegy (the music’s third movement, presented by Balanchine as its finale) perform it with loosened hair: this wasn’t the first time he had tried something along these lines, but it remains controversial among those who remember it with hair bound.

Later, Balanchine liked to speak as if he had been gradually pursuing a single goal with this work. Evidence, however, shows how his idea of this ballet changed. Likewise the importance of Serenade itself to him developed considerably. And he repeatedly revised what he thought Tchaikovsky’s music was telling him.

On August 26-28, 2015, I convened a three-day seminar on multiple aspects of this ballet at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; I thank Jan Schmidt, director of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. The seminar was filmed for the Library for the Performing Arts by François Bernadi. Silent film clips from Serenade performances in 1940 and 1944 (both Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo), 1951 and 1953 (both New York City Ballet) were shown, each in a different set of costumes; and photographs of Serenade from 1934 onward. It was administrated by Daisy Pommer, head of dance films for the Library. Present were Mindy Aloff, Jared Angle, Paul Boos, Holly Brubach, Vida Brown, John Goodman, Susan Gluck Pappajohn, Nancy Goldner, John Goodman, Robert Greskovic, Elizabeth Kendall, Allegra Kent, Simon Morrison, Gwyneth Muller, Kyra Nichols Gray, Claudia Roth Pierpont, Robert Pierpont, Nancy Reynolds, Suki Schorer, Victoria Simon, Jim Steichen, Carol Sumner, David Vaughan, Joy Williams Brown, most of whom contributed. (Robert Greskovic and Suki Schorer were especially instrumental.) On March 24, 2016, Robert Greskovic and I presented an evening of rare films and illustrations of Serenade at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’s Bruno Walter Auditorium, Lincoln Center.

This chronology and bibliography arose from these sessions. In addition to the above names, assistance via email was given by Toni Bentley, Amy Bordy, Maria Calegari, John Clifford, Arlene Croce, Suzanne Farrell, Emily Hite, Susan Hendl, Amanda Hunter, Nicholas Jenkins, Deborah Jowitt, Elizabeth Kattner-Ulrich, Nancy Lassalle, Andrew Litton, Pat McBride Lousada, Barbara Milberg Fisher, Kay Mazzo, Colleen Neary Christensen, Susan Pilarre, Anne Polajenko, Daniel Pratt, Francia Russell, Sharon Skeel, and Alice Standin.  Nancy Lassalle, Pat McBride Lousada, and Barbara Milberg Fisher were all valued friends who have since died; I honour their memory.

Further conclusions on Serenade and other Balanchine ballets are to be found in my 2021 essay for Liberties vol. 1 no 2, “Balanchine’s Plot.” AM.

1934.

1.Rehearsals begin on Wednesday, 14 March at School of American Ballet (637, Madison Avenue) in New York.

(What edition of the score was used? A copy of the piano rehearsal score, reflecting changes made at New York City Ballet in and probably before the 1960s, shows, among other things, two bars at the end of the Sonatina that are in no edition now known.)

According to Lincoln Kirstein’s handwritten diary for March 14:

“Balanchine doing new things to Errante. Started working on Serenade to Tchaikovsky’s music. He said his head was a blank & asked me to pray for him. He lined every one up according to their heights & commenced slowly to compose a hymn to ward off the sun.” (It’s possible that Kirstein wrote “a hymn to ward off the sin”; he may also follow “sin/sun” with an unquote mark as if ending a quotation from Balanchine’s own words. Most readers, including some who knew Kirstein and his handwriting, agree the word looks like “sun.”) “He tried two dancers breaking the composition, first in toe-shoes, then without; without won. The gestures of the arms and hands already seemed to me to have Balanchine’s creative quality. When I ebulliently suggested this to Dimitriew, he said je ne sais pas, dampening my too excessive and ready admiration…” (Kirstein, handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

There are several subsequent versions of Kirstein’s diaries, however. A typed transcript of the handwritten diary – very probably typed by Kirstein himself in later years, making significant omissions and emendations throughout – has the following:

“Balanchine doing new things to ERRANTE. Started working on SERENADE to Tchaikovsky string-music. He said his head was a blank and asked me to pray for him. He lined everyone up according to their heights and commenced slowly to compose a hymn to ward off sin. He tried two dancers breaking the composition, first in toe-shoes, then without; without won. The gestures of the arms and hands already seemed to me to have Balanchine's creative quality. When I ebulliently suggested this to Dimitriew, he said ‘Je ne sais pas,’ dampening my too excessive and ready enthusiasm....” (Kirstein, typescript diaries, same box, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

Kirstein adapts that in the 1970s for publication as follows:

“Work started on our first ballet at an evening ‘rehearsal class.’ Balanchine said his brain was blank and bid me pray for him. He lined up all the girls and slowly commenced to compose, as he said – ‘a hymn to ward off sin.’ He tried two dancers, first in bare feet, then in toe shoes. Gestures of arms and hands already seemed to indicate his special quality. When I reported this to Dimitriew in his office, he growled: ‘Je ne sais rien du tout,’ calculated to crush my too ready approval.” (Kirstein, New York City Ballet, Thirty Years, p.37.)

(The next sentence of the handwritten original has Danilova, then visiting New York, saying that Holly Howard is already better than Toumanova in Mozartiana. The day ends with Kirstein writing about Martha Graham for The New Republic.)

Kirstein’s handwritten account, written on or immediately after the first day of rehearsals, should be compared with the much later memories of Balanchine (see 7) and Ruthanna Boris (see 9). It should be noted, however, that Kirstein’s point (New York City Ballet, Thirty Years, p.37) about the evening rehearsal is a later addition. Boris (see 9) remembers the opening rehearsal as taking place in the morning.

Kirstein in each version is brisk about how Balanchine lined up the women, whereas to Balanchine ( see 7) and Boris (see 9) – both writing later - this was of crucial importance.

2. Alternative versions of the ballet’s inception have been given. Jim Steichen writes:

“In fact, Serenade may have begun even earlier. Arnold Haskell’s Balletomania, written almost literally as the paint was still drying on the new studios of the School for American Ballet in New York, makes a possible reference to Serenade, noting at the close of an interview, conducted in 12 January 1934, that Balanchine ‘is already hard at work, creating a repertoire, the first work in which is to be an homage to his beloved classicism.’

“Ruthanna Boris, one of Balanchine’s first students at the School of American Ballet and one of his first important American dancers, maintains in her recollections of the ballet’s creation that it had already begun to take shape in late 1933.”

(Steichen, The Stories of Serenade: Nonprofit History and George Balanchine’s “First Ballet in America,” p. 10, James Steichen Working Paper #46, Spring 2012 http://www.princeton.edu/~artspol/workpap/WP46-Steichen.pdf)

Nonetheless, Steichen now disputes both Haskell’s and Boris’s assertions. Kirstein’s unpublished original diaries surely establish the March 14 date of the first rehearsal.

3. Kirstein later writes:

“While the purpose was certainly eventual performance, no date was set; we were all too occupied with day-to-day maintenance to consider any definite time for public exposure.” (New York City Ballet; Thirty Years, p.38)

The handwritten originals of Kirstein’s unpublished diary suggest that Balanchine may well have completed a first draft of the choreography for Serenade before March 29. (See 6.) Certainly, having begun with the Sonatina, Balanchine is at work on the Elegy on March 26 and admits many to watch a rehearsal on March 29. If so, he nonetheless made revisions almost up to the June 10 premiere.

4. What strikes Kirstein in his March 14 diary is gesture. By this, he recognizes the “creative” or “special” quality of Balanchine.

The opening ritual of Serenade, as has been often observed, transforms its seventeen young female dancers from women into turned-out classical dancers. Its nine stages - moving from that raised hand down to the feet, and, finally, opening up the whole body - approximately reflect the music’s descending scales. (For Ruthanna Boris’s description, see 9.)

If the opening gesture was part of “a hymn to ward off the sun” (“sun” rather than “sin”), then this is part of a long tradition of interpreting the opening gestures as a way of screening the eyes from the light. Later – we cannot ascertain the date - the light is seen as moonlight.

The second movement is the bend of the wrist. This has been analyzed variously. Carol Sumner (email March 16, 2016) says “it is not just a flick of the wrist; the elbow bends at the same time that the hand drops – but the hand is reacting to what it had to do to shield the eyes from the sun, and this move initiates the next one. It feels logical, natural – it’s real life, done within the meter of the music.” Suki Schorer (Serenade seminar, August 27, 2015) teaches a slight lift of the wrist and forearm while the hand drops. Victoria Simon (Serenade seminar, same date) says that the action is “a breath”: the initial breath that brings the ballet into life: with which Schorer strongly agrees.  

The third is a slow port de bras (Allegra Kent, demonstrating this at the Serenade seminar, August 27, 2015, says “It’s like ‘The air is heavy’”) that ends by placing the wrist on the forehead. The fourth brings that arm down to cross the chest, the hand now resting at the base of the neck. The fifth is bras bas.

The sixth stage is the turnout of the feet into first position: of which Martha Graham said that it filled her eyes with tears: “It was simplicity itself, but the simplicity of a very great master – one who, we know, will later on be just as intricate as he pleases.” (Taper, Balanchine, p. 169). It is not known when Graham first saw Serenade, though it may well have been the March 1935 season of the American Ballet (she attended this, as Kirstein’s diaries show, but she may have missed Serenade). She probably spoke of it to Taper when relations between Balanchine and herself were at their friendliest, around 1959, the time of Episodes.

The seventh is tendu battement side (with arms opening from first to second); the eighth has the legs and feet closing in fifth position (with arms lowering to fifth en bas): the tendu and fifth position are the two most crucial items of Balanchine ballet style. (The five women of the Russian dance begin by closing in fifth position.)

The ninth, and last, is a port de bras opening through first to second position, with the palms turning and the head lifting (a backward bend of the neck and topmost spine) so that the face, arms, and hands address the sky.  This uplift of face and arms to the heavens is another of the images that suggest a religious quality (see 12).

Almost all these stages become thematic material that returns during the course of the ballet. No formal turned-out first position, however, recurs.

5. As the ballet has been seen since 1966, this ritual returns twice more, each time when the music echoes the opening of the Sonatina with those descending scales.

In the first, at the Sonatina’s end, the “Waltz” heroine repeats the ritual as far as bras bas. According to Ruthanna Boris (though her account may not be reliable here – see 10), this was part of the original 1934 choreography.

The ritual’s second return is in the Tema Russo. When Balanchine first added the Tema Russo in 1940 (see 79), he did so initially with two musical cuts, one of which included this musical sequence. Only when he opened those musical cuts in 1966 (see 122) did he choreograph the final recapitulation of the ballet’s opening ritual and formation.

6. How did Balanchine end the Sonatina? The City Ballet piano rehearsal score shows its final two bars of the Sonatina has been penciled out, because they correspond to no known edition. Balanchine until 1966 also penciled out the loud, sharp ffz chord with which the Sonatina usually ends (unless this was a post-1934 change). He also made a diminuendo to the previous bar. This had the merit, as conductor Andrew Litton pointed out (correspondence, January-March 2019) of making a smoother transition from the Sonatina to the Waltz. But in 1934 there was no man in the Sonatina or Waltz; and the Sonatina may have ended with the latecomer completing the ritual phrase; also the Waltz was a separate scene.

Kirstein’s handwritten diary entries for March 14-29 - the period when probably most of the ballet’s 1934 choreography was made - include these entries:

“<March> 15. At rehearsal, Serenade progressed a few bars. In it, I see traces of arms as in Mozartiana and groups from Errante.

“<March> 16. …Balanchine didn’t want anyone to see Serenade yet; impasse.…

“<March> 20. …Blue material arrived for the school’s costumes. Rehearsals of ‘Serenade’ proceed…. A part in ‘Serenade’ where they get on their knees. The girls complained. B. said when he was composing Fils Prodigue for Lifar, he was on his knees for two weeks…..

“<March> 21. Watching Balanchine creating Serenade: Dimitriew & he had a row over G.B. giving so much attention to Marie Jeanne Pelus, who on account of her age may not be allowed to dance at all. Serenade very interesting: as Dimitriew says - Balanchine has now hit his stride and style; for years he was doing trick stuff hoping for surprise; something no one had ever done before. Now it was pure Balanchine. I see Errante & Mozartiana & Cotillion”<sic> “in it: figures even: but new uses of lines: new languor: new Romance. Also Balanchine is pleased with our progress. D. said three wks ago he felt it was a crisis: students dropping off: but now even de Basil & the Monte Carlo co. doesn’t phase him: Only he will show nothing to managers until we have four ballets: he is in no hurry. He knows we’ll be safe.” (Kirstein, handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

Marie-Jeanne Pelus (1920-2007) is thirteen at the time of these Serenade rehearsals. In the 1940s, after dropping the name Pelus, she becomes celebrated as Marie-Jeanne, creating the ballerina roles in the revised 1940 Serenade (see 54, 77-78, 88), Concerto Barocco, Ballet Imperial, and other Balanchine ballets.  She danced in successive editions of Serenade until 1948 (see 105).

“<March> 22. … ‘Serenade’ is coming along. I recognize its sources in Errante and Mozartiana. Alfred and Marge Barr to rehearsal. Unresponsive and intelligent….

“<March> 26… Madame Riabouchinska to rehearsal of Serenade which has now a wonderful pas de trois of Heidi Vossler,<sic> Chas Laskey and Maloney. She said she cdn’t believe Balanchine cd. do anything so tender….

NB: This evidently describes the Elegy. Was Balanchine basing it on the Elegy in Fokine’s “Eros” to the same music?

“<March> 28… ‘Serenade’ considerably changed.…

“<March> 29. …Enormous crowd of people invited to see Rehearsal:… Dim. furious at the onrush wdn’t let us go through to see Mozartiana…. I was so nervous of Dimitriew’s displeasure I cd. derive no pleasure from ‘Serenade’, changed & improved.” (Lincoln Kirstein handwritten unpublished diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

7. Balanchine, however, later speaks of the first rehearsal as if the operative factor is not gesture but the number of girls present: seventeen. (Gesture, as he told the story, is the next issue.) In Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets, he (or Francis Mason on his behalf) writes:

“Soon after my arrival in America, Lincoln Kirstein, Edward M. Warburg, and I opened the School of American Ballet in New York. As part of the school curriculum, I started an evening ballet class in stage technique, to give students some idea of how dancing on stage differs from classwork. Serenade evolved from the lessons I gave.

“It seemed to me that the best way to make students aware of stage technique was to give them something new to dance, something they had never seen before. I chose Tchaikovsky’s Serenade to work with. The class contained, the first night, seventeen girls and no boys. The problem was, how to arrange this odd number of girls so that they would look interesting. I placed them on diagonal lines and decided that the hands should move first to give the girls practice.

“That was how Serenade began. The next class contained only nine girls; the third, six. I choreographed to the music with the pupils I happened to have at the time. Boys began to attend the class and they were worked into the pattern. One day, when all the girls rushed off the floor area we were using as a stage, one of the girls fell and began to cry. I told the pianist to keep on playing and kept this bit in the dance. Another day, one of the girls was late for class, so I left that in too.

“Later, when we staged Serenade, everything was revised. The girls who couldn’t dance well were kept out of the more difficult parts; I elaborated on the small accidental bits I had included in class and made the whole more dramatic, more theatrical, synchronizing it to the music with additional movement, but always using the little things that might ordinarily be overlooked.

“I’ve gone into a little detail about Serenade because many people think there is a concealed story in the ballet. There is not. There are, simply, dancers in motion to a beautiful piece of music. The only story is the music’s story, a serenade, a dance, if you like, in the light of the moon.”

(But see 96, 120, and 128 for what he said on later occasions about stories within Serenade.)

The two-part Dance in America TV documentary Balanchine (1984) includes a film clip in which Balanchine says that he was just making dances to show his new American dancers how to perform onstage.

In an account written decades later, Ruthanna Boris remembers Balanchine starting with the opening formation we see today; she provides a diagram to show how she and Annabelle Lyon, the shortest girls, were placed at the front. (Reading Dance, edited by Robert Gottlieb, pp.1063-69.)

Certainly Balanchine and Kirstein confirm that he worked on the 1934 Serenade in a way that he seems never to have used so pointedly before or again, incorporating the chance events of rehearsals: the girl who falls over (see 29); the day only nine girls turned up (Kirstein, Thirty Years, p. 38); the girl who arrives late (Leda Anchutina according to Kirstein, p.38; Annabelle Lyon according to herself and Ruthanna Boris– see 31); the first man who arrives by himself; the four men who arrive together one day. 

Balanchine pointedly says that nine girls came one day, six the next. It may or may not be relevant that the Sonatina, as we now see it, has an early incident in which two separate groups of nine and six girls are played antiphonally against each other.

8. The ballet begins with seventeen women. Balanchine said, “I happened to, I have seventeen dancers. And I placed them, almost looks like orange groves in California, you know? If I had only sixteen, even amount, there would be two lines. And now people ask me, why do you place them that way? Because I have seventeen.” (1984 documentary Balanchine, Production of Thirteen/WNET New York, Produced by Judy Kinberg, Directed by Merrill Brockway, Written by Holly Brubach, West Long Branch, NJ: Kultur, 2004. Quoted by Jim Steichen. The Stories of Serenade: Nonprofit History and George Balanchine’s “First Ballet in America,” p. 10, James Steichen Working Paper #46, Spring 2012 http://www.princeton.edu/~artspol/workpap/WP46-Steichen.pdf)

Balanchine, however, had not yet been to California. So this may be one of many wise-after-the-event stories in the histories of himself and this ballet.

9. Ruthanna Boris (1918-2007), writing several decades later, recalls that Balanchine, at the first rehearsal, Balanchine - after announcing “we will make some steps” and creating the opening formation - started not with a gesture but by speaking to the seventeen women of his life in Russia (“It was revolution, bullets in street”) and his move to Europe:

“Little by little his talking became more and more like a report—less conversational, more charged with feelings of anger and distress: “In Germany there is an awful man - terrible, awful man! He looks like me only he has mustache - he is very bad man— he has moustache – I do not have moustache – I am not bad man – I am not awful man!’… It seemed to me he was tasting his words and trying to get past them. To the best of my memory no one knew what he was talking about. We were adolescent and young ballet dancers, mostly American, mostly aware of the dance world, unaware of governmental affairs in the world beyond it….

“Suddenly he paused, fell silent, drew himself up and proclaimed, ‘When people in Germany see that man they do this’ – his right arm shot out in front of him, raised diagonally up toward the ceiling. He continued, speaking softly, leaving his arm exactly where it was ‘But you see, I am not bad man, I do not wear moustache – maybe for me, you do this.’ He moved his arm to the right side, still held in a right diagonal. His voice went on ‘Now put together feet, side by side – now, turn face, eyes look at hand. Now maybe hand is tired, hand falls down.’ His hand slowly relaxed its stiff salute, his finger-tips, then hand, then wrist softened and dropped until the wrist was completely bent, the hand suspended from it. He continued, ‘Now head is tired, cheek rests on left shoulder, wrist rests right side forehead, hand falls down, rests front of left shoulder, head change, rest on right shoulder, rests front of left shoulder, hand, arm fall down, meet left hand, make position preparation, feet make position one, arms position two, battement tendu par terre à la seconde, right foot, close position five front, arms again position preparation, and, we dance!’

“He had shown all the hand., cheek, head, and arm positions as he spoke them; we had picked up and moved along with him, just as we had been practicing to do in all our  technique classes for all the months we had been working with him.”

Boris recalls that only then does Balanchine have the music played by the pianist Ariadna Mikeshna. “It did not go perfectly the first time we did it. We all realized there was much refining and polishing ahead, but! we were on our way…. We roughed out half the first movement that first morning, configuration after configuration for groups, small solo enchaînements interspersed between them, lots of running, weaving in and out between each other, sudden pictures made by interwoven arms, varieties of body level in relation to the floor, always moving, always connected in time and space.

“That night, as I lay in bed mentally rehearsing all I had learned in two one-hour rehearsals that morning, counting the ten-minute speech before the dancing began, the wonder of his way of making dancing filled me with a swelling sense of mystery. The words he had said, the image of an awful man with a moustache who looked like him transformed into an opening of sad reverie that became a dance of gracious connections and beauty! The dancing that seemed to pour out of him as he worked among us had reminded me of a spider spinning a web. I looked up at my bedroom ceiling, and said, ‘Whatever you are, wherever you may exist, you were with us in Studio A this morning. I want to understand why he said what he said and did when he did. Maybe sometime I will.’” (Reading Dance, edited by Robert Gottlieb, pp.1065-67)

This may be a conveniently elided account. By the time it was written, Balanchine had revised the ballet extensively several times; Boris herself had danced the leading role in 1944-46 performances (see 93-95). In her subsequent account of later rehearsals, she seems to misremember two points that evidence suggests occurred in neither 1934 or 1935. (See 31.) Her version not only includes much that Kirstein’s original diary entry omits (the reference to Hitler above all), it also omits the rehearsals of Errante and Mozartiana mentioned in Kirstein’s original diary. It is not, however, the only account of Serenade that links the opening gesture to Hitler; and Boris also spoke to both Mindy Aloff and Nancy Reynolds of Balanchine’s words about Hitler and the opening formation.

Some, plausibly, have seen a connection between the opening of Serenade and the German and American modern dance of the 1930s (German movement choirs, for example). It’s possible Balanchine, whose mind was turning to Hitler according to Boris, may have thought here of German group modern dance, though there is no firm evidence. We know that he wanted the Russian dance (Tema Russo), added in 1940, to have a modern-dance (probably Bennington) quality. See 79.

10. Despite Balanchine’s words about the music’s story being “a serenade, a dance, if you will, in the light of the moon,” Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings is often solemn and contains, especially in its Elegy, passages of considerable melancholy or anguish. No previous musical serenade (for example those by Mozart, Brahms, Dvorák) had contained such depth of feeling. Although Tchaikovsky began it in 1880, its first performance was given on April 30, 1881 (Old Style) in memory of the pianist Nikolai Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky’s close friend, who had died 11 March. (The first performance of the Serenade is often given as later that year, but Simon Morrison has recently discovered this in the unpublished notes of the Russian conductor Eduard Nápravnik.)

     Aspects of both death and new life are often noted in Balanchine's Serenade choreography. Is this connected to his own recent tuberculosis in 1929-30? Kirstein's 1933-34 diaries several times mention other people's expectations that Balanchine has three years or one left to live. On March 16, four days after start of Serenade rehearsals, Kirstein takes Balanchine for a medical check-up. "With Bal. to Dr. Geyelin; thank God he is very much better than he was before, & may get absolutely cured. Gayelin said he could screw whomever he wished as long as he didn’t kiss them.” (Kirstein handwritten diaries. Quoted by permission.) "You know, I am really dead man," Balanchine told Ruthanna Boris later. "I was supposed to die, and I didn't, and so now everything I do is second chance." (Robert Gottlieb, Balanchine - The Ballet Maker, 2004, Harper Press, p. 58.)

11. Balanchine choreographs the first three movements of Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings music for the School of American Ballet: Sonatina, Waltz, Elegy. 

He does not choreograph the final movement, the Tema Russo or Russian dance, until 1940. (See 79-82.) Since that contains several of the key images of Serenade - the five girls linked together at the start, the heroine and hero suddenly arriving from opposite sides to stop like stags with antlers locked, the heroine who falls spectacularly as the corps runs out - this is hard for us to imagine. 

Probably (see 32) he choreographs the three movements as separate scenes without the through continuity that the ballet acquired in 1940 or earlier.

12. Although the words “hymn to ward off sin” may not be what Kirstein wrote in 1934 about the first day’s rehearsal of the ballet’s opening gesture, nobody has questioned it since he published it in 1973. If correct, it is the first of several suggestions of religious imagery in Serenade.

The opening ritual has a devotional quality, like nuns saying their vows; and the idea of a sorority like a religious collective may be felt at several later stages, right through to the Elegy’s final cortège at the ballet’s end. See also 4 (the end of the opening ritual), 14 and 39 (the Dark Angel beating her “wings”), 17 (the winged angel at Tchaikovsky’s grave), 20 (Orphic imagery), 41-44 (the ballet’s ending), and 133 (arms in prayer).

13. In using only the first three movement of Tchaikovsky’s four-movement Serenade, Balanchine is using the same music that Mikhail Fokine used in 1916 for Eros, a ballet that Balanchine must have seen in its 1922 Petrograd revival. (A negative account of its 1916 production is given by André Levinson in Ballets Old and New, pp. 92-93,)

14. There are other striking connections between Fokine’s Eros and Balanchine’s Serenade. Notable among these is how both works echoed the arrangement of figures struck by Antonio Canova for his Cupid and Psyche sculpture. Balanchine, in conversations in the late 1960s and early 1970s, confirms to John Clifford that he was alluding directly to the Canova Cupid and Psyche sculpture. (Clifford, email to Alastair Macaulay, May 14, 2016.) On August 28, 2015, both Elizabeth Kendall and Robert Greskovic spoke at length of Eros; Robert Greskovic returns to this (“Rare Films and Illustrations of Balanchine’s Serenade”) on March 24, 2016.

It may well strike Balanchine that this Canova statue, properly titled Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, recurs in the three cities most important to his career: St Petersburg, Paris, and now New York. The first (marble, 1787-91) has been in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, since 1824. The second (marble, 1794-99) has been in the Hermitage, St Petersburg, since the nineteenth century. The plaster model for the second, inherited by Canova’s favorite assistant, Adamo Tadolini, is in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Cupid (or Eros), with wide wings, leans down toward Psyche, whose arms stretch up to circle his head while his descend to frame and embrace her upper torso; their faces come close for a kiss. This image occurred not only in Fokine’s original but also in subsequent revisions of it; Robert Greskovic shows (August 28, 2015, Serenade seminar, and March 24, 2016, “Rare Films and Illustrations of Balanchine’s Serenade”) a photograph of Galina Ulanova in this position with Mikhail Dudko, a male dancer who was Balanchine’s Mariinsky contemporary.

It is this “Canova” image that Balanchine uses in the Elegy of Serenade for the heroine, her male partner, and the female dancer often known as the Dark Angel. In the Balanchine’s Elegy, the Canova echo is strongest when the male dancer has his final farewell to the heroine, with the “Dark Angel,” her face unseen, close behind him and extending her arms like wings. (As he and the Dark Angel return to the vertical, she beats those “wings” three times – see 41, 102 - and, in the same rhythm, places one hand over his eyes to render him sightless and the other hand across his chest: the configuration in which they entered at the start of the Elegy.) In a pointed quotation of the Canova sculpture, the 1944 Ann Barzel film – see 94 – shows the heroine (Ruthanna Boris) rings her arms around the man’s (Nicholas Magallanes’s) neck and stretches up for a farewell kiss.

15. Parts of Fokine’s Eros scenario, as Elizabeth Kendall shows, are close to some of the other events in Serenade, notably its Elegy. The Romantic themes include love, fate, and dream; Fokine’s heroine near the end has a “waking from a dream” moment, which corresponds to the way the Elegy’s heroine rises from the floor after the man’s departure. It is important in the Serenade Elegy that, near the end, its heroine is lowered to lie on the same part of the floor on which she is found at its start (and, since 1940, on which she fell at the end of the Tema Russo).

Marcia Siegel: “She is back in the spot where she first fell. Seeing her there again, with the man hovering behind her, is like returning to the start of a flashback in a film. Now we seem to understand how she got to be there…” (The Shapes of Change, p.78)

This “flashback”-like quality may be derived from Eros. Eros also features a statue of the title deity. So does Balanchine’s 1947 Paris production of Serenade: see 99.

Elizabeth Kendall writes (Balanchine and the Lost Muse: Revolution & the Making of a Choreographer, Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 196) of Lidia (Lidochka, Lida) Ivanova in 1923 performances of Eros:

“In Fokine’s 1916 Eros, about a girl torn between the pagan girl and a Christian angel (the angel wins), Lidochka played one of nine nymphs dancing the traits of romantic love in front of the statue of Eros. Lida’s nymph was Jealousy…. The Eros nymphs danced to the sweeping waltz that would become Balanchine’s Serenade’s second movement (perhaps with the ghost of Lidochka still in it).”

16. There may be other Fokine connections. Kirstein (Thirty Years, p.38) notes that Fokine's Chopiniana (Les Sylphides) “derived from a situation corresponding to our own - schoolroom, or an academic recital projected toward repertory theater.”

Balanchine’s 1940 addition of the Tema Russo gives a specific echo of Les Sylphides (see 79) and of another Fokine device (see 81).

A central Balanchine device, evident at the start of Serenade, may well derive from Les Sylphides. The music begins and the curtain rises to reveal a tableau that remains motionless. Only on a particular moment in the music does the dancing begin. This remains Balanchine’s usual way of commencing a ballet for the rest of his career. Seldom does the curtain rise on dancers already in motion: in this respect, Allegro Brillante (1956) is a rare exception.

It’s also possible that Balanchine’s style in Serenade is influenced by the Russian choreographer Kasyan Goleizovsky (1892-1970). Balanchine mentions Goleizovsky as an example in early conversations with Kirstein. See, for example, Kirstein handwritten diaries, February 10, 1935.

17. Others, including Tim Scholl, also argue that the image of a winged angel behind the hero comes from Tchaikovsky’s grave. Robert Greskovic shows this image on August 28, 2015 (Serenade seminar) and March 24, 2016 (“Rare Films and Illustrations of Balanchine’s Serenade”).

Balanchine himself stresses in later years that he felt Tchaikovsky was with him throughout Serenade (“Almost the whole of Serenade is done with his help.” Balanchine in Solomon Volkov, Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky, p. 35.) This is said late in Balanchine’s life. It is not easy to reconcile it, however, with his many changes of mind about Serenade over the decades.

18. The possible connections of the Serenade Elegy to pathos, death, and the realm of the dead are complex. It is possible to feel that the heroine is already dead, like Eurydice, when the Dark Angel brings the Orpheus figure to her; or that she dies when he leaves her; or that she moves toward death at the very end.

Elizabeth Kendall suggests (Balanchine and the Lost Muse – Revolution & the Making of a Choreographer, 2013, pp. 10, 196, 234-6) that the Elegy’s heroine was inspired by the death by drowning of Balanchine’s friend and dance contemporary Lydia Ivanova, just at the time Balanchine was leaving Russia in 1924. This may also connect to the theme of water imagery that many find in several parts of Serenade. (At the end of the Sonatina, as the corps walks out across the stage, they hold their hands behind them. The image given to New York City Ballet dancers since the 1950s has consistently been “as if trailing your hands in the water”. Victoria Simon and Gwyneth Muller speak of this at the Serenade seminar, August 28, 2015.)

Kendall (referring to Balanchine as “Georges”) writes:

“He reversed the order of the last two of Tchaikovsky’s four movements, so the third, an elegy, comes at the end, and the ballet itself becomes an elegy. On the way to this elegy’s raison d’être, the dancers enact some scenes that seem peculiar and deliberate. A woman comes in late and tries to find her place in the corps de ballet. The same woman later trips and falls to the ground. (Both events really happened in rehearsal and went into the choreography.) A man enters after the girl has fall and walks toward her, with another girl hugging his back and shielding his eyes – so he won’t see the fallen girl? So he can’t help her?  The two pause beside the fallen girl, and the walking girl, now hidden by the man, flaps her arms like wings to the music, as if giving wings to the fallen one. She and the man continue walking offstage, then the fallen girl gets up and runs to another tall dancer on the other side of the stage (as Giselle runs to her mother at the end of her mad scene). In her embrace, she slips down and is lowered to her knees. Has she died? She’s preparing, at any rate, for the next phase of her destiny, which will transpire in heaven.

“Here is the subject of Serenade’s elegy: another victim, another ballet corps like the one in Giselleor The Sleeping Beauty, or in Georges’s own Marche Funèbre for the Young Ballet. But the corpses in earlier ballets rise again to dance. Serenade’s corps doesn’t. She’s lifted instead sill in a standing position by four men who come onstage for this purpose, then carried across the stage into the upstage right wing. Her raised face meets a ray of light.  A train of Serenade’s corps de ballet follow, their faces raised too, and arms raised forward in supplication.

“Is she Lidochka? Who can know? Whoever she is, she’s spared the indignity of being carried horizontally. She enters heaven vertically, in a ray of light, like the ray of light Lidochka once dies in onstage in Valse Triste. And Serenade’s music is the same that Fokine used for his ballet Eros, in which Lidochka danced so memorably… And all of Lidochka’s friends knew how she felt about Tchaikovsky. ‘Sometimes I would like to be one of the sounds created by Tchaikovsky,’ she once wrote on a picture for a fan, so that sounding softly and sadly, I could dissolve in the evening mist.’ In Serenade, she does that.” (Balanchine and the Lost Muse, pp.234-36.)

There are minor errors here. Kendall confuses the girl who fell in 1934 rehearsals with the heroine’s fall at the end of the 1940 Tema Russo. The Dark Angel in the Elegy surely shields the man’s eyes so that he will have no choice but to meet the woman to whom she is – temporarily - leading him. Allegra Kent (August 27, 2015) is among the Balanchine dancers who does not interpret the ballet as ending with death or heaven, though she does agree it is about a new phase of existence. Nonetheless Ivanova may well have been in Balanchine’s thoughts with this music.

19. Another death that may have affected Balanchine was that of the young Danish ballerina Elna Lassen. He spent a few months in late 1930 in Copenhagen, where his first choreography for the Royal Danish Ballet was to Liszt's Liebestraum (September 16, 1930, http://www.balanchine.org/balanchine/display_result.jsp?id=156&sid=&searchMethod=&current=&stagings=&refs=1&tvs= per “100. [Duet and Trio],” Liszt, Liebestraum) . In this, Balanchine partnered Elna Jørgen-Jensen in a pas de deux, then danced with Elna Lassen and Ulla Poulsen in a pas de trois.

Poulsen speaks of the pas de trois in I Remember Balanchine:

“His own role was not very big. He had stopped dancing because of his health, but I know it was something that he loved. Liebestraum was about a man who loves two women, but one he loves more. I was the woman he was leaving behind. It was a very emotional piece. First, we were together, then he didn't know which one he wanted. The dance was more mime, not so much a pas de deux. He had come to the Danish ballet and found that we had much expression. So he managed to make ballets with mime and emotion, instead of the Russian style with the brilliant dancing, turns, lifts, and technical solos.... The only thing I couldn't do was a real Balanchine ballet, because I had weak feet.” (p.95)

It's startling to discover that Elna Lassen committed suicide only four days later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elna_Lassen. Poulsen says:

“Elna Lassen was a beautiful dancer and a really fine person. She was very light, and she jumped very well. Balanchine was especially moved when she died, a suicide, to all our sorrow….At the special performance following <her> untimely death, Balanchine danced the male role in Chopiniana. It was the only time that he danced it. He knew the ballet from his years with Diaghilev, and I don't think he changed anything. It was performed only the one evening. He danced very beautifully. At all the points where Elna Lassen should have danced, the spotlight was empty.” (I Remember Balanchine, p. 95)

(Thus Balanchine anticipates the famous performance in 1931 after Pavlova's death at which they played The Dying Swan with just a spotlight to show her path across the stage.)

The 1930 Liebestraum pas de trois, about a man “who loves two women, but one he loves more” and leaves one behind, sounds like a distinct precedent for the Elegy in Serenade. The death by suicide of its dancer Elna Lassen may be a connection to the Elegy’s funerary quality.

20. The Elegy also offers ideas of ideas of sightlessness, fate, and the beloved heroine whom the man finds only to lose again. These may also derive from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Underworld.

Kirstein’s unpublished diary entry for April 9, 1934, records Balanchine playing the music for Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice. (Kirstein uses the French title.) “Bal. playing over Gluck’s Orphée which he wants to do as an erotic ballet. Walked home to 350 East 53. Marvelous day & wrote out the lovely story from Bullfinch’s age of fable on Orpheus.”

Kirstein’s diaries for May 7, 13, and 14, 1934, mention Dimitriew’s concern that Balanchine is considering an Orpheus film with the composer Georges Antheil:

May 7. “…At the School, Dimitriew angry at Antheil & Bal. for considering doing a movie on ‘Orpheus’ in an amateur way, ruining Bal’s vacation & spoiling all our affairs….

May 13. “... (At the School) Dim. drew me aside : said that Salop Antheil had persuaded George B. to do the Orpheus film & if he did it it wd ruin his vacation - & our chances for ballets. Gt scene yesterday which I’m glad I missed, Bal. insisted he wd. do it. Dim. swore he wdn’t….

May 14.  “…I spoke to Antheil abt. canning the film he & Bal. was going to do until later: he was confused, pleased that he'd always wanted to do a film & that the money was right at hand, & he cdn't help grabbing at it….” (Kirstein, handwritten original diary, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

No such film happens, but Balanchine choreographs Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice at the Metropolitan Opera in 1936. Robert Greskovic (August 28, 2015; March 24, 2016) shows photographs from this production that show Eros with huge wings, Orpheus, and the recumbent Eurydice; a resemblance to the Elegy of Serenade is evident. (It’s worth stressing that Gluck places Eurydice among the Blessed Spirits in the Elysian Fields.)

Balanchine returns to the Orpheus myth throughout his career: notably in his 1936 staging of the opera, his 1948 Stravinsky ballet, and his 1976 Chaconne. In both Serenade and the 1948 Orpheus, a character is the Dark Angel: in Orpheus, that angel is male. (It happens that August Bournonville refers to the title character of La Sylphide as a “bad angel”. See My Theatre Life, p. 79.) Is the Serenade character known as “Dark Angel” because, though female, dancers recognize she serves a similar function (fateful, propelling) to the Dark Angel in the 1948 Orpheus? The dramatic function of the 1948 Orpheus angel is surely based on that of Amor in the 1936 Gluck Orpheus and Eurydice.

21. Another possible precedent is Giselle, which both Fokine and Balanchine know well – chiefly Act Two.  (Fokine supervised the 1910 Diaghilev production; Balanchine supervises the Paris Opéra one in 1947, coaching Tamara Toumanova in a way that Maria Tallchief - as she told Arlene Croce decades later - found transformed both Toumanova and Giselle, though in rehearsal rather than in performance. He is also believed to have assisted on Ballet Theater’s 1946 production, with designs by Eugene Berman.)

Albrecht traditionally enters the forest (the realm of the dead) along the same diagonal as the man in the Serenade Elegy. Russian and American productions of Giselle Act II often place her grave downstage right, close to where the heroine lies at the start of the Elegy. The idea of the man revisiting the tomb of his dead beloved, as in Giselle, and dancing again with her spirit before they are parted forever is one of the possible interpretations of the Elegy.

The ballet’s opening Sonatina movement places its women in a diagonal line that also recalls the wilis of Giselle, as does their rushing exit offstage to stage right. And Balanchine, in his subsequent changes to the ballet, adds three further elements that heighten the echoes of Giselle. See 74, 79, 81, 106, 112. (Both Adolphe Adam’s music for Albrecht’s entrance into the forest and the diagonal path he takes may well have been inspired by Orpheus’s entrance in Orphée et Eurydice, the 1774 French version of Gluck’s opera. That’s another story.)

It’s possible that “the girl who falls over” in the Sonatina (see 29, 87) is an echo of Giselle at the start of her Act One Mad Scene – or (in some earlier stagings of Serenade) Giselle at the moment of her death. It’s also possible that, when the Elegy’s heroine, left alone, rushes across the stage to embrace another woman who has just entered (downstage left), she recalls us of Giselle’s final run across the stage to recognize and embrace her mother Berthe (downstage right). That Serenade woman is now called “the mother” by New York City Ballet. (Gwyneth Muller, Serenade seminar August 27, 2015.)

22. Ruthanna Boris, in her account of the first rehearsal of Serenade (see 9). said Balanchine wanted every dancer onstage to be seen; the orange-grove formation was his solution. This may be the first of several ways in which Serenade reflected the democracy of America: theatrical visibility for each and every dancer. (See 23, 50.) Other touches of American democracy may involve Balanchine’s way of multiplying events that are usually for individuals: notably, the ensemble manège (late in the Sonatina, for fifteen women) of piqué turns, which hitherto in stage choreography have been a climactic solo effect for the ballerina solo (Siegel, Shapes of Change, pp. 72, 73-74) and the episode in the Elegy when eight men and four men go through a partnering exercise that becomes a quadruplication of the Elegy’s primary drama of one man caught between two women (see 40).

“Balanchine could almost be declaring his own independence from the undemocratic ranking systems of the old Russian companies, where this one is the Ballerina, another is the Cavalier, and others are the Corps or the Second Lead, and they never do anything more or less than their assignments… Piqué turns are a showy, applause-getting device usually performed by the ballerina at the end of a pas de deux. Yet Balanchine says all seventeen of these dancers can do the step. And the trick, done by so many, looks less exciting rather than more. Balanchine plays down its flashiness, incorporates it into the standard body of material that a corps de ballet can do in creating its ensemble designs.” (Siegel, The Shapes of Change, pp.72, 73-74.)

Yet Balanchine in several later ballets reverts in several later ballets to Russian-style hierarchy, and never again showed quite the same fluidity of ranking as he did in Serenade. A number of roles in the Sonatina, Waltz, and Elegy have soloist-type prominence for brief moments but belong to corps dancers who are never featured this way again. (The last of them - the woman who emerges from the wings downstage left at the end of the Elegy and is embraced by the heroine - is “the mother.” See 21.)

23. Is this emphasis on the individual within the ensemble a new reaction on Balanchine’s part to American democracy and to world politics? Certainly elements of world politics seem, obliquely, to have affected Serenade. See 9.

Robert Greskovic writes (email to Macaulay, September 2, 2015) that Barbara Weisberger has recalled that Balanchine said that, though he was aware this might seem a “Sieg, Heil” moment, his next direction was for a “bend/flex/relax of the wrist” - as if to flick that suggestion away.

Kirstein writes (New York City Ballet: Thirty Years, pp.39-40) that Balanchine began with a gesture. “When the curtain rises, the corps de ballet, in a strictly geometrical floor plan, are seen as a unison platoon standing at guard rest - or actually, in the first of the five academic positions which are successively assumed in the initial twenty measures of the music. Hands are curved to shield their eyes, as if facing some intolerable lunar light. At the first rehearsals all arms were stiffly raised, but since Eddie Warburg imagined that this resembled the Heil, Hitler arm-thrust salute, Balanchine altered it to a more curvilinear, tentative, and vague fanfare of indeterminate gesture.”

(Kirstein’s published writings on ballet, valuable on Serenade as on many other subjects, include a few factual errors. The one here about “the five academic positions which are successively assumed in the initial twenty measures of the music” is certainly one. This opening ritual includes first and fifth positions, pointe tendue in second, but not third or fourth. His words “guard rest… the first of the five academic positions” do not explain that, at curtain-up, the first position the dancers are in a first position, but not a turned-out one.)

Hitler and totalitarian politics are certainly in the New York air. Kirstein’s diary shows his occasional mixture of interest and alarm about communism, his rage about his friend the architect Philip Johnson’s interest in fascism, and his own composition of some Hitler poems:

“April 3rd. <after obtaining visas in Montreal for Balanchine and Dimitriew, describing the train journey back to New York> We were very gay: talked abt. Serenade & possibility of Uncle Tom’s Cabin & Eddie’s lack of seriousness. Dim. very formally thanked me for coming up to Montreal & doing all for them. He is a terribly tired man & his own passion is to retire to a desert isle & to have peace the rest of his days. They were both bitter abt. Communist Russia: Bal’s family in considerable distress at this moment & the superogation<sic> of personal liberty. G.P.O. to insupportable, and how it wd. surely come here if things weren’t done to stop it.

“May 16. Called on Phil Johnson at his big flat on E49.... I asked for an explanation of his ‘gray shirt’ fascist activities : demonstrated anger & intensity : he said the shirts had been abandoned. They were barely organized. They are not anti-semitic - & even hoped that nice Jews like Warburg & myself wd. join them. They were merely a group of young men interested in ‘direct action’ in politics , who believed in a totalitarian state and leadership instead of democracy. I explained that while I had no great fear of Phil Johnson or Alan Blackburn, nevertheless other such organizations were sprouting up all over, which <?> if corelated<?> cd. not afford to ignore the strong political weapon of anti-semiticism. He said he knew nothing he cd say wd. convince me but that his plans were not anti-semitic. I retorted : not yet.

“<July> 6. …Worked on my Hitler poems.”

“<July> 16. After some pondering wrote, as perhaps I shouldn’t have, to harry Dunham, sending him as an impersonal offering my ‘Lieder Für Hitler’ and a note saying I could (just) take no answer.” (Kirstein handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

24. Balanchine also makes a pointed use of all the soloists being part of the corps - perhaps something already uncharacteristic of him and something he generally avoided later. 

The main hall at the School of American Ballet was large, and Serenade is felt to have reflected that. Leda Anchutina recalled “We ran and ran and ran.” (Nancy Reynolds, Repertory in Review, p. 36) This extensive and rapturous use of running has been seen as a quality evoking the style of Isadora Duncan.

Kirstein writes (New York City Ballet, Thirty Years, p.39):

“The prime quality of Serenade from the moment of its inception was cool frankness, a candor that seemed at once lyric and naively athletic; a straightforward yet passionate clarity and freshness suitable to the foundation of a non-European academy. Balanchine had not seen Isadora Duncan in her best days, but she had certainly affected Fokine, and might detect a strain of her free-flowing motion here.”

25. Edwin Denby later writes - in what publication or letter we do not know - something quoted by Bernard Taper (Balanchine, 1974 edition, p.169):

“He had to find a way for Americans to look grand and noble, yet not be embarrassed about it. The Russian way is for each dancer to feel what he is expressing. The Americans weren't ready to do that. By concentrating on form and the whole ensemble, Balanchine was able to bypass the uncertainties of the individual dancer. The thrill of ‘Serenade’ depends on the sweetness of bond between all the young dancers. The dancing and the behavior are as exact as in a strict ballet class. The bond is made by the music, by the hereditary classic steps, and by a collective look the dancers in action have unconsciously - their American young look. That local look had never before been used as a dramatic effect in classic ballet.”

But Balanchine's reaction to this Denby point was “Too fancy!... I was just trying to teach my students some little lessons and make a ballet that wouldn't show how badly they danced.” As Taper noted, this was “the kind of ingenuous, deadpan statement that he often makes and that he may or may not entirely mean.” (Taper, Balanchine, 1974 edition, p.169.)

26. The three leading roles we now know seem to have been shared among four or more women/girls. Casting for the 1934 premiere (see 36, 52-53) shows that the two lead female dancers of the Elegy did not dance in the earlier two movements. Kirstein (p.39) writes “At the start the chief solo role was shared among five girls; parts of it were later combined for a single soloist.” (See 77, 83, 93.)

27.  In at least two ways, the Sonatina (like some other Balanchine ballets from the 1920s to perhaps the early 1940s) shows a connection to the style of Bronislava Nijinska.

Women, while holding arms en couronne, like a halo around the head, tilt the torso in different angles, as in Les Biches. (This in turn may well have evolved from Fokine’s choreography in Les Sylphides.)

An early multi-tier close-ranked pile-up for the female corps de ballet, upstage left, maintained as the “Russian” dancer begins her first solo, is remarkably like a four-tier pile-up for the men in the second scene of Les Noces. (This parallel is shown by Macaulay and Greskovic on March 24, 2016, “Rare Films and Illustrations of Balanchine’s Serenade”.)

28. A quite different resemblance has been noted (Croce, “Higher and Higher,” 1977: Afterimages pp. 268-269) – to the dance style of Jessie Matthews, an English dancer of stage and film (very popular in America as well, where she was called “the Dancing Divinity”). As shown on March 24, 2016, the especially Matthews look is in the way, at the end of the Waltz, the corps women perform swift backbends while pushing the air ahead of them with their arms (see 48); Matthews does this in “Dancing on the Ceiling” in her most beloved film, Evergreen (1934), itself an adaptation of the 1930 London stage show Ever Green.

In 1929 both Balanchine (uncredited) and Jessie Matthews had worked in London, separately, on the Charles Cochran revue Wake Up and Dream!. It was the first time Balanchine worked with Tilly Losch, who received, with Max Rivers, the credits for the choreography. According to Choreography by George Balanchine, this was Balanchine's initial choreography for British and American musical revues. Matthews danced non-Balanchine numbers.

In I Remember Balanchine, the veteran NYCB wardrobe supervisor Leslie Copeland says,

“Balanchine and I would reminisce about the past. He had worked in London with Jessie Matthews in the Charles B. Cochran revue, 'Wake Up and Dream!’ in 1929. That was before my time, but I had worked with her on BBC Television, so I knew her. Jessie couldn't really dance. She could do one thing and that was kick very high from the left. We would talk about Jessie. We used to laugh a lot about it.”

“Dancing on the Ceiling” certainly shows Matthews’s high kick, but it shows she could do more too. Croce in 1977 writes how Matthews “had forged a lightly idiosyncratic and highly appealing dance style out of ballet steps done in jazz rhythm” - something else Matthews had in common with Balanchine.  

It's possible her “Dancing on the Ceiling” number contains a few other influences upon Serenade - the excitable series of piqué turns, the sudden penchées. When Balanchine lengthened the dresses in 1950 and 1952 (see  106, 112) he, perhaps accidentally, strongly heightened the resemblance of certain steps, especially the Waltz heroine’s manèges of piqué turns, to “Dancing on the Ceiling”.

29.  There is no question about where we still see the “girl who was late for class” (see 7, 31); her entrance plainly occurs at the end of the Sonatina – interestingly, just as the music repeats the opening bars.

But “the girl who fell over” and began to cry has been an issue for some confusion. Kirstein establishes that this is the fall we see in the Sonatina:

“A girl tripped and fell over, close to the end of Serenade's first movement. This accident Balanchine kept as a climactic collapse by which a genuine minor mishap became a permanent framed controlling excitement, a contribution precipitating but by no means perpetuating chance.” (New York City Ballet, Thirty Years, p.39)

This is surely the moment, perhaps three-quarters way through the Sonatina, when, center stage, a girl suddenly turns and falls (or quickly lowers herself) to the floor. (Since the late 1950s, this has always been part of the “Russian” dancer’s role.)

Today, however, it’s often assumed that “the girl who fell over” moment is the more spectacular fall at the end of the Tema Russo or Russian dance. Since there was no Russian dance, this raises questions about how the 1934 Waltz (with its very different final music) ended and the Elegy began. (See 32 for a likely solution.)

The woman falling in the Sonatina is the most pronounced example of how Balanchine later, in his words  (see 7), “elaborated on the small accidental bits I had included in class and made the whole more dramatic, more theatrical, synchronizing it to the music with additional movement.” After what has already been an extensive solo, this woman has a little exchange – a briefly dramatic incident, like dialogue - with another corps dancer, who emerges from the wings downstage left. After this exchange, that corps dancer is joined by fourteen others from various wings on both sides of the stage; these fifteen march on point with stiff arms towards the front-center area; and it is precisely there that the soloist now turns and then falls to the floor.

The formation the fifteen corps dances create is that of a three-tier semi-circle of five rows, like a Greek theater; as Bart Cook has remarked, they are “both theater and audience.” Arriving in this pattern, they execute staccato ports de bras – a striking example of the freeze-frame fragmentation of academic gesture that began with the ballet’s opening ritual – while she lies there and as she then rises.

When she does so, she embarks on the most complex jumps we have seen so far. (This resembles the Fred and Ginger “Pick yourself up, brush yourself off, start all over again.” Swing Time, 1936) Thus her “accident” coincides with one of the most formally choreographed passages in the whole ballet.

The fifteen corps women then proceed to the unison manège of piqué (or fouetté) turns, initiated by two of them. (See 22, 30.)

Colleen Neary recalls (email to Macaulay, April 28, 2015) that Balanchine told her in the 1970s or 1980s that, when the “Russian girl” falls over in the Sonatina, “It is as if she has fainted, after turning so fast, she reaches up and then faints, and then, after 1 x 8 on the floor, she slowly recovers and slowly crosses her foot over and gets up and rises on point in full strength.” Neary danced both the “Russian” and “Dark Angel” roles in the 1970s and served in the 1980s as ballet mistress to the Zürich Ballet, where Balanchine came to rehearse his works. She remarks “I am not sure if he was giving me the illusion, or if the girl in reality, years before, actually did faint! He demonstrated it to me, as a slow recovery and then rising up and then strongly doing the jumps that follow, facing back and the front and then relevé in arabesque.”

It also seems likely the ballet’s second fall, the one at the end of the Tema Russo, is planned by Balanchine as an echo of the first. The ballet abounds in echoes, suggesting flashbacks (see 15), second opportunities, and images of destiny.

Suki Schorer and Kyra Nichols Gray both spoke on August 27, 2015 (Serenade seminar) of Balanchine’s strictness about exact musical timing with the “Russian” soloist’s jumps after her recovery.

30. Annabelle Lyon (1916-2011), an advanced student of Michel Fokine, recalls a surprising point about Balanchine’s initial version of this choreography:

“When he originally did Serenade in 1934, the first movement concluded with the entire corps de ballet doing a sequence of fouettés. (Later he changed it to piqué turns.) I couldn’t do fouettés, so he had me run offstage just before that.” (I Remember Balanchine, p. 142)

This explains what has until now seemed Kirstein’s most puzzling statement on Serenade, in his 1939 Ballet Alphabet (often re-printed), under “Fouetté”:

“In Balanchine’s Serenade (1934), sixteen girls executed thirty-two fouettés without difficulty.”

Kirstein has described a fouetté turn accurately two paragraphs above. It’s probable he is wrong about the numbers sixteen and thirty-two here, but Lyon’s account corroborates his point, which hitherto has seemed unbelievable.

31. Balanchine actually sneaks another woman (seldom noticed) into the formation the moment before “the dancer who arrives late” appears, in the version seen since the 1940s or earlier. The “Greek theater” formation (see 29) and the unison piqué turns use fifteen women; the additional woman makes sixteen. So the latecomer, on arrival, completes the original formation of seventeen.’

It seems that Lyon (see 30) was the original “girl who arrives late” (see 7) – though Kirstein (see 7) recalls Anchutina as the original latecomer in rehearsal. Lyon recalls:

“Then, before the waltz began, I was the one who comes in late, looking for her place. Now when people try to put a meaning to that, it always tickles me. I didn’t have enough strength in technique, but I had a sense of all things I had learnt with Fokine. So Balanchine used a lot of lyric movement whenever he did a piece on me.” (I Remember Balanchine, p. 142.)

Lyon was indeed one of the five women who, with no man, were featured in the Waltz in 1935 (see 69). And Ruthanna Boris corroborates Lyon’s account:

“One morning he completed the first movement of the dance we had been learning by the end of our first rehearsal hour. He set a configuration that returned each of us to our original place and position in the opening picture – legs parallel, right arm upraised toward stage right, heads turned to the arm, eyes looking up at uplifted hands. One dancer was missing – Annabelle had missed class that morning, had been absent from the rehearsal…. Annabelle arrived for the second hour; he reviewed the ending, and, once we were all in place and beginning the last arm, head, eyes movements, he brought her in from stage left rear, wandering through the lines, looking for her place, finding it, assuming her arm position, looking up at her hand, then, he had us all drop our arms, turn away from her, and slowly begin to exit into the wings of stage right…” (Boris, “Serenade”: Reading Dance, edited by Robert Gottlieb, p. 1068.)

Boris goes on, however, to say that Lyon was then joined by William Dollar, with whom, Boris claims, Lyon then began the Waltz. Actually, no man dances in the Waltz until Balanchine revises it in 1936 (see 74). Boris’s memories here, therefore, are unreliable; they seem, however, to be generally good on other points. (See 9.)

Lyon also speaks of being the original “latecomer” in a 1979 oral history interview with Elizabeth Kendall (New York Public Library for the Performing Arts). She speaks entirely, though, as if Balanchine brought her back in for practical reasons, and makes no connection to his now famous use of the accidents of rehearsals. Therefore, despite Boris’s memory of Lyon’s late arrival in rehearsal, it seems at least possible that it was another dancer who arrived late in rehearsal (perhaps Anchutina, as Kirstein recalled – see 67);and that it occurred to Balanchine subsequently to turn that lateness into choreography for another dancer.

Over the years, striking differences emerge between the various journeys taken by this “latecomer” through the corps. Diana Adams, in Victor Jessen’s 1953 film, shows a route and manner unlike any seen today. When asked about the feeling with which they made this entrance, Kyra Nichols Gray (August 27, 2015) says “I was just trying to find my place without anybody noticing”; Allegra Kent (same day) says “I felt I was searching for something I knew I could never find.”

32. It’s possible or probable that the 1934-35 Serenade was not the continuous dance we see today (see 74) but three separate scenes, like those we see now in Tschaikovsky Suite no 3 (1970). The way the dancers are listed for each movement in 1934-35 programs (see 52, 69-71) supports this theory.

33. Though Kirstein is writing long after 1934 (New York City Ballet, Thirty Years), he may be right about that original version when he says:

“There were numerous novelties of pattern and plastic structure.... Asymmetrical units of shifting dancers seesawed in contrapuntal accord; a solo dancer, holding a half of the stage, was echoed by a unison group in unlikely opposition.”

34. As Nancy Goldner (Balanchine Variations) observes, the 1934-35 Waltz is very different from the one we now know, beginning with five women, and including no man. (See 52, 69-71.) The Waltz’s music suggests that the women cannot have moved in the way that five women do at the start of the 1940 Russian dance. Do they echo the chain of five women who make a brief part of the Sonatina?

Some 1935 photographs show five women together. Their horizontal grouping, somewhat resembling the one we now see at the start of the Russian dance (Tema Russo), probably shows us the start of the Waltz as it was then.

35. Does the end of the Waltz, however, already feature the phenomenal geometries and counter-rhythms (corps of sixteen women with “Russian” soloist at the center) we see now? Very possibly, yes. The program for the June 10 premiere (see 52) shows the Waltz uses the female ensemble of nineteen women; and Kirstein’s point about “numerous novelties of pattern and plastic structure” may include this. Certainly the 1940 film shows a glimpse of this formation.

In this exceptional passage, the corps begins in two diagonal lines; the soloist is upstage where the lines meet. The two diagonals cross the stage horizontally, passing through each other while each maintains the same diagonal line; but the soloist (the “Russian” dancer in today’s casting) passes down the centerline toward the audience. On August 28, 2016, at the Serenade seminar, Victoria Simon (also shown on screen on March 24, 2016, “Rare Films and Illustrations of Balanchine’s Serenade”) analyzes the counts involved here: one line is a count ahead of the other, and the soloist “Russian” dancer advances to different counts. The two lines of the corps are doing a version of what Arlene Croce calls “Jessie Matthews backbends”, pushing their arms forward into the air while suddenly arching back. (See 28.)

Ruthanna Boris, however, writes that, in a rehearsal for the end of the Waltz:

“Heidi Vossler” <sic> “fell down during the exit, far downstage right. She scrambled to get up, but Mr. Balanchine said ‘No, you stay, others go.’”

But casting shows that Vosseler did not dance in the June 10 premiere of the Waltz. (See 34.) This therefore seems another of Boris’s wise-after-the-event memories. (See 9, 31).

36. Kirstein’s March 26 diary entry (see 6), about the “wonderful pas de trois of Heidi Vosseler, Charles Laskey and Catherine Maloney”, is surely a reference to the choreography for the Elegy, which featured Vosseler, Laskey and (the more usual spelling) Kathryn Mullowney.

Heidi Vosseler (1918-1992) is the original “heroine” of the Elegy. (See 44, 53.) The June 10 program (see 42) strongly suggests that she only dances in that movement.

This confirms the idea that Balanchine originally conceived the three movements as separate scenes without any through continuity. By August 1935 (see 71), she is also dancing a corps role in the Sonatina, but remains absent from the Waltz.

If Balanchine is right in remembering that, when one man attends rehearsals, he puts him into the choreography, that man seems to have been Laskey (1908-1998).  Other men had already taken classes at the School of American Ballet, we know. Is Laskey just lucky in his timing? Laskey dances this role in Serenade until at least August 1935. He later danced for Balanchine on Broadway and in Hollywood. Boris describes him as “tall, strong, and handsome”; although other parts of her account are unreliable, here she confirms that Vosseler, Laskey and Kathryn Mullowney (her spelling) are the opening trio of the final Elegy.

Catherine Maloney’s names are spelled at least two other ways in 1934-1935: Katheryn and Kathryn, Mallowney, Mullowny, and Mullowney (see 52-53, 69). She must have danced the role now known as the “Dark Angel” and did so (though not in February 1935) till at least August 1935. In a 1976 oral history interview (New York Public Library for the Performing Arts), she recalls dancing in the Elegy of the original Serenade without specifying her role. She says, however, that she had “a high arabesque”: often a crucial element for a Dark Angel.

37. For the opening of the Elegy, Boris recalls that Balanchine:

“placed Charles <Lasky, her spelling> in front, bent forward from the waist with Kathryn draped over his back and had them enter from upstage left in that position, moving on a diagonal toward Heidi. He fussed with their positions a bit, then had Kathryn wrap her downstage arm around Charles’s chest and cover his eyes with her upstage hand. It made an interesting, dramatic picture as they slowly advanced toward Heidi, lying stretched out on the floor; that was the beginning of the last movement, the Elegy. After rehearsal, I said ‘Mr. Balanchine, how did you think of that position for Kathryn and Charles Laskey? It’s very interesting and dramatic.’ He smiled and whispered, as if it was a secret, ‘You know, Lasky, he is very near-sight. I thought he does not see, so, maybe more comfortable if eyes have cover and Kathryn looks where to go.’” (Boris, “Serenade,” in Reading Dance, edited by Robert Gottlieb, p.1069.)

Colleen Neary recalls “When I did the "dark angel girl", he always said "walk with man and you are his eyes, because man cannot see" (email, July 14, 2016)

38. The Elegy seems always to have had the same overall structure: the heroine on the floor; the man who arrives with the Dark Angel; her promenade arabesque turned by her thigh: their trio; the other women who rush by and the one dancer who joins them for a quartet; the episode where four men partner eight women: the return to the trio: the Canova/Eros arms moment: the departure of the man and Dark Angel, leaving the “heroine” alone on the floor: the arrival of other women: the suggestion of her awakening; her rush to the anonymous “mother” figure, the three men who help to carry her away. 

Although quite a few aspects of this Elegy seem to have come from Fokine's Eros (see 13-15. 18), these do not include the arabesque promenade, the episode for four men and eight women, or the final lift and departure. (Robert Greskovic observed - August 28, 2015 - that Balanchine had used the arabesque promenade, by the supporting knee, in La Pastorale for Felia Doubrovska.)

The final departure and other parts may have connected to Balanchine’s own early Marche Funèbre. Robert Greskovic observes that the Marche, according to Kendall’s Balanchine and the Lost Muse, was costumed in knee-length tunics of black and gray, designed by Boris Erbshtein, somewhat related to those to those proposed by William B. Okie in 1934 as well as those by, or attributed to, Lurçat in various forms in the years 1935-47. Greskovic in 2016 observes that the Balanchine Catalog on line attributes the Marche Funèbre scenery to Erbshtein but its costumes to Vladimir Dimitriev. Greskovic identifies this as Vladimir Vladimirovich Dimitriev, not to be confused with Vladimir Pavlovich Dimitriev or (Kirstein’s spelling) Dimitriew (see 1, 6, 20, 45, 47), Balanchine’s fellow Russian émigré and right-hand colleague at the School of American Ballet. But see also 39-44.

39. Balanchine interrupts and relaxes the Elegy’s chief drama, which concerns one man and two women, by introducing a stream of other women. One of these women (the role performed today by the “Russian” dancer) soon returns and becomes part of a sustained quartet.

On both her entries, she arrives in the man’s arms with highly dramatic jumps (each different), which Balanchine was often prepared over the decades to rehearse many times to get them to his satisfaction. (See Pat McBride Lousada, 102.) Patricia Wilde’s skill (in the 1950s) in the initial jump – a grand fouetté sauté upward to arrive backward on the man’s chest and in his arms – is one of the moments David Vaughan can never forget. Kyra Nichols Gray, at the Serenade seminar on August 27, 2015, says that, when she first did the role with City Ballet in the late 1970s, Balanchine must have made her do this jump “fifty times.”

40. Balanchine always says that one of the “accidents” of the 1934 rehearsals was that one day four men arrived, after a sole man had arrived on an earlier day. The sole man arrived in time to be the hero of the Elegy; the four men (known as “the Blueberries” by today’s Serenade dancers) arrive later in the same section.

Although their scene is a diversion from the main dramatic situation (one man, two women) and proceeds like a formal exercise in partnering, it also (see 22) formally quadruples it (four men, eight women, at one point making trios whose arms recall Canova’s Cupid and Psyche) while providing one of the few examples of same-sex partnering in Balanchine.) Immediately after the departure of these twelve dancers, the action returns to the central drama for three people, with imagery closest to Canova’s configuration. (See 14.)

Strange though this may seem today, it's possible - even likely - that the sole man was also one of the four. (See 53.) There seem to have been only four men in the June 10 premiere. This, however, was one of the first things Balanchine certainly changed. Five men are listed at the January 1935 performance.

41. The Elegy’s hero is reclaimed by the “Dark Angel,” who beats her “wings” three times in a way Balanchine took care to rehearse over the years. (See 102.) Without a change of rhythm she folds her arms/wings over his chest and eyes, and steers him offstage.

Left alone, the heroine (in 1934, Heidi Vosseler) rises again from the floor. She is joined by a small community of seven women from downstage left. She embraces one of these – the role today known as “the mother” by City Ballet dancers (see 21). She, the heroine, kneels at the “mother’s” feet, and, opening her arms wide, arches her torso backwards in a way often considered tragic; at the same time, her backbend may be related to the final bend of the neck and head of the ballet’s opening ritual. (See 4.)

Three men then enter. Her torso returns to the vertical; she sees them; she stands. The men then lift her, like an effigy, and slowly carry her on a diagonal to the upstage right corner, while the seven women ceremoniously attend them.

This slow-traveling cortège diagonal effect resembles two in the ballets of Léonide Massine. At the end of the pas de deux in La Boutique Fantasque (1919), the female Can-Can dancer is carried slowly upstage along the opposite diagonal; at the end of the first movement of Choreartium(1933), the lead male dancer is carried on a downstage diagonal. Frederick Ashton has imitated the Boutique cortège closely in Les Rendezvous (1933) and does something similar with a group in Les Patineurs (1937).

42. But the drama of the Balanchine cortège nonetheless seems different, not least because the heroine is standing erect and because she opens her arms and face to address the heavens: the ballet’s final echo of its own opening ritual. (See 4, 14, 85.) The suggestion that she is moving off into another life - or another stage of life - makes the ending of Serenade resemble a number of works in which the protagonist departs into the realm of the sublime, as in Marche Funèbre (1923), the original Apollo  (1928, with the ascent-to-Parnassus ending still seen in some stagings today), Le Baiser de la fée (1937), Night Shadow (1946).

43. Elizabeth Kattner-Ulrich, researching Balanchine’s early ballets, writes (email to Macaulay, March 28, 2016):

“In addition to the theme of death represented by the funeral cortège in Balanchine’s early ballets, there is progression in the development of multilevel, sculptural formations in his work. The cortège at the end of Serenade has precedence in Balanchine’s first group ballet, Marche Funèbre(1923). According to Vera Kostrovitskaya, Yuri Slonimsky and Tatyana Bruni, in the first and third sections of this ballet, a female dancer, lying on her back, is carried high on extended arms, an overhead lift, something that was experimental at the time. This group moves under a spotlight through the audience. In 1927, Balanchine created, in La Chatte, three sculptural formations out of an all-male corps de ballet: a pyramid, a cortège, and a chariot. An extant photograph of the chariot shows five men carrying the Man, who is upright, kneeling on the back of one of the dancers, balancing by holding the hand of another. The cortège in Serenade shows similarities as well as a progression from the cortège in Marche Funèbre and the chariot in La Chatte. Three men carry the woman in an upright, standing position. Fewer dancers stabilize the base, and the woman holds the position without using her hands. (Yuri Slonimsky, ‘Balanchine: The Early Years,” in I Remember Balanchine, pp. 64-65.)”

44. Barbara Weisberger - aged eight in 1934, and watching rehearsals from a corner - has always remembered (not from any performance) an incident recalled by nobody else: "As I… saw Heidi Vosseler being carried aloft on that upstage diagonal, that final exit, I was absolutely transported because (as I swore years later to Mr. Balanchine) Vosseler, the first time she rehearsed it, when she arched backward high in the air, had a piece of chiffon over her face, which Mr. B. had put there.... He said I'm thinking of another ballet. But I know I'm not. As romantic as I was at eight, I could not have made up a piece of chiffon. Because it absolutely thrilled me." (Mason, “Balanchine as Teacher”, "Ballet Review", vol. 19, no 4, p.65, col. 2 (See 12.)

45. Kirstein’s diary entries for April-May 1934 suggest the choreography of Serenade may already be complete by now, at least in large part. He writes almost entirely of costumes for it:-

“April 6. …Bill Littlefield at the School trying to create ideas for costumes for Serenade, which he takes as an induction from puberty to womanhood: pink ribbons for monthlies: <?> Bal. thinks however a good executant but he has no creative imagination.

“April 7. …. At Rehearsal, very ragged because abt. 10 were missing…. Ended with last movement of ‘Serenade’ which impressed everybody & Brock Pemberton said it was much bigger than he had any idea….

“April 10…. At rehearsal, Ben Shahn, Mother… & a lot of people. Mozartiana & Serenade danced very well. It really looks like a company. Room too small & people fall because they were crowded: plans for enlargement….

“April 24. …At the school this afternoon Kashouba brought in the dark blue uniform practice costumes for the company. They didn’t fit very well but everyone looked very sweet. Dimitriew was sore, because Bal. as usual had wanted them cut low over the breasts & they were cut too low & consequently they had to be worn backwards. Mozartiana & Serenade were danced before a large mob… over fifty & Dim said it wd be the last one for quite a while as it wasted Bals time. It did not go very well but people liked Serenade very much. John Martin, kept late by Hurok over the affairs of the Monte Carlo Ballet, saw it: but was ungracious. & said only the work was commendable & he disliked Tchaikovsky’s music. The proceedings made me acutely nervous as I felt somehow Bal. was being sacrificed to no good end….

May 5. “…Joe Milziner <Mielziner> for Serenade….

May 8. “…Afterwards we talked with Joe Milziner who will do Mozartiana & the lights for Serenade. …

May 11. “…Joe Milziner at a rehearsal of Mozartiana & Serenade, so he cd. make lighting & costume sketches.Mozartiana changed: now at a ball. Black marbleized men with while veins. Masquerade. I was inclined to like his ideas, as I like him, but Dimitriew put in various sound disagreements & objections.

May 14.  “…With Bal. & Dim. To see Joe Milziner 1441 Brdway abt. costumes for ‘Serenade’ what he had done was very poor, albeit rushed. …Question with Eddie Warburg whether or not he wd. give the private performance at his place or not & how to give it. He drives me quite mad with his kidding the kids. but I can't imagine any one else who'd do what he's done.

May 20. “ I drove Bal. home with me. He said Ballet, in the Diaghilev, Petipa idiom is dead Serenade Songes all that with him is only commercial: of no interest. One must find new ideas - although the exercises were valuable in themselves.... ”

May 31. “.... White practice costumes for ‘Serenade’.” (Kirstein, handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

46. Simon Morrison (August 2015) found this invitation amid Antheil’s papers (Library of Congress, Washington D.C.):

Mr. and Mrs. Felix Warburg

Request the pleasure of your company

On Saturday, June ninth, at half past eight o’ clock

At “Woodlands”, White Plains

For the first performance of two ballets by

The School of the American Ballet

Choreography by Georges Balanchine

“Serenade” “Dreams”

Music by Peter Tchaikovsky Music by George Antheil

Theme and Costumes by André Derain

Woodlands was the Warburg home. Dreams is Balanchine’s revised version of the 1933 Les Songes (which had been to music by Milhaud, which Milhaud’s people would not now allow Balanchine to use) and is set to new music by the American avant-garde composer George Antheil (1900-59). Derain had been the designer of Dreams since its 1933 original, Les Songes. (Antheil will be also involved with Serenade - see 59, 60, 66, 73 - but it seems unlikely that he is so at this stage.)

Nancy Reynolds (August 27, 2015), having investigated the matter herself for the ballet’s 70th anniversary, observes that Woodlands is a considerable distance from White Plains. Mindy Aloff reports on this in The Dance View Times, 19 April, 2004.

47. The hunt for costumes continues. Kirstein’s unpublished diaries for June 5, 1934: “Hunted for bathing suits for the boys in Serenade….”

“June 6: Hours spent more or less fruitlessly with Bal. at Bloomingdales’, with Bal, while he tried to make up his mind abt. costumes for the Boys in Serenade. He has a spoiled boy’s vanity which makes him at once refuse any given suggestion. One must approach him always from behind. Even this no cinch as there are always more than two alternatives…. Maria Stepanovna Stregilova, the old wardrobe mistress for Diaghilev suddenly appeared, 15 minutes after the costumes for Serenade had come in and were adjudged absolutely hopeless. Warburg <looks also like Laskey> had chosen them for 2.50 instead of Pons.garanteed<?> for $5. Fuss about the representation in the country : wd. it rain : Excess cost of piano, new shoes, little things. Boys think the Serenade clothes look like Présages :they do rather.…”

This reference is to Massine’s Les Présages, choreographed for the de Basil Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1933.

“June 7.… Pitney, Mina & Marya Mannes to watch last rehearsal. Bal. changes things all the time right up to the end. The girls are all very sweet & nice to look at. No trace of self-consciousness….”

“June 8. Hunted all over again for suitable shirts for Serenade; found them at last at Abercrombie's. Pons slightly late with the costumes, but the School left for White Plains at 3 oclock. including 2 mothers, Anchutina’s father and Maria Stepanova wardrobe mistress.… The Warburg mansion, when we arrived, had the air of a castle deserted before the onslaught of invaders. No one was around….  It got colder as time went on… Costumes unpacked & hung up…. Frances Mann one of the important 2nd line dancers hurt her foot. Caccialanza tripped & fell. Another girl wept & was suspected to have female ills…. The students looked peaked and were cold & hungry & I feared a revolution…. Vladimirov was in all his states : Voila vôtre Ballet Americain. I said ‘Nôtre Ballet Americain.’ When he saw Marie Jeanne come in the Ave Verum, he said he was reminded of the debut of Pavlova. Eric <sic> Hawkins <see 52, 54> was sweet & very enthusiastic & inspired as indeed was every body. The lights didn’t go very well, but the stage was absolutely magnificent. A superb floor & the pianos sounded well…. Balanchine said he was pleased enough….”

June 9. “…. Out to White Plains, the weather graying over, we taking every comfort in every light space in the sky. A kind of intermittent drizzle set up losing us 1½ hrs of rehearsal time…. I made myself as boring as possible by asking & praying & wondering abt. the weather. Good deal of quick plans & changes. Guests started arriving. We decided not to do it : to wait till tomorrow : what if tomorrow was the same as today? It looked that kind of weather : the flag on the tower kept bearing due South : if it changed to East – all wd. be over…. Tarpaulin over the pianos and the stage taken off & put on 3 separate times. Balanchine wholly indifferent went off in his car into White Plains to get some decent food. Fair weather came & Dimitriew searched in vain for him to rehearse ‘Mozartiana’ which Vladimirov started. Frances Mann’s leg got increasingly worse. More rain : Bal. said calmly God’s will be done. Around 8.40 – we all in a <??> decided to go through with what we cd. Kids were dressed & made up for ‘Mozartiana’. I got nervous & screamed at two of the boys to hurry & Dim. came in & roared at me. General apologies afterwards. ‘Mozartiana’ looked lovely : went off well. Ridiculously stupid audience. Little enthusiasm….‘Serenade” was prepared. But then the rain set in, in earnest….” (Kirstein, handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

48. Edward Warburg - who had persuaded his parents to give him this performance for his twenty-sixth birthday (which occurred five days earlier) - wrote:

“With the music of Tchaikovsky, the lights went up on the assembled group of dancers, each one standing with an arm outstretched, looking up towards the heavens. It was a moving moment. I can never look back at that scene now without remembering the White Plains performance.  No sooner had the dancers become visible when, as if in answer to their raised arms, the heavens opened up, and it poured!” (Jennifer Dunning, But First a School, p. 64).

Another performance the next day went ahead, with a large audience, despite a light rain. Kirstein and Dunning confirm that pianists played the score.

For June 10th, Kirstein’s diary:

“A little sun when I woke up – but considerable heat & the threat of rain increasing as time went on…. at 5 o'clock in spoke of threats we again completely embarked for White Plains with an added cargo of husbands, mothers, friends, etc….. Rehearsal of ‘Serenade’ on the sticky stage. The weather seemed to clear. Blue skies with holes in dense cloud. I looked for every slight change of wind. It seems to split 2 ways over the house. Nelson Rockefeller called up from Pocantico <Pocantico Hills, the Rockefeller Estate> to say there'd been a cloudburst on the Hudson but it had passed…. We reversed the program: Dreams : Serenade : Mozartiana : all of us felt Dreams is not yet a success and we told Antheil it might rain and we at least wanted people to see it, which was true enough as it started a light rain just as they were going up for 'Serenade'. I'm glad to say however it was pushed through - with little enough confusion - although the piano keys were so wet that Mikeshina & Kopeikin <sic> cd hardly play…. Serenade looked very lovely, the boys OK in red pants and brownish polo shirts. Laskey's make-up left something to be desired but still…. Conditions were very difficult & everybody behaved extremely well. There were even more people than last night: Nelson seemed impressed as was also Alfred Barr. Alan Blackburn looked at me as I had deflected the Warburg millions from the Mus. of Mod. Art…. Afterwards we speedily left for N.Y. to a banquet at Chestney's for 50 people : the Scholl and friends - the money gifts were site inured. Toasts of all were drunk including the weather, the City of Philadelphia etc…..Bal. read a little speech sober & comic  ending with ‘we only have one Dollar (Wm) but soon we hope to have many dollars.”….” (Kirstein, handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

49. No costume or design credit is given in a surviving Woodlands program. (Jim Steichen, Serenade Performance Chronology, 1934-35.)

Photographs suggest that the women’s hair in the first performance was loose but not long.

50. Kirstein's program note reads:

“Without an implicit subject, the music and its thematic development indicate the tragic form of this primarily feminine ballet. Its lyricism is the large, fluent sentiment of Tschaikovsky shifting from the fresh swiftness of Sonatina, the buoyant accumulating passage of the Waltz, through the sustained adagio of the Elegy. The classic dance has been used here in conjunction with free gesture, developed logically for the whole body's use. The corps de ballet, as such, scarcely exists. Each member is inseparable from the schematic design in personal individual meaning. The soloists crown the action alone, their tragedy prepared by the frame of the previous dances.” (Kirstein, Program Notes, p.17)

51. Special to the New York Times, June 11, 1934:

“BALLET SCHOOL GIVES 2 WORLD PREMIERES: Recital at Estate of the Felix M. Warburg Is First Outside of Studio”

“The world premiere of two ballets, ‘Serenade’ and ‘Dreams,’ took place this evening at Woodlands, the estate here of Mr. and Mrs. Felix M. Warburg. Tonight's performance was a continuation of the presentation by the School of the American Ballet, which was postponed last evening owing to rain after “Mozartiana,” the opening ballet on the program, had been given.

“In spite of the threat of inclement weather all but a few of the 250 guests of Mr. and Mrs. Warburg, who had witnessed the opening of last night’s program, were present this evening. Tonight the ‘Mozartiana’ was repeated. Then followed the two new works, ‘Serenade,’ music by Peter Tchaikovsky, choreography by Georges Balanchine, and ‘Dreams,’ music by George Antheil, choreography by Mr. Balanchine and scenario and costumes by André Dérain.

“Saturday’s and tonight's performances were the first given by the School of the American Ballet outside its own studio. The school was founded last Autumn by Edward Warburg, Mr. Balanchine, Lincoln Kirstein and Vladimir Dimitriew.”

52. The program is titled “The Ballets of George Balanchine”. The cast is given as follows:

“Sonatina: Misses Anchutina, Arnold, Barret, Boris, Caccialanza, Campbell, Crotty, Delano, Guerard, Howard, Kahrklinsch, Leitch, Lyon, Mann, de Martinez, McCracken, Norris, Pelus, Varalle.

“Waltz: Same.

“Elegy: Misses Anchutina, Caccialanza, Howard, Kahrklinsch, Leitch, Lyon, Mallowney, Mann, McCracken, Norris, Vosseler.

Messrs Laskey, Chaffee, Hawkins, Heilig.”

(For the 1934 program, see Steichen, Serenade Performance Chronology, 1934-35).

53. Only four men are listed for the Elegy. Does Charles Laskey double as one of the group as well as in the lead male role?

Vosseler and Mallowney (Maloney, Mullowney) are the only women not to appear in the Sonatina and Waltz. Since they dances the “heroine” and “Dark Angel” (see 36), this delayed first appearance of theirs, like that of the men, must have provided a new element of drama. (Mullowney danced in all three movements in August 1935, however, and Vosseler also appeared in the Sonatina; so Balanchine was soon experimenting with different distribution of parts of the roles.)

It is possible, though, that he also makes later versions of Serenade in which the dancer of the “Dark Angel” only appeared for the Elegy. See 83, 93, 116.

54. Most of these dancers are also featured in the program’s first ballet, Mozartiana - notably Hortense Kahrklinsch, Mr. Chaffee (first name not given), and Mr. Heilig (Gigue), Holly Howard, and Charles Laskey (pas de deux at the ending of the Theme and Variations).

Marie-Jeanne Pelus, becoming celebrated in the 1940s as Marie-Jeanne as already noted above (see 6) dances in successive editions of Serenade until at least 1948 (see 77, 78, 82, 88, 105).

Anchutina, Boris (see 9, 93-95), Gisella Caccialanza (1914-98 – she sometimes performs with the stage name of Giselle), Holly Howard, Lyon, Vosseler, and Laskey go on to have notable careers with Balanchine; Boris dances its leading role in 1944-46.

But Arnold, Barret, Crotty, Delano, de Martinez, McCracken, Norris, Varalle (women) and Chaffee (man) seem not to work again with Balanchine. Quite a turnover of personnel.

McCracken was Joan McCracken (1917-1961), who had dropped out of West Philadelphia High School to join School of American Ballet in 1934; she later, in 1935, joins the Littlefield Ballet of Philadelphia. She went on to a career in musicals on Broadway (notably the original productions of Oklahoma!, in which she was the Girl Who Falls Down, Bloomer Girl, and Billion Dollar Baby) and in Hollywood (Good News). Two photographs of Serenade, showing early Sonatina configurations in the June 1934 performance, are in her scrapbook (Theatre Department at the Free Library of Philadelphia); dancers are identified in her handwriting on the back. (A further complication is that she identifies one as “Youngie”. Sharon Skeel believes that this is Alice Young,  another of the Littlefield dancers from Philadelphia. No Young or Youngie is named in the program (see 52), however. But McCracken does identify Boris, Campbell, Crotty, Guerard, Kahrklinsch, Leitch, Lyon, herself, McLean, Pelus, Varalle. (Sharon Skeel, email to Macaulay, August 4, 2016.)

Chaffee was presumably George Chaffee (1907-1984), who became a leading star of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet in the late 1930s and a renowned dance scholar.

Erick (original name Frederick) Hawkins (1909-1994) was listed at School of American Ballet as an instructor for most of 1935 (Lincoln Kirstein, who, spelling his first name “Eric” in 1934-35, mentions him frequently in his 1934-36 diaries, taking ballet lessons from him) and became a part of Ballet Caravan in 1936-37. (Information from Jim Steichen.) In 1937, however, Hawkins joined the Martha Graham Dance Company, gaining greater celebrity with Graham and, later, with his own choreography.

Jack Heillig (now spelt with two Ls), is in the February 1935 performance. Sharon Skeel, who is researching the Littlefields’ work in ballet in Philadelphia, believes (email to Macaulay, August 4, 2016) he was really Jack Pottinger, who danced with the Littlefields in Philadelphia both before and after his stint with the American Ballet.

55: Kirstein’s subsequent diary entries include the following:-

“<June> 22. Annabelle Lyon & Edna Vasalle came in to say they cdn't stay at the School any longer, since Fokine wd. have nothing to do with them if they came on, as he said, without definite 'work' - I.e. money. They cd. choose - but if they came then he wd. never have them again. Annabelle cried…. They said they needed time to make up their minds : Annabelle consented to dance in 'Serenade' to show Felia Doubrovska, who liked it .”

“<September> 22. “Dimitriew said….<that he had told Balanchine yesterday that Balanchine > wasted everybodies time last year, given a superb company; SERENADE was not finished on account of no scenery and costrumnes; he wasted his time with Heidi Vosseler and Kopeikine.”

“<November> 25: Down to Helene Pons <costume builder>, 125 West 45, for a costume-fitting. Dim. had said the costumes for Serenade might be awful, and they were they were: The idea was OK, but somehow the execution was dreadful: Pink Latex which tears easily & spirals of black material sticking out stiffly from it. The costumes of the two soloists Vosseler & Martinez made in white and gray bath-toweling : (as <Helene> Leitch said one dirty & one clean and one towel), snipped at by scissors to look ragged; they were fierce and finally scrapped. Great row as to whose fault it was – Balanchine’s or Oakie’s who ‘designed’ the costumes….

“<November> 27…. Costumes arrive from Pons for Serenade & Alma Mater : put in the cupboard. I traced John Held jr’s and Watkins’s drawings for the program book…”

“<December> 2. Dress parade of all the costumes at the school. The kids looked pretty sweet flopping around in their big skirts. ‘Serenade’ looked O.K. though odd - & will be O.K. with the lights…. The pianists one dead ogre of a fairy & his meet boy friend played so badly that Bal. was driven into a frenzy of silence. What is the use of choreography of costumes etc : the music is the most important thing : one can do nothing without music : Eddie went off & Dim. got a hold of an old friend of his one-time chef d’orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater to lead them. He said he was taking the responsibility himself. When the house in on fire you can’t bargain for firemen….

“<December> 6. …Bought rope for Serenade set : Mendola’s shoes giving gt. pain to the dancers.…. I took off my tails, and worked till about 2.30AM, trying to put up Oakie’s set for ‘Serenade’, which had to be done if we were to rehearse tomorrow morning the last chance we’d get. Cut out flies & wings from the extra set of drapes. : the big spiral looked like hell but we got it in <sic> all into some kind of shape…. Warburg came back to work on Serenade : Paul Kilfeather more dead than alive tried to whip the expressive but inefficient lighting into some semblance of order under Dim’s thumb, with no success - or very little. To bed too excited to sleep -” (Kirstein, handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

56. Although Serenade is announced for the Hartford season, its performance is canceled. Jim Steichen:

“The main obstacle to presenting Serenade was the unworkability of the set designed by William Okie, designs for which have been located in the MoMA archives by Robert Greskovic. Okie’s design included a ‘large pendant sculptural shell,’ according to Kirstein’s diaries. Although Serenade is mentioned in several reviews of the Hartford performances, most references occur in articles published before the ballet was scrapped on Saturday, and even then the ballet is described in brief and vague terms that in effect paraphrases copy from the surviving press release and other reports.” (Jim Steichen, Serenade Performance Chronology.)

Kirstein’s diaries: <Dec> 7. Rehearsal of ‘Serenade’ in costume with Dubious effects. Costumes & scenery both not very right : but gd. moments : the stage really too small for this ballet….

<Dec> “8 Slept very late : when I got to the Museum they had decided not to give ‘Serenade’ at all : Stage wasn’t big enough : the costumes were impossible. No use in trying to fool ourselves. It wd. ruin an otherwise gd. ballet by getting it set off on the wrong foot. Saw that flowers were sent to Vosseler and Martinez whose gt. debut it was to be. Both behaved well under the disappointment & parents coming up from N.Y. for the Occasion. ….” (Kirstein, handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

Because of the advance announcement, some sources say that Serenade was danced in these December 6-8 performances announced for Avery Memorial Theater, Hartford, Connecticut, with new décor and costumes for Serenade by William B. Okie, Jr.  Nancy Reynolds in the on-line edition of Choreography by George Balanchine http://www.balanchine.org/balanchine/display_result.jsp?num=141 , says these performances were by “the Producing Company of the School of American Ballet, December 8, 1934, Avery Memorial Theater, Hartford, Connecticut, with costumes by William B. Okie, Jr.” These, however, would have been “preview” performances; and they did not in any event occur.

57. Robert Greskovic has obtained a copy of Okie’s sleek, Art-Déco-like design for the stage for the March 24, 2016 presentation (“Rare Films and Illustrations of Balanchine’s Serenade”) at the New York Public Library. It contains the first example of the blue color that is now associated with Serenade.

58. Kirstein, quickly seeking a new designer for Serenade, finds Jean Lurçat (1892-1966) From his diaries:

“<Dec> 15. Took Bal. up to Eliz. Haws 21E67 to see the Lurçat sketches for Jardin Publique : Lurçat was there : talked of possible collaboration later. For ‘Serenade’ even : As George said Quand meme, un peintre…

“<Dec> “17. … Lurçat came to the school; went over the libretto of the ‘Master Dances.’…” <A ballet planned by Balanchine and Kirstein but not executed.> “Watched a rehearsal of ‘Serenade’ and said it was O.K. but the other was made for a painter: indeed some of the ideas in it overlapped on one’s he already had : We looked at old pictures and we talked with Eddie <Warburg> for a while : Lurçat very witty & French. Said he cdn’t really talk unless we had dinner together. Like an automobile without gas….”

“<Dec> 18. ….Lurçat up to talk abt. the costumes for the Master Dances a few of which he brought with him. Not very one thing or another. ‘Serenade’ was again shown him….”(Kirstein, handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

1935.

58B. From Kirstein’s handwritten diaries:

“Jan 2. …2 hours talk with Bal. & Dim. & Warburg abt. principles of the School & in particular abt. necessity for having an artistic director who can help Bal. & stop him from making mistakes as in the costumes & décor for ‘Serenade’….”

“<Jan> 5. ….At the school heard the disagreeable story of yesterday afternoon’s Rehearsal of Serenade. Bal got into one of those Repetitious sadistic things he sometimes can’t pull himself out of. Made them repeat the same step for an hour : asked if they were tired they cd. go home & abruptly left himself. Up to Rehearsal time today he spoke no word to anyone of the company. I called up around 4, however today Laskey answered, saying everything was O.K…..”

“<Jan> 8. …. To see Jean Lurçat at 45 E60, a studio his being given… handsome costume drawing of a bacchante for our ‘Master Dancers’ which I doubt now will ever be done & some new ideas for ‘Serenade’…. ” (Kirstein, handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

59. On January 13, 1935, Antheil (see 35) writes to Eric Knight, “Another of the things that have complicated life the last two months, Eric, is the fact that I orchestrated two other ballets for Balanchine, and all three of my ballets are due for big premiere with the new superlative American Ballet, in March, here in N.Y.C.” (Mauro Piccinini, unpublished biographical file for George Antheil, 1935.) Although Antheil’s correspondence and Kirstein’s diaries cover several other Balanchine-Antheil projects, his orchestral arrangement of Serenade does not surface until 1935.

60. “Preview” performances of the American Ballet, February 7-8, 1935, Bryn Mawr College, included Serenade. http://www.balanchine.org/balanchine/display_result.jsp?num=141   Programs survive from the performance. (These have been traced by scholars Mauro Piccinini and Jim Steichen).

Antheil’s arrangement of the music is announced. Nonetheless, he writes on February 16th to Norman Bel Geddes:

“I am answering you a bit late but this week has caught me with my two orchestrations of the ballets Transcendence and Serenade which had to be finished and go to the copyist before two o'clock last night in order for them to extract the parts in time to be played at the premiere on February 28th. It has meant working every minute that I didn't actually need for sleeping or eating. However, now after a good night’s sleep I feel thoroughly rested and ready for more mischief. I write my letters myself and therefore it is more difficult for me to get my mail out in time.” (Mario Piccinini, biographical file for George Antheil, 1935.)

61A The Bryn Mawr program shows only 17 women dancing the Sonatina, including Dorothie Littlefield.

Kirstein’s diaries, however, record:

“<February> 7… Stayed at Miss Gertrude Ely’s at Bryn Mawr…Sat with Agnes (de Mille> during the performance which was even worse than I feared. Dorothie Littlefield’s mother called up and <?revived<?> a gt. thing with <??> (she’d done just the same thing with me before Hartford how if Dorothy were made to dance in the corps de ballet she cd. never permit etc. Anyway D. didn’t dance & Serenade was Ruined.” (Kirstein, handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

If Dorothie Littlefield was removed from the initial seventeen women, the point of the opening formation would have been removed. (See 6-7.)

Four men now dance the Elegy in addition to Laskey in its leading role, however. It seems likely this clinches the main organization of the Elegy from then on, although Balanchine revises important details as late as 1976.

61B. Kirstein’s diary for the next day:

“<Feb> 8. …General gloom among the company: Frances Mass had a bloody toe : Laskey <?>fell<?> : Heidi Vosseller is too fat for ‘Serenade’. Bal. just discovered it & told her so before the performance so she cd. hardly dance etc…. They <the dancers in the evening> gave an excellent performance. The lights were incredibly enough much better….” (Kirstein, handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

62. New women listed are Blanche Felsher, Dorothie Littlefield (but see above), Eleanor McLean, Yvonne Patterson, Elise Reiman, Elena de Rivas, Mary Sale and (men, all in the Elegy) William Dollar (new to Serenade but already a dancer in other choreography on the June 10, 1934 program), Arthur Friderix, and Joseph Levinoff. Of the new intake – some names will already have vanished by August 1935 - Reiman and Dollar prove the most lastingly important. Ann Campbell, a member of the 1934 cast, is absent from the Bryn Mawr performance but returns in August 1935.

63. Kirstein, in a letter to Muriel Draper, confirms that costumes by Jean Lurçat were used for the Bryn Mawr performances, with a color palette of blue, grey, black, and white. (Jim Steichen, Serenade Performance Chronology.)

Lurçat’s designs are those used in most productions until 1947. It is hard, however, to be sure what color, shapes, and distinguishing features they featured – though certainly all of the women’s dresses end at about knee-level. One set of costume sketches (shown on March 24, 2016) emphasizes a russet color, and this is suggested in one review. But blues – only an incidental feature in the sketches – become the chief element in the 1940s Lurçat designs. (No russets are recalled by dancers of that era). Another issue is whether the soloists/ballerinas/lead men have costumes in any way differentiated from the corps: certainly this seems the case with the 1944 staging as seen on an Ann Barzel film (see 82). (The differentiation of leading roles by costume continues in one set of post-Lurçat costumes – see 89.)

Films and photographs from the years 1935-47 suggest that several considerably different versions of the Lurçat designs were successively used; a number of them have different points of resemblance to the 1934-35 sketches. Robert Greskovic discussed this on August 26, 2015 and March 24, 2016.

64. In the same letter to Draper, Kirstein describes “a clear blue set with no other design”. (Jim Steichen, Serenade Performance Chronology.) This refers to scenery by Gaston Longchamp.

In August 2015, Simon Morrison found information that “Gaston Longchamp” was the pseudonym of Franklin Chenault Watkins (1894-1972), a painter who worked with Kirstein (mentioned in 1933-35 diary entries) and provided the backdrop for Balanchine’s Transcendence (March 1, 1935 – its premiere shared the program at the Adelphi Theatre with Serenade). Longchamp’s name exists in the Library of Congress “Authority Term” listing without dates, supporting the point that Watkins, who was not in the scenic union, had to work under an assumed name. Kirstein’s diary for January 17, 1935, however, strongly suggests that Longchamps (who did have union problems) and Watkins were two different people.

64B: Kirstein’s letters for the period between the Bryn Mawr performances (February 7-8) and the first New York one at the Adelphi (March 1) contain the following:

<Feb> 10 …. Dined with Bal. at the Eiffel Tower W. 52. He was furious also with Dorothie Littlefield for ‘Refusing’ to dance in the corps de ballet on Thursday night & Ruining ‘Serenade’. I objected to Tamara Geva’s criticism but George said she was right: that Heidi Vosseler was impossible in ‘Serenade’, wants to replace her by Holly Howard: (de Rivas wed be much better) : that the girls shd. have something to keep their hair uniform:….” (Kirstein, handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

65. Balanchine stages the ballet for the American Ballet - March 1, 1935, at the Adelphi Theater, New York.  (Nancy Reynolds, Repertory in Review, p. 36). Jim Steichen has found from surviving programs and newspaper reviews that Serenade was included in ten of these Adelphi Theatre programs (out of a total of twenty performances, March 1-17).

It is always an opening ballet; other ballets in the season include Alma Mater, Dreams, Errante, Reminiscence, Mozartiana.  

66. It seems to be danced to Antheil’s orchestral version of the music (see 46, 59, 60. 66, 73), though this is a vexed area. Kirstein’s diaries note on February 27:

“To an orchestral rehearsal at the Adelphi Theater with <??> : First time they had played together & it sounded like hell, possibly a cold theater. Harmati, the conductor’s dog ate up 7 pages of the score for ‘Transcendance’. Antheil’s orchestration of Serenade was so bad, so full of Antheilism’s, it can’t be used. Cd. ‘Serenade’ be <??> abandoned : No!....” (Kirstein, handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

In a letter to Muriel Draper dated February 28, Kirstein claims that Balanchine was balking at using the orchestration: ‘Balanchine’s refused to use Antheil’s orchestration for Serenade: ces affreux trompettes. Antheil furious.’ (This letter is in the Draper papers at the Beinecke.)” (Jim Steichen, Serenade Performance Chronology.)

See 73 for some evidence that the Antheil arrangement was indeed used, at least at a later date.

67. Kirstein's program note:

“Tschaikovsky was born at Votlinsk in the Vyatka Province, 1849. He was trained as a lawyer, only after his unhappy marriage turning completely to music. His life was characterized by his remarkable correspondence for thirteen years with Nadezhda Filitarevna von Meck, who made him independent of financial worries and steadfastly refused to meet him, fearing the personal effects of an actual encounter. Towards the end of their relationship, due to her own ill-fortune, there was an estrangement. Tschaikovsky did not long survive her.

“The Serenade for stringed instruments (Op. 48) was composed in 1881 and performed in Moscow on January 16, 1882, for the first time.

“The painter Jean Lurçat was born in Paris, 1892. Educated at the University of Nancy in the Natural Sciences, he served in the Great War and was wounded at Verdun. He is well known as a painter in Europe and America and also as a designer of tapestries and textiles. Serenade is the first ballet he has created, to be followed by others for the Monte Carlo and Chicago Companies.” (LK, Program Notes, pp.17-18.)

68A. From Kirstein’s diary for the opening night in New York and the next day:

“March 1. …The Adelphi Theatre was full, a brilliant audience which came in late, both at first & from the intermissions. I was nervous but the audience was very well disposed to like it: started the applause at the start of ‘Serenade’. It was danced well enough : but the lights & the costumes were a terrible strain : No atmosphere of mystery : No accidents so far and I felt Reasonably assured…. Bal back stage not dressed, unshaved & unslept praised the dancers, cursed Harmati the conductor for taking Serenade so slow….

“<March> 2. …Lunch at Chestney’s with Balanchine & Warburg. The critics liked the ballet on the whole. Bal. agreed with Martin that ‘ERRante’ was silly: however he insists it means nothing : it is entirely simple like a dream. Why do Americans always have to see meaning in everything. At the afternoon performance sat with Dorothie Littlefield who feels (her own fault) out of it all during ‘Serenade’ which was better danced than last night : moderate audience…. Harmati, the conductor, still having trouble with the orchestra but it will soon be O.K….”(Kirstein, handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

68B. Kirstein’s diaries for the rest of the season mention Serenade only once:

“<March> 13 ….Very good performance of ‘Serenade’: Bal. was watching from the Balcony. Princess Natalia Paley, a blonde dumb bell embraces him afterwards….”(Kirstein, handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

68C. The March 1935 Dancing Times review is perhaps the first positive one Serenade receives:

“Contains some of Balanchine’s most unusual groupings, breathtaking in the sheer beauty of their arrangement. The Elegy is a little masterpiece of choreographic design.” (Nancy Reynolds, Repertory in Review, p. 37.)

69. The on-line version of Choreography by George Balanchine http://www.balanchine.org/balanchine/display_result.jsp?num=141 gives this cast:

Cast: SONATINA: Leda Anchutina, Holly Howard, Elise Reiman, Elena de Rivas, 13 women;

WALTZ: Anchutina, Howard, Sylvia Giselle [Gisella Caccialanza], Helen Leitch, Annabelle Lyon, 10 women;

ELEGY: Howard, Kathryn Mullowny, Heidi Vosseler, Charles Laskey, 8 women, 4 men.

(“George Balanchine – View Record: 141. Serenade”).

70A. Serenade is given, with Alma Mater and Reminiscence, at the Lewisohn Stadium in New York (August 12, 19) and the Robin Hood Dell in Philadelphia (August 16-17). (The August 19 date replaces a rained-off August 13 one.) The lead dancers in one Lewisohn Stadium performance are those named as in 69.

The other women in the Sonatina are named for the Lewisohn Stadium as Katheryn Mullowney <her name is given twice, with this spelling, as is de Rivas’s>, Ruthanna Boris, Anne Campbell, Giselle <Gisela Caccialanza>, Audrey Guerard, Rabana Hasburgh, Hortense Kahrklinsch, Helen Leitch, Annabelle Lyon, Frances Mann, Hannah Moore, Yvonne Patterson, Heidi Vosseler. (It seems that de Rivas and Mullowney are listed twice because, though dancing in each performance, they alternate in playing a featured role – Mullowney on Monday, de Rivas on Tuesday.) (Jim Steichen, Serenade Performance Chronology.)

70B. From Kirstein’s handwritten diary:

“Aug 12. …To the Lewisohn Stadium where a small (5000) audience saw Reminscence – Alma Mater - <?>Serenade<?> - lousy stage, but the kids looked sweet – Mullowney danced well. The young Roosevelts were there which pleased Warburg: his Ma & Pa: Edward Johnson etc. Muriel was sweet & sympathetic abt. it. She knows how long it will really take.…..”

“<August> 19. …The Ballet had a great success in Philadelphia though Helen Leitch fell into the cymbals….” (Kirstein, handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

71. Instead of the approximately alphabetical order used before for the Sonatina, women are now listed in a way that suggests that four roles are particularly featured in this movement. Anchutina, Howard, Reiman and either Mullowney (August 12) or de Rivas (August 13/19) dance those roles. The other twelve dancers are listed in alphabetical order, followed by the (recurring) names of both Mullowney and de Rivas.

This raises several questions. How were four roles featured in the Sonatina? Probably the two solos danced by today’s “Russian” dancer were taken by different dancers. If the opening tableau featured seventeen women as usual, it must have included all but one of the leading women.

The same names recur in the Waltz except for Vosseler, who is still featured in the Elegy. The main structural differences are that - whereas originally she and Mullowney did not appear before the opening scene of the Elegy (as “heroine” and Dark Angel – see 36, 52-53) - now she makes a corps appearance in the Sonatina; and Mullowney now dances in both Sonatina (sometimes in  a featured role) and the Waltz.

Laskey is still the Elegy’s leading man, and Friederix (new spelling) and Joseph Levinoff remain from the February cast. William Dollar, though absent from Serenade, has a leading role in Alma Mater.

(The management for the American Ballet is given as George Balanchine, Maitre de Ballet. Edward M. M. Warburg, Director. Sandor Harmatim Musical Director.) (Jim Steichen, Serenade Performance Chronology.)

72. In October, the company tours Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey with this and other productions (Alma Mater, Mozartiana, Reminiscence, as well as musical overtures and interludes): seven one-night stands in October 15-22. Jim Steichen has assembled a chronology for this; Serenade was performed three times (Greenwich, Connecticut; Allentown and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania). (Jim Steichen, Serenade Performance Chronology.)

73. Simon Morrison has discovered a reference to Antheil’s orchestral arrangement (including wind instruments) of Serenade in a September 22, 1935 Dallas Morning News advance announcement (by John Rosenfeld Jr) of a Dallas appearance of the American Ballet on November 13. The American Ballet never made it to Dallas, however. Its tour of America folded in October after Scranton, Pennsylvania. Rosenfeld’s advance piece also says that Serenade “seemed to be full of the restlessness of human desires, with all the fluency of pattern and design of which Balanchine is the master.”

Jim Steichen has encountered, amid dozens of reviews of the Adelphi performances, no other details about the Antheil arrangement.

1936.

74A. At the Metropolitan Opera, New York, Balanchine adds a male dancer to the waltz (Nancy Reynolds, Choreography by George Balanchine). This presumably creates the pas de deux opening we know, or an earlier version of it. It seems the same male dancer also danced the Elegy.

Either now or in the next few years, Balanchine has the Waltz’s male dancer enter at the end of the Sonatina. His diagonal entrance is another of the echoes of Giselle, as well as prefiguring the entrance of the man in the Elegy. (See 21.)

(When did Balanchine create the continuity between the Sonatina and the Waltz? Perhaps not till 1940? Until then, did he perhaps retain the ffz chord at the end of the Sonatina?)

74B. Kirstein’s handwritten diary mentions only changes of costumes: “

“<Feb>10. …Excellent performance of ‘Serenade’ to universal acclaim. White lights with patches & red wigs for the boys…” (Kirstein, handwritten diaries, New York Public Library. Quoted by permission.)

75A. According to Nancy Reynolds (Choreography by George Balanchine), there is no décor in performances of Serenade from now on. There are, however, some exceptions to this rule: we have Kirstein’s description of Portinari’s 1941 décor and a photograph of André Delfau’s 1947 décor.

75B. Annabelle Lyon (1979 oral history with Elizabeth Kendall, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) says that Balanchine, after making Serenade with the original three movements of the music, choreographed the Tema Russo fourth movement (she cannot remember its name, but remembers it is fast) with herself in the lead. “He choreographed it on me. But I never had a chance to perform it. He didn’t have a company.” Quite what date she has in mind is unclear.

No date

76. A file of Serenade documents and press cuttings in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts contains two highly peculiar and baffling unsigned documents, which may both be jokes. They look and read like typed drafts for program notes; the typescripts differ.

Each writes of Serenade as if it had only three movements, which suggests pre-1940 dates. The typography and language, however, suggest a later period. Also one of them is stapled to a standard form from New York City Center, undated; and has a French translation with it. It’s possible the English is a version of the French original. Possibly it was a program note for the 1947 Paris Opéra production (see 99). Another possibility, less likely, is that it was written for a European tour of New York City Ballet.

The first: “SERENADE:

“Just as a symphony is composed of theme (sic) integrated to flow against one another, so this ballet, purely symphonic in form, uses three sets of types of movement in counterpoint. The sonatina and waltz are designated in ceaseless, linear patterns of young girls, dressed in blue, white, and gray - - - on their toes and again in free plastic action. The sonatina (sic), a somber adagio movement, uses two girls and a boy and then the whole corps de ballet as a background for a tragic pantomime. At the end, the single figure of the forsaken dancer is elevated over the heads of the others and borne off, followed by the vibrating hands of her companions.”

The second: “SERENADE.

“Music by Tchaikovsky.

“Story and Choreography by George Balanchine.

“The action of the ballet is symbolic and represents the futile search for mutual understanding between two people and the final realization that each person must carry eternally the burden of his loneliness. The search is represented first by a Girl and later by a Boy.

“In the first section the Girl tries to identify herself with a group. She takes her place among them, adopting the same attitudes and gestures. By their variations they indicate their differentness and their separateness from her.

“In the middle section (the Waltz) the girl tries to achieve understanding through love, but this too ends in failure and she is left abandoned on an empty stage.

“In the last section, the Boy enters. Hanging upon him, her arms encircling him like tentacles, her hands blinding his eyes, her feet following his steps more closely than a shadow, is a dancer who represents all the forces within him which make it impossible for him to give himself completely in love. He attempts to break away from this inseparable part of himself and is temporarily able to believe that he can find happiness with the Girl. But, inexorably, the tentacles, reclaim him, the hands again blind him, and he is pushed away from happiness back into himself. The Girl is again abandoned on an empty stage and is finally carried off, still seeking, but hopelessly.”

The files at the New York Public Library contain other such documents, some of which are student assignments that were donated by teachers. Serenade, (Balanchine) clippings)

1940.

77. The ballet is revived for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, October 17, 1940. (Anatole Chujoy, Dance Encyclopedia; George Balanchine, Compete Stories of the Great Ballets.) Balanchine gives most of the solo roles to one dancer, including the main new role in the Russian dance. This dancer was initially Marie-Jeanne (see 6, 54, 78, 82, 105), who is guest artist; the men were Igor Youskevitch and Frederic Franklin.

It may be relevant that in a 2010 essay (“The Ballet that Changed Everything”, Wall Street Journal), Toni Bentley writes that “Balanchine told one of his favorite dancers that the ballet could simply have been called “Ballerina.” (That dancer was Karin von Aroldingen. Email from Toni Bentley to Macaulay, March 15, 2015.)

78. Edwin Denby, reviewing the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo’s fall 1940 season, writes “Balanchine’s third piece for the Monte Carlo, a revival of Serenade, I was not invited to by the organization’s publicity department; well, I remember liking it some years ago at the Stadium.” (Modern Music, November-December 1940. See Denby, Dance Writings, p. 65.) He surely means the Lewisohn Stadium, where the American Ballet had performed it: see 70-71.

The Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Serenadeclippings include one by John Martin (“The Ballet Russe in Two Premieres,” New York Times, October 18, 1940) of a Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo double bill of Serenade (Marie-Jeanne) and Nutcracker (Markova):

“…Balanchine’s ‘Serenade’ will also improve with further performance, for it is essentially an ensemble piece, and last night it was anything else. As a composition, it is fresh, impeccably neat, and chic, with an admirable musicianship always evident under its line and phrase. It is almost a pure abstraction, a ‘music visualization’, with only a hint of classroom ‘center practice’ in its opening movement and a vague suggestion of program in its final section. For those who have the inclination to go with the choreographer along his rather rarefied way, the experience is eminently worth the effort for the first two movements – the ‘Sonatina’ and the ‘Waltz’. For the final section, here called ‘Adagio’ but originally ‘Elegy,’ there may be reservations. It is referred to in the program notes as somber and tragic, but it proves to be instead both lush and disingenuous.

“Marie-Jeanne of the American Ballet Caravan was guest artist, in a single solo role, and gave an excellent account of herself, with more flowers than you could shake a stick at as her reward..”

This review suggests the ballet still only has three movements. So, confusingly, do a number of subsequent reviews and notes. Nevertheless….

79. Probably at this point - though no critic seems to notice – Balanchine adds, for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, the Tema Russo or “Russian dance”, placing it before the Elegy. (Nancy Reynolds, Choreography by George Balanchine.) (See 75B for Annabelle Lyon’s memory of him choreographing this on her earlier, when “he didn’t have a company.”) It begins with five women (as the old Waltz used to).

The Tema Russo has a number of moments that recall older ballets. The women’s forward-hopping arabesques voyagées and temps levés may suggest the wilis of Giselle. (See 21.) A later sequence where all the dancers address the back of the stage may evoke an ensemble near the end of Les Sylphides (see 16) when both sylphs and Poet all address the moon. The use of the corps – usually sixteen women in four groups of four – is more orthodox than elsewhere in Serenade.

The new section, however, also contains jumps that (according to Kyra Nichols Gray, Serenade seminar, August 27, 2015) Balanchine wanted to have a “modern dance” quality. These are initiated by the “Russian” soloist: jumps with alternating convex and concave shapes that arch the whole torso.

80. Simon Morrison observes (Serenade seminar, August 28, 2015) that 1940 is a significant date: it is Tchaikovsky’s centenary, made much of in the Soviet Union. Balanchine’s decision in 1940 to employ Tchaikovsky's original scoring may be another acknowledgement of this anniversary - a gesture to honor the composer as international and non-Soviet.

Nonetheless the score retains slight cuts in the Waltz, and two in the newly added Tema Russo – one of which can seem musically crucial, since it returns to the opening theme of the Sonatina.

Some sources claim - as Victoria Simon remarks at the Serenade seminar, August 28, 2015 - that Tchaikovsky was happy for the two final movements of his Serenade to be played in reverse order in concert. Simon Morrison (same day) contradicts this, arguing that Tchaikovsky took considerable trouble over the overall structure of his score. Morrison argues that to end the score with the poignant Elegy, as Balanchine does, is to give it a quality deliberately like that of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony. (Certainly Balanchine – who believed that Tchaikovsky committed suicide, a view discredited in twenty-first-century Tchaikovsky studies – loved the Pathétique, choreographing its Adagio Lamentoso for New York City Ballet’s 1981 Tschaikovsky Festival.)

Another factor may be simply that, as Marcia Siegel observes (The Shapes of Change, p.71), the music for the Elegy is based on an ascending scale, in contrast to the descending scales that feature so markedly in the Sonatina (beginning and end) and Tema Russo (near the end).

Balanchine’s preparedness to re-organize the structure of Tchaikovsky’s music recurs in his 1981 Mozartiana (which re-orders the first and second movements of Tchaikovsky’s fourth orchestral suite of that name), and may be linked to his preparedness to choreograph just to one movement of a suite (making his 1947 Theme and Variations from the finale of the third suite) and to remove the opening movement from a symphony (when making Diamonds to the third symphony).

81. The new Tema Russo opens with a dance for five women, close together. They descend to the floor and join hands to make a chain.

The 1940 and 1944 Ann Barzel films (Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts - see 83, 85-87) shows that the choreography here differed from what we now see. When first joining hands, the women at the end of the row do not extend their second hands to the outer air but back inward to the rest of the group. When they are upright, the central dancer does a backbend at the center of the chain (perhaps echoing those of the Dark Angel in the Sonatina with four other women).

These chains are something that André Levinson associated with Mikhail Fokine’s choreography and folk dance; to Levinson they were anti-classical. (“In nearly every one of Fokine’s ballets there is a moment where all the participants, irrespective of their earlier roles, join hands and form a long chain – a farandole –which closes up into concentric circles and carries on to an ever-accelerating tempo…. Fokine’s khovorod is the breakdown of the classical principle.” Ballet Old and New, pp. 41, 43.) With the women on the floor, there is also a parallel to the opening scene for nine women in Nijinska’s Les Noces. For Balanchine, they may have been also derived from Georgian folk dance.

82. We cannot be sure, but it may be for Marie-Jeanne (the originator of the legendary double sauts de basque in Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial, 1941) that Balanchine choreographs, in the Tema Russo, the single most talked-about step in Serenade as we have known it since the 1950s. In the opening quintet of the Tema Russo, the “Russian” dancer (the ballerina who opens this movement) does what Suki Schorer defines (Serenade seminar, August 27, 2015) as a ballonné battu, a jump in which the working leg moves out à la seconde and then, bending, quickly beats (front and back) the other leg, high up; that other leg remains straight in the air. The nature of the take-off and the height of the battu are part of what has become controversial about this step, which has sometimes been delivered as an entrechat-trois (or something like) in recent decades. The best account of the ballonné battu on film is seen with Patricia Wilde in the 1953 film by Victor Jessen. See 116.

83. How are the dances actually distributed in this version? The 1940 and 1944 Ann Barzel films of Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo performances suggest that this leading ballerina dances the extended solos now given to the “Waltz” and “Russian” dancers in the Sonatina, Waltz, and Tema Russo, as well as the Waltz and Tema Russo pas de deux and opening quintet of the Tema Russo; she then falls at the end of the Tema Russo and becoming the “heroine” of the Elegy. Nathalie Krassovska (1940) and Ruthanna Boris (1944) are shown in film clips of these dances.

The solo danced since the late 1950s by the “Dark Angel” in the Sonatina is danced in the 1944 film by the nineteen-year-old Maria Tallchief, who then becomes one of the four demi-soloists opening the Tema Russo with the lead dancer. Tallchief is not seen in the clips of the Elegy.

The 1944 clips show Mary Ellen Moylan (we believe) as the “Dark Angel” in the Elegy, but do not seem to feature her in the earlier movements. Did this “character” wait in the wings until the final movement? (See 52, 93, 116.)

84. It is perhaps in 1940, with the Tema Russo added, that that Balanchine gives Serenade an unbroken continuity that links the movements of the music. See 32.

And it is perhaps now – though it may have been as early as 1934 (see 34) - that he organizes the ballet to have a number of structural “echoes”. The five women who open the Tema Russo (who may well have been adapted from the five women who in 1934-35 opened the Waltz – see 34) are an echo of the five women in the Sonatina. A lone woman who advances from downstage left in the Sonatina towards the soloist who falls down (see 29) anticipates the “mother” figure who makes a similar entrance at the end of the Elegy (see 41).

85. The Ann Barzel film fragments (Chicago, 1940) of this are said to feature Nathalie Krassovska in the lead role; they include clips of all four movements, including the new Russian dance.

The two men are identified as Mark Platoff and Igor Youskevitch (1912-94). Marc Platoff was the Monte Carlo name of Marc Platt (1913-2014), né Marcel LePlat; he also bore the Platoff name in 1938 in the de Basil company.

In the Elegy, the Dark Angel is promenaded in arabesque by her knee, twice. She does not, however, stretch up at the end of the arabesque.

Krassovska makes an especially striking impression in the backbend of the  ballet’s final cortège.

86. The 1940 Barzel film shows costumes, with vertically/diagonally paneled two-tone dresses just above the knee for the women. These were surely a version of Lurçat's 1935 costumes. Anatole Chujoy concurs in his 1949 Dance Encyclopedia. Kirstein in “The American Ballet in Brazil” (1941) writes “Mr. Balanchine had given the original Lurçat costumes and scenery of his Serenade to the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.” (Kirstein: Ballet: Bias & Belief, p.80.)

None of the 1940s Ballet Russe dancers (most of them from later in the decade) present at the Serenade seminar on August 26-28, 2015 recognized these costumes, however.

(Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts credits the costume design as Karinska, which is simply wrong. This error may lead us to ask if the film is also misdated; but all the evidence – costumes, dance text - supports a 1940 date or one very soon after.)

87. The Barzel film seems to show the “girl who falls over” in the Sonatina (see 29) lying like a corpse flat on her back, arms folded across her chest as if ready for her coffin. Is this an echo of the dead Giselle? (See 21.)

Another Jerome Robbins Dance Division photograph from another year echoes this “dead” look, but with arms by her side. In this photo, the corps members are placed at extraordinarily close quarters to her in their three-tier “Greek theatre” formation.

1941.

88. Serenade is also danced by American Ballet Caravan. Costumes are by the Brazilian Candido Portinari. (Nancy Reynolds, Choreography by George Balanchine) 

Kirstein in “The American Ballet in Brazil” (1941) writes :

“Our opening at the Municipal Theatre was the occasion also of the first real collaboration with a South American artist. I had known the painter Candido Portinari from the New York World’s Fair, where his big decorations at the Brazilian Pavilion had led to his one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Balanchine had given the original Lurçat costumes and scenery of his Serenade to the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. This was the first ballet composed for our company, the original American Ballet in 1934, while in it our first dancer, Marie-Jeanne, made her successful debut with the Monte Carlo in the fall of 1940 as guest artist.

“Portinari was a great admirer of Balanchine’s and made a number of sketches for the décor from which we selected a free interpretation of the sky over the Southern Hemisphere with the stars of the Southern Cross intertwined with two meteors. The drop, though simple, was extremely effective. The costumes were made in a less than a week in the studios of the Teatro Municipal.

“I cannot pretend our dancers were not nervous…. Nor can I say that the Portinari collaboration was a triumph. The public was not prepared for his quiet and, to our way of thinking, perfect solution of a rather simple problem. They would have preferred something violent and ‘modern’; upsetting. It was merely, from their point of view, suitable, ‘in good taste’.” (Kirstein: Ballet: Bias & Belief, p.80.)”

But Anatole Chujoy in his 1949 Dance Encyclopedia and Balanchine in the Complete  Stories of the Great Ballet says this production had costumes by Alvin Colt. (Colt later that decade became a well-known Broadway designer.)

As Serenata, it is danced on the company’s South American tour. Marie-Jeanne (see 6, 54, 77, 78, 82, 105) again danced it, with William Dollar and Lorna London: http://www.balanchine.org/balanchine/display_result.jsp?id=260&sid=&searchMethod= . Some sources say that this is when the Tema Russo/Russian dance was first added – but see 79-81 (1940) above.

(It would be good to hunt for more photographs of the American Ballet’s South American 1941 Serenata to identify Portinari’s contribution. We believe that one photograph of an early Sonatina grouping does show the women’s costumes: very short and pale – white-looking tunics, ultra-short with multiple necklace-type loops embossed beneath the neck. This photograph of these costumes is shown on March 24, 2016: “Rare Films and Illustrations of Balanchine’s Serenade.”)

89. The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo is also keeping it in repertory. Denby (Modern Music, November-December 1941), listing the company’s repertory, simply says “For Balanchine choreography there is the Baiser, Poker Game, and Serenade, all three fascinating to watch.” (Dance Writings, p. 82)

1944.

90. John Martin (“Serenade Danced by Ballet Russe,” New York Times, April 15) writes of Serenade as “This charming and characteristic little ballet.”

91. Edwin Denby (New York Herald Tribune, April 15) writes:

“Balanchine’s Serenade was beautifully danced last night by the Monte Carlo at the City Center, and it is a completely beautiful ballet.

“George Balanchine is the greatest choreographer of our time. He is Petipa’s heir. His style is classical: grand without being impressive, clear without being strict. It is humane because it is based on the patterns the human body makes when it dances; it is not – like romantic choreography – based on patterns the body cannot quite force itself into. His dance evolutions and figures are luminous in their spacing, and of a miraculous musicality in their impetus. Sentiment, fancy, and wit give them warmth and immediacy. But as the audience actually watches, it all looks so playful and light, so unemphatic and delicate, it doesn’t seem to call for noisy applause. Ten years later, when noisier successes have faded, one finds with surprise that his have kept intact their first freshness and their natural bloom.

“Serenade is a kind of graduation exercise: the dancers seem to perform all the feats that they have learned, both passages of dancing and passages of mime (or plastique). There is no story, though there seems to be a girl who meets a boy; he comes on with another girl and for a while all three are together; then, at the end, the first girl is left alone and given a sort of tragic little apotheosis.

“I was delighted to hear some giggling in the audience at the parts where all three were together – it showed how well the point got across; the audience at plays giggles too when the sentiment becomes intimate, it is our national way of reacting to that emotion. After giggling last night they gasped a little at some particularly beautiful lifts and then began applauding them.” (Denby, Dance Writings, p.214)

92. Ann Barzel’s 1944 silent film of Serenade film fragments(Chicago, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo - Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) suggests that costumes are now undergoing revision. Were Lurçat and/or Portinari and/or Colt involved? (As noted in 88 above, it would be good to find more photographs of the American Ballet’s South American 1941 Serenata to identify Portinari’s and/or Colt’s contribution.)

The corps now wear white or pale short dresses with little cloaks. Hair is worn with bandeaux or broad handbands. But the leading two women are differently dressed in the Elegy and - in the first of two performances shown - dance the Elegy with loosened hair. (Balanchine is seen in the wings.)

In the second performance, all bandeaux are kept in place in the Elegy. (It is, however, possible that the clips are of an earlier performance: who can tell? At any rate, it seems very likely that the clips come from the same series of performances.)

Joy Williams Brown (then Joy Williams), who danced Serenade with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1946-1948, says (Serenade seminar, August 26-18, 2015) that the corps (among whom she was one) wore those corps costumes, which were blue but the cloaks were white. She does not recognize the different costumes for the principal characters in the 1944 film as ones used in her time.

93. To modern eyes, the distribution of roles in the 1944 Barzel film clips is at first confusing. (See 83.) Ruthanna Boris (named by Barzel) seems to be dancing the lead woman. As far as we can tell from these fragmentary film clips, she dances the two solos in the Sonatina now danced by the so-called “Russian” dancer, the Waltz duet, the role of the Russian dancer at the end of the Waltz and start of the Tema Russo, the duet/partnered passages in the Tema Russo and the fall at the end of the Tema Russo, and the heroine in the Elegy.

Mary Ellen Moylan (named by Barzel) is also seen, identified by some viewers as the most technically advanced dancer on these fragments (but people differ on this). She is probably the Dark Angel in at least one.

The young Maria Tallchief (unmistakable, though not identified on Barzel’s credits) is in a demi-soloist role, dancing the first extended solo in the Sonatina (the one now danced by the “Dark Angel”) but also dancing as one of the side girls in the quintet opening the Russian dance. In that Sonatina solo, her steps – though featuring the same extensions à la seconde falling sideways off balance - are sometimes different: they include single tours en l’air to both left and right.

Leon Danielian and Nicholas Magallanes are identified as the other two men; for Magallanes this involvement with the Elegy would continue until the early 1970s. (David Vaughan, however, believes that Frederic Franklin is one of the two lead men.)

94. The camera shows several striking moments in the Elegy. One is when Magallanes has completed promenading Moylan by the knee in first arabesque, twice; then, although the camera angle is poor, she is seen to stretch her arm and upper torso up. Since this touch is absent in the 1940 film (see 85), it’s fair to ask if Balanchine added it for Moylan, who at this period became an important interpreter of his work. (“She was the first,” Balanchine later told younger dances, as she proudly recalls in I Remember Balanchine.)

Another notable image is when Magallanes lowers Boris to the floor: she turns only once in his arms. A third is the subsequent Eros/Canova/Fokine moment in which Boris pays farewell to her male partner (Magallanes): she rings her arms around his neck and their faces come close as if for a final kiss. (See 14.)

95. Denby (April 20, 1944) reviews the Boris-Moylan-Danielian-Magallanes cast (Dance Writings,pp.219-220). He seems to identify Boris as the main heroine, Moylan as the Elegy’s “Dark Angel” (“again astonished with a particularly fine long-held arabesque that rose in height at the end as an opera singer’s high C increases in volume in the last bar”). (This arabesque is obliquely caught in the Ann Barzel film: see 85.) Was Moylan the first to stretch up this way? Possibly not; Kathryn Mullowney, the original Dark Angel, mentions in a 1976 oral history interview that she has a high arabesque (see 36). But Moylan’s importance to the evolution of Balanchine style is beyond doubt. She remembers (“I Remember Balanchine”) how he introduced her to a later generation of dancers with the words “She was the first.”

Denby adds “In a small part blond Nina Popova was remarkably quick, clear, and straight.” (She later founded the Houston Ballet.) Since the largest role not taken by Boris, Moylan, or Tallchief in the Barzel film is that of the third (“Russian”) dancer in the central section of the Elegy, it seems at least possible that this is Popova’s role.

96. At some point around now, Danilova dances the lead role in Serenade. She later recalled that Balanchine said that the woman on the man's back was his wife.

“She is his wife and together, he said, they pass down the road of life. I, the girl on the floor, was pitied by the man, but I was a frivolous girl who had one affair after another. Then I was left alone." (Mason, I Remember Balanchine, p.7.)

See 7; and see 120 and 128 for another version of Balanchine’s “story” for the Elegy.

1946-47.

97. The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo continues to dance Serenade. (Edwin Denby, Dance Writings, pp. 347-50.) Joy Williams Brown dances in its corps in these years. She contributes to the August 2015 seminar a photograph of the corps including herself, with strokes of color to show the possible shades of blue in the costumes; this is shown on March 24, 2016 (“Rare Films and Illustrations of Balanchine’s Serenade”).

98. Denby (A Note on Balanchine’s Present Style, Dance Index, February-March 1945), summing up the development in Balanchine’s style since 1940, looks back to say, “Serenade is directly classic in its style of dancing but it makes many of its points by gestures and arrangements that have a sort of pictorial symbolism.” (Denby, Dance Writings, p. 413.) Denby must be referring to this Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo production.

1947.

99. Balanchine stages it for the Paris Opera Ballet, as La Sérénade. Designs are by André Delfau.

Nancy Reynolds has located - in Pierre Michaut, Le Ballet Contemporain, 1950 -  a photograph of this production, which shows the corps in the opening formation, with short skirts, hats, and a wide-diagonal use of the opening port de bras. Robert Greskovic and Claudia Roth Pierpont note (Serenade seminar, August 28, 2015) that the headpieces resemble Russian diadem affairs, rather like those devised by Rouben Ter-Arutunian for Balanchine’s Stravinsky Scherzo à la Russe, with veils trailing down at the back. Other photographs in the New York Public Library show that the lead women have costumes differentiated from one another. This may be the last set of designs in which the leading soloists are distinguished by costume from one another and from the corps. Several of these were shown on March 24, 2016 (“Rare Films and Illustrations of Balanchine’s Serenade”).

Behind the women in the photograph of the opening tableau is a statue of – yes -  Eros: an echo of Fokine’s Eros, it seems likely. (See 15.)

(Delfau also designs the Paris Opera’s 1947 Apollon Musagète, in which Michel Renault’s brown body make-up smeared Maria Tallchief’s white costume as Terpsichore. See Julie Kavanagh, Secret Muses, The Life of Frederick Ashton, Viking, NY, 1996)

100A. Three 1947 Argus de la Presse photographs (Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) show that the cast includes Christiane Vaussard, Michel Renault, Max Bezzoni, Denise Bourgeois.

Renault is also Balanchine’s Paris Apollo, and the lead dancer in the third, Allegro Vivace - “Les Éméraudes” movement of its original Le Palais de Cristal, dancing opposite Micheline Bardin. Bezzoni is the lead man in the fourth movement Palais de Cristal the same year. (*MGZR Serenade(Balanchine) clippings file)

100B. Anatole Chujoy, in the 1949 Dance Encyclopedia (p.424), lists productions of Serenade for the American Ballet (1935), Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (1940), and Paris Opera Ballet (1947). Nonetheless he calls it a “Ballet in 3 movements.” Like others, he seems not to have noticed that it has been a four-movement ballet since 1940.

1948.

101. New York City Ballet dances it; the first performance is October 18. Barbara Milberg Fisher writes (email to Macaulay, July 7, 2015): 

“I do remember the first day Balanchine began to set Serenade for the newly-formed NYCB in the big studio at SAB. He put us all in place & then asked Georgia Hiden to show us the opening movements of the arms. Georgia had danced with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet & toured South America in Ballet Caravan, both with Balanchine. She stood in front of the stationed dancers in that first rehearsal & showed us the arm movements to the opening chords of the ballet - and I recall that the first movement - pulling in the right wrist - made us giggle.

“They say that Mnemosyne is a fickle muse & I may be wrong - but that's what I remember :)”

102. Pat McBride Lousada danced the “Dark Angel” role in the Elegy, and had a solo in (probably) the Sonatina.

She writes (email to Macaulay, January 19, 2016) “Yes, I was in it when the company first staged it…. I was taught by George. He wasn’t called Mr B. in those days. He showed us what to do. He also changed the solos around quite often. I had an entrance that required a good jump, which I didn’t have, and then ended in a double pirouette ending on one knee. Very hard to do and land properly. I didn’t always manage it; but Mr B. wouldn’t change it, and I know he thought it would make me improve my jump! The dancers he had in my day were nothing like the ones that followed. We were technically a very mixed lot, but he somehow created wonderful ballets even with our limitations. I dare say the American Ballet didn’t have many decent dancers either. I can remember him asking different girls to try the jump in which the boy catches the girl while she is turning in mid-air. Only one managed – I think it was Ruth Sobotka. Today most dancers would think nothing of it.

“I also remember that I had trouble making my arms menacing enough when I had to do that fierce fluttering arm movement <the beating wing movement before leading the man offstage>. I kept trying to imitate him but knew that by his having to show me a number of times I wasn’t doing it the way he wanted.” (See 12, 41.)

103. Costumes are uncredited. Photographs by George Platt Lynes seem to show that the company was wearing skirts/dresses ending high up the thigh. Patricia McBride Lousada, who danced the Dark Angel role in the Platt Lynes photos, writes (email to Macaulay, January 19, 2016):

“I remember that we wore blue, simple fitting sleeveless, bodices attached to short skirts that just came to the top of the thighs, cut on the bias (I think). Not sure what the material was but perhaps rayon. The skirts stayed close to the body but moved well…. And our tights and shoes were pink I’m pretty sure. Looking at a photo the skirts were slightly gathered up as well as cut on the bias. That is what I can remember and it was a very long time ago.

“There is a big book called The New York City Ballet with a text by Lincoln and photos by Swope and George Platt Lynes, a Borzoi book published by Knopf, 1973. On page 23, you will have what I described: Melissa <Hayden>, <Frank> Hobi, and me. Three photos.”

Although Barbara Milberg Fisher (conversation with Macaulay, March 24, 2016) only remembers dancing Serenade in long Karinska dresses, photographs and Patricia McBride Lousada’s testimony strongly suggest that these much shorter outfits were worn at this period.

But the leading men (and probably the corps men too) wear the “Blueberry” costumes (with embossed gold chains) still usually worn today. One particular oddity of the unattributed costumes is that the “Blueberry” costumes have been attributed to Karinska since 1952. So are these 1948-50 costumes a mixture by Karinska and others from the Ballet Society wardrobe? It seems unlikely that Karinska would lend her name in 1952 to male costumes she had not devised.

104. Lighting is by Jean Rosenthal. Is this when the ballet's moonlit look begins?

105. It is not quite clear from Nancy Reynolds (Choreography by George Balanchine) whether the company dances it with the three-ballerina distribution of leading roles that we are accustomed to seeing now.

Marie-Jeanne (see 6, 53, 77, 78, 82, 105) danced with City Ballet in those years. Although Pat McBride Lousada (email to Macaulay, January 19, 2016) does not recall Marie-Jeanne dancing Serenade with the company, Jack Anderson quotes a 1948 review of her doing so by Walter Terry in his Jan 3, 2008 New York Times obituary for her: “…although it is in her dance nature to be quick, staccato, even nervous of movement, she brought a fine fluidity of motion to her assignment.”

1950.

106. Martin Duberman (The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, p. 461) writes about spring 1950: “Ashton’s suggestion to change the clothes for Serenade to flowing robes was also adopted.” This is when City Ballet is preparing its six-week summer London season at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

Photos from the 1950 Covent Garden season establish that the women now wear dark blue net/tulle skirts (full, beneath the knee) and matching veils over the chignon, over brighter blue leotards.

One photograph shows Maria Tallchief, in the Waltz role, wearing this attire with blue tights. (This was shown on March 24, 2016, “Rare Films and Illustrations of Balanchine’s Serenade”). It is likely, however, that other 1950-1951 black-and-white photos of this attire show differently colored – probably pink - tights. The longer skirts – is this what Ashton envisaged? – help to turn Serenadeinto a partly Romantic ballet, like Giselle. (See 21, 79, 112.)

Costumes are unattributed, however, in the Covent Garden programs. Photographs in the British dance magazines (Ballet, Dance and Dancers) establish that the men are wearing the blue “Blueberry” costumes (see 103) later attributed to Karinska, with the embossed gold chain.

Ashton also advised (Duberman, p. 463) that it was “madness” to open with Orpheus, and suggested Serenade instead. The company did open with Orpheus, nonetheless. Little of the repertory was well received by the critics - except (pp.463, 464) for Serenade. 

107. Balanchine (or Francis Mason on his behalf) wrote later (Complete Stories of the Great Ballets, p. 532):

“The leading role in Serenade was first danced by a group of soloists, rather than by one principal dancer. In a number of productions, however, I rearranged it for one dancer. But when the New York City Ballet was to make its first appearance in London, at the Royal Opera House, Garden, in the summer of 1950, it seemed appropriate to introduce the company by introducing its principal dancers and the leading role was again divided and danced by our leading soloists.”

Nancy Reynolds (Choreography by George Balanchine, p.118) writes that, for the 1950 London season, what we now think of as the leading three roles are distributed among five ballerinas.

Programs (Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts), however, show a four-ballerina distribution of roles:-

(August 30) Janet Reed, Yvonne Mounsey, Patricia Wilde, Melissa Hayden.  

It is for, or in, this London season that Mounsey learns the “Dark Angel” role from Patricia McBride (now Patricia Lousada, see 102-103); Mounsey goes on to dance it up to the late 1950s. She speaks of this in a January 4, 2006, audio interview with Emily Hite; she also speaks of dancing the role in a 2012 film made by Hite. (She becomes famous for the fast-changing port de bras she did in her first solo in the Sonatina - David Vaughan has never forgotten. In her late eighties, meeting me at the New York State Theater and hearing of her role in Serenade, she at once shows me the port de bras as if she knows that is her particular legend.)When I met Mounsey at the New York State Theater in 2008 and mentioned this role, she was in her late eighties, but at once showed me the port de bras as if she knew that was her particular legend.)

1951.

108. A one-minute series of black-and-white film clips by Ann Barzel (Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) shows New York City Ballet dancing Serenade in Chicago. Melissa Hayden and Tanaquil Le Clercq are in lead roles. The four Elegy men wear what look like the “Blueberry” costumes we still see in today’s Karinska costumes. (See 103, 107.) The women, however, are wearing the darker tulle/net affairs mentioned in 106 above. The date given is 1951, and is probably accurate,

Hayden here is dancing the “Russian” role, or part of it. (Earlier, during 1948-50, she had danced the Waltz “heroine”, as she did again, up to at least 1970.) David Vaughan has never forgotten the incisive way she, as the Russian dancer, did the ballonné battu in the Tema Russo.

Le Clercq is dancing the role of the Waltz “heroine”, seen briefly in the Waltz pas de deux.

109. Kirstein now writes a new Souvenir Program note:

“Set to Tschaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, this was the first ballet created by Balanchine in America. It was originally presented June 10, 1934, by the Students of the School of American Ballet, at the estate of Felix M. Warburg, White Plains, New York. Subsequently the work was remounted for the American Ballet Caravan, 1941; the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, 1943; for the Grand Opera, Paris, 1947; and for the New York City Ballet, 1948.” (LK, Program Notes, p.38)

110. A May 1 program (Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts: MGZB (New York City Ballet) 1951 Feb. 13-Dec. 16 c.6 https://catalog.nypl.org/record=b12113434~S1) now shows the five-ballerina distribution of roles: Melissa Hayden, Patricia Wilde, Yvonne Mounsey, Tanaquil LeClercq, Diana Adams. Costumes again are unattributed.

1952.

111. Denby, back in New York after four years, now writes in Ballet (“New York City’s Ballet”, August 1952) about New York City Ballet’s dancing of Serenade:

“Serenade is danced even more meticulously than Valse; but, despite its constant success, I would prefer it danced, so to speak, demi-caractère, not straight academic. Done as it used to be before the war, with a slight ‘Russian’ ritard and dragging in the waltzing, that tiny overtone of acting gave the whole piece a stylistic unity and coherence in which the beautiful gesture images (from the one at the opening to the very last, the closing procession) appeared not extraneous but immanent in a single conception.” (Denby, Dance Writings, p. 423)

(In a 1965 note to Dancers Buildings, and People in the Street, however, Denby remarks “I am astonished that I ever thought Serenade would be better performed in a demi-caractère way.” Denby, Dance Writings, p. 575.)

112. Nancy Reynolds (Choreography by George Balanchine) writes that it is only now that the company dressed the ballet in costumes by Karinska; a 7 July program from Covent Garden (New York Public Library) supports her. This change seems to be only in the women’s costumes, which have longer skirts (low calf-length); they have the asymmetrical waistlines used ever since. They also have a length that is shorter at the front, allowing greater visibility of footwork – this is especially visible on the 1953 Jessen film (New York Public Library). (The hemline is changed – made more regular - at some later date, probably during the 1960s. It is only then they also acquire the two vertical cream-yellow panels that offset their general blue.) The longer skirts clinch the Romantic quality of Serenade and its points of resemblance to Giselle. (See 21, 74, 79, 106.)

113. The July 7 Covent Garden program also shows a five-ballerina distribution of leading roles: Janet Reed, Yvonne Mounsey, Patricia Wilde, Melissa Hayden, Diana Adams.

114. As Robert Greskovic remarks (email to Macaulay, September 2, 2015), this program specifically lists Serenade among the season’s “classic ballets,” along with Symphony in C, The Guests, Concerto Barocco, and Mother Goose Suite. (Bourrée Fantasque is called “classical balle”: presumably a typo.)

1953.

115. Nancy Reynolds (Choreography by George Balanchine) writes that the leading roles were now distributed among four ballerinas. (This was not new: see 26, 71, 107.) She says this version was also danced in 1955 and 1958; perhaps we can’t be sure which version the company danced in between.

116. The Victor Jessen film (black-and-white, silent, 75 minutes, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) is made from composite NYCB performances at the Greek Theatre, Los Angeles, in 1953. It is hard to tell whether it represents a fair view of the distribution of roles or whether Jessen was editing out those ballerinas he liked less (as he sometimes did in other films). Notably, Tanaquil Le Clercq seems not to be seen until the Russian Dance, when she is the heroine to whom the Dark Angel brings Nicholas Magallanes.

And Jillana seems to appear only for the Elegy, in the “Dark Angel” role. (See 52-53, 96 for previous occasions when the Dark Angel made this late arrival.) Yvonne Mounsey, who dances the “Dark Angel”’s dances earlier, seems not to return in the Elegy, although in the 1957 Serenade film (see 102) she dances the complete role as we now usually see it.

The Waltz “heroine” (in all four movements) is, in most performances, Diana Adams, who also alternates in the Elegy with Le Clercq. The Russian dancer, in most or all performances, is Patricia Wilde - superb. Yvonne Mounsey seems identifiable as the “Dark Angel” in the first movement, Jillana in the same role in the Elegy. Herbert Bliss is the main exponent of the Waltz man, Magallanes (though some also see him in the Waltz role once or twice) of the Elegy man.

The film preserves another moment David Vaughan found unforgettable from the 1950s: the wildness with which Le Clercq keeps turning as Magallanes lowers her from the vertical angle near the end of their encounter.

1957.

117. New York City Ballet dances Serenade in a November 1957 television film in Montréal for Canadian television, with New York City Ballet dancing, in small studio conditions that necessitate a low barrier (to hide the lighting). Camera angles are especially interesting for the Elegy, with close-ups for the heroine, and aimed along the ballet’s final diagonal - as if to show us where she is going.

The cast is Diana Adams (Waltz, Elegy heroine), Patricia Wilde (Russian), Yvonne Mounsey (Dark Angel), Herbert Bliss (Waltz), Jacques d’Amboise (Elegy).

118. It is now and in the following years that Nancy Reynolds, then dancing with New York City Ballet, recalls Balanchine pronouncing the ballet “Serenayde”, though it was customary around the company to say its name as “Serenahde”. John Clifford, from his time in City Ballet in the late 1960s and early 1970s, confirms Balanchine’s use of the “Serenayde” pronunciation. Balanchine is heard again to use this pronunciation on a film-clip included in the 1984 documentary Balanchine, Production of Thirteen/WNET New York, Produced by Judy Kinberg, Directed by Merrill Brockway, Written by Holly Brubach, West Long Branch, NJ: Kultur, 2004.

He has also called it Serenata in South America (see 88, 92) and La Sérénade in France (see 99). So it seems likely that he wants the ballet to have both name and pronunciation in the language of its local audience.

1959.

119. Nancy Reynolds (in Choreography by George Balanchine) writes that the three-ballerina distribution of leading roles was instituted now. Although this is not the first time, it seems to have endured ever since  - though there is at least one exception (see 124).

120. Bernard Taper relates how Balanchine, pleased that Serenade has lasted twenty-five years, says, about one of its dramatic themes, to a friend “Each man goes through the world with his destiny on his back. He sees a woman - he cares for her - but his destiny has other plans.”

Taper records that the friend said “That's fascinating. Did you tell any of that to your dancers when you were choreographing the ballet?”

Then “Balanchine drew back in horror. ‘God forbid!’ he said.” (Balanchine, 1974 revised expanded edition, p. 172.)

On p.371 of the same edition, Taper reveals that he was the friend in question.

See 7; and see also 96 for Danilova’s memory of Balanchine’s alternative “story” for the Elegy and 128 for a different version that he told Colleen Neary.

1964.

121. When NYCB moves to the New York State Theatre, lighting is now by Ronald Bates.

At some point, perhaps now, the Karinska costumes are subtly revised. The asymmetrical waistline remains, the hemline becomes straight, but two vertical panels of soft yellow/cream are added at the front of the skirt.

Over the years at least three versions of the male costume are used, all blue: sometimes the old “Blueberry” ones in darkish blue with gold chain embossed, sometimes a similar dark blue but with no gold chain, and sometimes a pale blue with no gold chain.

1966.

122. Francia Russell writes (2015) that it was now that Balanchine opened the cuts in the score. Victoria Simon and Suzanne Farrell support this date. Victoria Simon records that the cuts were not opened when she left the company in 1965 but that a 1967 tape shows the difference. Russell believes Balanchine opened them at Saratoga in 1966; Suzanne Farrell, however, believes he did so at the New York State Theater “because we had more time and space to work this way.”

But Anne Polajenko (Facebook, March 1, 2019) recalls “An interesting footnote to the ‘opening’ of the previously cut  music in ‘Serenade’ is that Mr Balanchine did not choreograph the extra section on NYCB but for Geneva’s Ballet du Grand Théâtre first. The idea being that we were his testing ground. At the time he was artistic advisor to the company and spent a great deal of time with us, tinkering with his ballets. On the Serenade premiere, I recall how frantic it was. Mr Balanchine arriving late, suddenly making all these additions just a few days before the opening, the dancers appalled by it all. But he must have liked the changes well enough as he did take them to NY.”

Some (Arlene Croce, for example) have written that this occurred in 1964. And Nancy Reynolds(Choreography by George Balanchine) says for this season “Early-mid 1960s, New York City Ballet: Slight additions at beginning and extensive new material added at end of RUSSIAN DANCE, with all previous omissions in score of Tema Russo restored.” Nonetheless, Russell and Simon have so many reasons for giving the date 1966 to the openings of the cuts that it seems very likely they are correct.

Both the openings occur in the Tema Russo. The first is early on and short, featuring the moment when the five opening women twine in to one another and then face upstage, with arms raised and crossed above their heads. Francia Russell thinks this may be the first time Balanchine said “Like a Clairol commercial” (see 126): she recalls the five women including one blonde, one redhead, and two brunettes.

The second is longer. (Balanchine’s revision involves altering a short sequence of previous choreography.) In particular, the added musical passage features the music’s reference to the opening of the Sonatina (see 5), which prompts Balanchine to return the dancers to resume the opening formation, but now – as the music changes - with marked variations. The heroine, now center front, is on point, supported by the man. Though all the women begin with the ballet’s opening gesture, this develops in an entirely different direction.

John Clifford (email to Macaulay, May 3, 2016) supports Saratoga 1966 as the season when Balanchine opened the cuts:

“In the summer of 1966, I was with a Los Angeles company that had Serenade and he came out to rehearse it and the cuts were still there.  When NYCB danced it at the Greek Theater in 1965, it still had the cuts too.  I remember being surprised when I saw it later in NYC in Nov. 1966, when I joined the company, because it was much longer.  When I asked why the dancers told me he had added repeats (opened cuts) that summer.”

Clifford also writes (different email to Macaulay, same day):

“Soon after I joined the company in 1966, I was choreographing my first ballets for the school at that time and Balanchine asked me to revise one section of my Stravinsky ballet as a sort of exercise to see if I could ‘re-think it’ as he put it. I asked why it was necessary and he said, ‘Look at me. I've been changing Serenade for over 30 years!’ I asked him why he added the repeat and why he kept changing it. He said ‘I need to get it right. I will keep fixing it until I do. Someday I see Tchaikovsky and I want to be sure I did it right.’  He wasn't kidding.”

It was also now that Balanchine restored the final ffz chord of the Sonatina, as Russell, Clifford and others recall. (It is not – yet - known how exactly he set the heroine’s tilted fall into the man’s arms.)

Balanchine remarked in the 1970s:

“A few years ago I finally succeeded in expanding the ballet so that it now uses all of the score of the Tchaikovsky ‘Serenade for Strings,’ something I had wanted to do for a long time. The interesting thing is that while some knowing members of the audience noticed this change and spoke to me about it, the critics didn’t seem to notice at all! Perhaps they had seen the ballet too often!” (Balanchine’s Festival of Ballet, 1978 edition, p.532)

1970-1.

123. Kirstein in 1971 writes a new Souvenir Program note:

“Originally presented June 9, 1934, Serenade is the first ballet created by Balanchine in America. For many years it has been a signature piece for seasons of the New York City Ballet and its antecedent groups, as Les Sylphides had been for the Ballets Russes. While Fokine’s suite from Chopin reflected the aura of the romantic nineteenth-century cult of the ballerina, Balanchine, taking his inspiration from a new school in a new country, retained the lyrical atmosphere while projecting movement that was athletic—swiftly contemporary yet passionately youthful and idealistic. The ballet’s dramatic overtones, evolving from the music, evoke love, separation, loss, and rededication, but the imagery is rarely specific; there is no characterization of individual roles. If there is a star, perhaps it is the corps de ballet, which Balanchine, at the start of his American career, intended to strengthen past anonymity or any subordinate position.” (Kirstein, Program Notes, p. 18)

1971.

Arlene Croce recalls (email to Macaulay 21 January, 2019) Balanchine altering the end of the Sonatina in Saratoga, in spring/summer 1971, with Melissa Hayden.

“He rearranged Melissa Hayden’s pose so that she leaned back on – (I forget who); it stopped applause and prepared the audience for the Waltz. … That he had made no previous adjustments seemed borne out by Hayden’s remark after the rehearsal: “All these years later and he’s still composing Serenade.”

1973.

124. New York City Ballet films Serenade in Berlin. Kay Mazzo dances the Waltz heroine, Peter Martins the Waltz partner, Karin von Aroldingen the Dark Angel, Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux the Elegy man. Because Sara Leland suffers an injury during the filming, the “Russian” dancer is divided between two dancers: Leland for the first movement, Susan Hendl for the Elegy.

The men wear the pale blue outfits – see 121.

As far as Mazzo remembers, Balanchine made no changes to her role. Film shows that, at the end of the Sonatina, she arrived in the man’s arms with arms en couronne. Was this the version he had made in 1971 with Hayden? Mazzo continued to dance Serenade” through the 1970s and recalls only that version of that moment.

125. Bernard Taper describes (Balanchine, third edition, 1974, p.371) Balanchine and Irving discussing, with a metronome, all the orchestral tempi for fifteen ballets that they were about to film in Berlin in 1973. (The music had to be pre-recorded in Vienna.) 

“After making each decision, they check the score - out of sheer curiosity, it would appear, to see what tempo marking the composer or arranger had specified. It is seldom the same as theirs. The biggest discrepancy shows up in Serenade's elegy. Balanchine and Irving prefer it at sixty-nine. ‘What does Tchaikovsky say?’ Balanchine asks.

“‘Ninety-six,'’ says Irving, after looking at the score.

“‘It must be a misprint,’ says Balanchine.

“Eventually they settle for doing it even a shade more slowly - at sixty-six.”

1975-1977.

126. Balanchine revises the Elegy, most strikingly by having the leading three women loosen their hair. He also adjusts the musicality and heightens the Romantic emphasis. Another change is the way the two women are lowered to the floor. (See 129-130.)

The date is uncertain – probably 1976. The cast seems almost certainly to have been Karin von Aroldingen (heroine/protagonist/Waltz girl), Colleen Neary (Russian dance), Maria Calegari (Dark Angel), Kipling Houston (Elegy man). Some New Yorkers first recall this with Allegra Kent (heroine) in a 1977 cast (see 131) with Susan Hendl (Dark Angel) and Susan Pilarre or Sara Leland (Russian dancer, but Pilarre, who loved dancing it with Kent and Hendl, is sure they were not the first to let their hair down. This view confirmed by Neary and Calegari, who feel sure they were the first to rehearse it this way with Balanchine.

Colleen Neary: “We had a rehearsal in the ‘main hall’ for the Elegy section (and by the way I love this story). It was von Aroldingen in Waltz girl, myself in Russian, and Calegari as Dark Angel.

“In rehearsal, when Karin fell to the floor at the end of the Waltz when all the girls do the famous ‘Serenade’ jump forward and back and run off, and the Waltz girl chaînés to the floor, Karin’s hair fell down from her bun, and was totally down.

“Balanchine stopped, and said ‘Oh wait… that is beautiful! Maria and Colleen take your hair down also.’ So, we did, and it was Karin, blondish, myself, dark at the time, and Maria redhead, and he said ‘GREAT!!!! It looks like a Clairol commercial!!!” …”

<See 122 for an earlier Clairol story>

Maria Calegari wrote (August 14-19, 2015, successive emails to Macaulay): “This is all to my best recollection, as it was a long time ago! 

“I would say we were in an intense re-working period where Mr. B wanted to rehearse the Elegy and yes, we did it for at least a week - or more. It was after a matinee we were asked to go to the main hall to rehearse. I remember because I had stage make-up on.

“Yes, Mr. Balanchine made a funny, as he often liked to do, ‘I want to try this with the hair down. You still have long hair yes? Or have you cut it short for your boyfriend?’ Now this has a context, because first of all he knew I would not do this, but many other women had cut their hair throughout the years and I think he always let them know he was not happy with this. Maybe for many reasons, but I think he felt that long hair was a theatrical necessity, which he used numerous times.

“I remember he spoke to me first, because I had the first entrance with Kip (Kipling Houston) and then yes, he had both Karin and Kyra take the hair down to try it at this rehearsal. I think we all loved it right away - Mr. Balanchine included. There was a feeling for him of ‘Yes - I finally got it right.’

“Can I also say: You see, Karin, Kip and I were all in the Suite 3 Elegy, which he really loved also. I was in the corps of the Elegy but also was given the lead in the late ‘70s. I felt this might have given him the idea about the hair down. 

“So I am sure we tried it like this in the next performances we had coming up. And then it was always done this way. 

(After reading Colleen Neary’s version of the rehearsals) “Yes, I think this is more correct and am so glad you were in touch with Colleen.

“I had been thinking about her and knew she was somewhere in the mix of this early story but could not remember as she also did the Dark Angel. She and her sister both have wonderful and colorful memories. OK - so I do not quite remember the main hall rehearsal in this way... but it’s a good story! And at least another person can confirm it.

“I can see where it was Colleen and not Kyra in this rehearsal as the Russian Girl.

“Yes, I think it could have been as early as 1976.

“Would you like to add also for color that Mr. B. asked when we had to run to the man for the big embrace that we did it like the 3 girls in Charlie's Angels! The American TV show at that time, which he obviously enjoyed very much. In other words, I think, with strength and passion.

“So it was not halfway.

“It was Kip most of the time. And it worked well, because he was not a very tall man - and so, standing behind him with the wings and walking was perfect. Mr. B was about the same height - a bit smaller. Kip also had a free abandoned energy about him and that worked well. Strong partner, too.”

John Clifford (email to Macaulay, May 2, 2016), however, remembers Balanchine saying he wanted to loosen the hair in the Elegy to show off the red hair of Linda Merrill, another dancer of the “Dark Angel” role.

127. The hair-down performances of von Aroldingen, Calegari and Houston are preserved (with Kyra Nichols as the Russian dancer) in a Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts film of a 1980 Serenade rehearsal. Short skirts are worn, but solely (as in a number of special Library recordings) to make the choreography more legible.

128. As stated in 126, Colleen Neary danced both “Russian” and “Dark Angel” roles. She recalls (email to Macaulay, April 28, 2015) that Balanchine said about the Elegy that the girl on the floor was the wife, the Dark Angel was the mistress, and the Russian girl, passing through, was the lover.

“Joking, he said, ‘story of my life!’”

See 7; and see 96 and 120 for alternative Balanchine narrations for the Elegy.

129. On March 21, 1977, after a New York City Ballet season at the Kennedy Center, Washington D.C., Arlene Croce wrote in The New Yorker “Balanchine’s tinkerings have effected some changes in the Elegy of Serenade, none of which strike me as happy ones. The two girls whom the male soloist lowers to a reclining position, with their feet braced against his, now take a lunge pose before subsiding to the floor. It’s a minor detail, and I can only explain my objection to it by saying that the interrupted descent to the floor is emotionally insignificant. I feel the same way about the moment when one of those girls turns a series of stabbing pirouettes and then collapses sideways in her partner’s arms. Years ago, she would collapse while turning and would continue to turn spastically while he held her a foot above the ground. The three female principals in the Elegy now go through it with their hair hanging loose, which may be the way it was danced once upon a time but looks out of place today. The sisterhood of the corps in Serenade, which has expanded through the years as Balanchine expanded the choreography, is in its anonymity one of the most moving we have in all ballet, and the three new heads of hair in the last movement violate the image. And, as the two lines of girls cross behind the soloist in the Waltz, what has happened to the Jessie Matthews backbends they used to do?”  (Croce, Afterimages, 1977, pp. 268-9.)

In fact, the 1940, 1944, 1953, and 1957 films reveal different versions of the Elegy heroine’s collapse while turning in which this dancer “would continue to turn spastically while he held her a foot above the ground.” Only the 1953 and 1957 show her (Adams or Le Clercq) doing more than one turn when held above the floor; Le Clercq here is especially “wild” (Robert Greskovic’s adjective). The 1940s versions are simpler. See Ann Barzel, 1940 and 1944 films of Serenade (1940, 1944); Jessen, Serenade (film collage) [1953]; Balanchine—New York City Ballet in Montreal [1957].

130. More than one dancer from the era before this change has said that the reason for Balanchine adding the lunge for the two women, before they subsided to the floor, was that it was hard for them to keep their long tulle skirts close to them as they reclined; and that therefore the loose tulle could be a hazard to the “Russian” dancer’s fouetté sauté’s arriving backward in the man’s arms – the one Wilde does so expertly in the 1950s films – with the tulle causing the jumping dancer to slip. This apparently had happened more than once to von Aroldingen; hence Balanchine’s making the change.  The greater space of the State Theater heightened the problem for the ballerina as she ran and jumped at the man. (And this therefore is one moment where the original short-skirted costumes would have better complimented the choreography, without any lunge, as seen on the 1944 film with Boris and Moylan, and in older photographs.)

Nonetheless, a number of women had managed the jump perfectly in 1964-76 at the State Theater before the lunge was amended. Few changes in Serenade are more regretted than this.

131. Several New York ballet-goers recall the first local sighting of the hair-down Elegy at a May 28, 1977 evening performance, New York City Ballet at the New York State Theater. The cast is listed as Susan Hendl, Allegra Kent, Sara Leland (replacing Susan Pilarre), Kipling Houston, Sean Lavery. Kent, as the “heroine,” was the first seen to loosen her hair. (David Vaughan remarks “I kept expecting Giselle’s mother to come on to undo the hairpins”; and others wonder at first if Kent had gone mad onstage, before finally realizing that this was a revised version.)

1981.

132. For New York City Ballet’s Tschaikovsky Festival, with its unit set of “architectural structure with movable ranks of translucent plastic cylinders by Philip Johnson and John Burgee” (the words of the Balanchine Catalogue), Serenade is given on June 6 with the cylinders arranged at a sharp, clean diagonal angle. Robert Greskovic (email to Macaulay September 2, 2015) adds “Think, if memory serves, of the angle of a guillotine’s blade).” He connects this with the Art Déco aesthetics of the early Lurçat costumes and apparently never-used Oakie set; and remarks “The effect was that of something that might have been arranged for the 1930s stage of Radio City Music Hall.”

At some point the heroine’s port de bras at the end of the Sonatina is changed from en couronne to a parted croisé annunciatory (“a deux bras”) position. This is used by City Ballet until 2018.

1983-84 and later.

133. At the time of Balanchine’s death and/or again on his next birthday, according to eyewitness reports, Karin von Aroldingen ends the ballet by making a transitional gesture of prayer as she was lifted away. (See 12.) Although Maria Calegari’s understands that von Aroldingen has done this at Balanchine’s behest, von Aroldingen recollects it (to Elizabeth Kendall on August 27, 2015) as simply her response to this moment for Balanchine.

Toni Bentley (emails March 15 and July 7, 2016) writes that Rosemary Dunleavy (New York City Ballet ballet master), in a 2007 interview with Bentley, recalls both Suzanne Farrell and Darci Kistler, on occasion but very seldom, also doing the “prayer hands”. Kistler has confirmed to Bentley that she “only occasionally, not every time at all” did these.

2012.

134. The geophysicist Brett Denevi gives the name “Balanchine” to a crater on the planet Mercury. She gives the names Ailey, Fonteyn, Nureyev, and Petipa to other craters. Balanchine is her favorite, “so named because the blue rays extending from the crater reminded her of the long blue, tutus in his classic ballet, ‘Serenade’.” (Rebecca Ritzel, “Ballet isn’t rocket science, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive, either”, Washington Post, December 20, 2012.)

2016

135. In September, New York City Ballet commissions new versions of the Karinska dresses, which - thanks to Marc Happel, head of the company’s wardrobe department, are too stiff and too long, with the two subtle cream (or beige) panels replaced by blazing lemon-yellow ones. Karinska’s asymmetrical waistline is also rendered less remarkable.

Over the ensuing months, the excessive length is modified, the fabric softened, and the yellow tempered. Complaints nonetheless continue about them, even in 2024.

A Serenade Bibliography

Films, videos

Balanchine, a two-part television documentary, 1984, Dance in America. Production of Thirteen/WNET New York, Produced by Judy Kinberg, Directed by Merrill Brockway.

Serenade seminar, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, August 26-28, 2015. (A film of this is in the Library.) Chaired by Alastair Macaulay, with contributions by Mindy Aloff, Jared Angle, Paul Boos, Holly Brubach, Joy Williams Brown, Vida Brown, John Goodman, Susan Gluck, Nancy Goldner, Robert Greskovic, Elizabeth Kendall, Allegra Kent, Simon Morrison, Gwyneth Muller, Kyra Nichols Gray, Claudia Pierpont, Robert Pierpont, Nancy Reynolds, Suki Schorer, Victoria Simon, Carol Sumner, David Vaughan. Filmed by François Bernadi, organized by Daisy Pommer.

Serenade, a presentation of rare films and illustrations, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Bruno Walter Auditorium. Presented by Alastair Macaulay and Robert Greskovic, March 24, 2016. (A film of this is in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.)

Film fragments of Serenade danced in 1940, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (4 minutes); 1944, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (6 minutes); 1951, New York City Ballet (1 minute). Ann Barzel Collection: Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Victor Jessen complete film collage of Serenade, New York City Ballet at the Greek Theater, Los Angeles, 1953, 75 minutes. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

New York City Ballet in Montreal, vol. 1. Serenade, filmed November 1957. The cast is led by Diana Adams, Patricia Wilde, Yvonne Mounsey, Jacques d’Amboise.

New York City Ballet, 1973 film of Serenade, studio film, Berlin. Kay Mazzo, Sara Leland, Karin von Aroldingen, Susan Hendl, Peter Martins, Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux. Score conducted (in a Vienna recording) by Robert Irving

New York City Ballet stage rehearsal, New York State Theater, 1980, of Serenade filmed for New York Public Library. Karin von Aroldingen, Kyra Nichols, Maria Calegari, Kipling Houston; piano accompaniment. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

New York City Ballet film of Serenade, Dance in America, 1990, directed by Judy Kinberg. Darci Kistler, Kyra Nichols, Maria Calegari, Leonid Kozlov. Studio film, Denmark.

2012 video interview with Yvonne Mounsey, conducted in her home in Los Angeles by Emily Hite.

Books, periodicals, special publications, websites.

Ballet (UK) and Dance and Dancers (UK), 1950 and 1952 issues.

“BALLET SCHOOL GIVES 2 WORLD PREMIERES; Recital at Estate of the Felix M. Warburgs Is First Outside of Studio.” New York Times, June 11, 1934.

Clippings of Serenade materials, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Jerome Robbins Dance Division

Email correspondence between Alastair Macaulay and Toni Bentley, Maria Calegari, John Clifford, Robert Greskovic, Emily Hite, Amanda Hunter, Nicholas Jenkins, Elizabeth Kattner-Ulrich, Barbara Milberg Fisher, Andrew Litton, Kay Mazzo, Pat McBride Lousada, Simon Morrison, Colleen Neary Christensen, Daniel Pratt, Francia Russell, Suki Schorer, Sharon Skeel, Victoria Simon, Carol Sumner. 2015-16.

Responses to my Facebook posts (March 1, 2019) by  Peter Caleb (March 1 and 2, 2019) and Anna Polajenko (March 1, 2019).

Email correspondence between Robert Greskovic and Colleen Neary, August 2015.

Choreography by George Balanchine http://www.balanchine.org/balanchine/display_result.jsp?num=141

Choreography by George Balanchine: A Catalog of Works. The Eakins Press Foundation, New York, 1983.

Mindy Aloff, The DanceView Times, Letter from New York, 19 April 2004.

Jack Anderson, New York Times, obituary of Marie-Jeanne, 3 January, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/arts/03marie-jeanne.html

Balanchine, George, and Francis Mason. Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977. (Also published as Balanchine’s Festival of Ballet. London: W. H. Allen 1978.)

http://www.balanchine.org/balanchine/display_result.jsp?id=156&sid=&searchMethod=&current=&stagings=&refs=1&tvs=)

Toni Bentley, The Ballet That Changed Everything, September 3, 2010, Wall Street Journal.

August Bournonville, My Theatre Life, translated by Patricia McAndew. A.& C. Black, UK, 1979

Anatole Chujoy, The Dance Encyclopedia, A.S. Barnes and Company, NY, 1949.

Arlene Croce, Afterimages, Alfred A.Knopf, U,.S., 1977.

Arlene Croce, “Serenade: In the Beginning,” Allegro, publication for the School of American Ballet’s 1993 Workshop Performance Benefit, NY.

Don Daniels, “Academy: The World of Serenade”, Ballet Review, vol. 5 no 1 (1975-76).

Edwin Denby, Dancers, Buildings and People in the Street, Horizon Press, 1965

Edwin Denby, Dance Writings, Alfred A. Knopf, NY, 1986.

Martin Duberman, The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein. Knopf, NY, 2007.

Jennifer Dunning, But First a School – the first fifty years of the School of American ballet, Elisabeth Sifton Books, 1985.

“Elna Lassen.” Wikipedia, last modified May 30, 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elna_Lassen.

“George Balanchine – Festivals Directed by Balanchine.” The George Balanchine Foundation. http://www.balanchine.org/balanchine/festivals.jsp?p=2.

“George Balanchine – View Record: 100. [Duet and Trio],” Liszt, Liebestraum. The George Balanchine Foundation. http://www.balanchine.org/balanchine/display_result.jsp?id=156&sid=&searchMethod=&current=&stagings=&refs=1&tvs=.

“George Balanchine – View Record: 141. Serenade.” The George Balanchine Foundation. http://www.balanchine.org/balanchine/display_result.jsp?num=141.

Nancy Goldner, Balanchine Variations. University of Florida Press, 2008.

Robert Gottlieb, Reading Dance, Pantheon Book, NY, 2008.

Stephanie Jordan, Moving Music, Dance Books, 2000.

Julie Kavanagh, Secret Muses, the Life of Frederick Ashton, Pantheon, N.Y., 1997.

Elizabeth Kendall, Balanchine and the Lost Muse, Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer, 2014. Oxford University Press, 2013

Lincoln Kirstein, diaries (unpublished), 1934. Writings by Lincoln Kirstein are @The New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations).

Lincoln Kirstein, Ballet Alphabet, 1939. Reprinted in Kirstein, Ballet: Bias and Belief, Dance Horizons, New York, 1983, pp.157. Writings by Lincoln Kirstein are @The New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations).

Lincoln Kirstein: Ballet: Bias & Belief: Three Pamphlets Collected, Dance Horizon, 1983. Writings by Lincoln Kirstein are @The New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations).

Lincoln Kirstein, New York City Ballet, Thirty Years, Knopf, 1979 p.37. Writings by Lincoln Kirstein are @The New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations).

Lincoln Kirstein, Program Notes, 1934-1991, edited Randall Bourschedit., Eakins Press, NY 2009. Writings by Lincoln Kirstein are @The New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations).

André Levinson, Ballets Old and New, translated from the Russian by Susan Cook Summer. Dance Horizons, NY, 1982.

Joel Lobenthal, Wilde Times: Patricia Wilde, George Balanchine, and the Rise of New York City Ballet, Fore Edge, USA 2016

Annabelle Lyon, oral history interview with Elizabeth Kendall, 1979: New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Alastair Macaulay, “The Ambiguities of ‘Serenade’ (1934)”, in Choreography; Principles & Practice, edited by Janet Adshead. Matuonal Resource Centre for Dance, U.K., 1987.

Alastair Macaulay, “Balanchine’s Plot”, Liberties (U.S.A., vol. 1 no 2,  February 2021

Francis Mason, I Remember Balanchine, Recollections of the Ballet Master by Those Who Knew Him, Doubleday, NY, 1991.

Pierre Michaut, Le Ballet Contemporain, 1929-1950, Plon, Paris, France, 1950

Martin, John. “THE BALLET RUSSE IN TWO PREMIERES; Revival of “Nutcracker,” by Petipa, and Balanchine’s ‘Serenade.’” New York Times, October 18, 1940.

Martin, John. “‘SERENADE’ DANCED BY BALLET RUSSE.” New York Times, April 15, 1944.

Francis Mason (ed.), I Remember Balanchine, Doubleday, NY, 1991.

Michaut, Pierre. Le Ballet Contemporain, 1929-1950. Paris: Plon, 1950

Simon Morrison, unpublished notes on Serenade, shared with Serenade seminar participants and the basis for his informal paper, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, August 28, 2015.

Kathryn Mullowny, oral history interview, 1976: New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Mauro Piccinini, unpublished biographical files on George Antheil for 1934 and 1934. My thanks to Simon Morrison for forwarding these and obtaining Mr. Piccinini’s permission to use these files.

Claudia Roth Pierpont, “Balanchine’s Romanticism,” Ballet Review, vol. 12 no 1, Summer 1984.

Nancy Reynolds, Repertory in Review: 40 Years of the New York City Ballet. Dial Press, NY, 1977.

Rebecca Ritzel, “Ballet isn’t rocket science, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive, either”, Washington Post, December 20, 2012

Tim Scholl, “Serenade: From Giselle to Georgia,” Ballet Review, Fall 2012.

Marcia B. Siegel, The Shapes of Change – Images of American Dance, Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1979.

Jim Steichen, Serenade Performance Chronology, Ph.D. dissertation on Balanchine, Princeton, 2015.

Jim Steichen, The Stories of Serenade: Nonprofit History and George Balanchine’s “First Ballet in America,” p. 10, James Steichen Working Paper #46, Spring 2012 http://www.princeton.edu/~artspol/workpap/WP46-Steichen.pdf

Bernard Taper, Balanchine, revised and expanded edition, Macmillan, NY, 1974.  

Solomon Volkov, Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky: Conversations with Balanchine on his Life, Ballet, and Music, 1985, republished 2002. Anchor Books.

Barbara Weisberger in “Balanchine as Teacher, a symposium moderated by Francis Mason” "Ballet Review", vol. 19, no 4, p.65, col. 2 (See 14.)

@Alastair Macaulay 2024

1: Antonio Canova, “Psyche Awakened by Cupid’s Kiss”, 1787, first version, commissioned by Colonel John Campbell, now in the Louvre Museum, Paris.

2: Hugh Douglas Hamilton, pastel, “Antonio Canova in his Studio with Henry Tresham and a plaster model for ‘Cupid and Psyche’,” 1788-1791. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

3: Antonio Canova, 1794 plaster model for second version of “Psyche Awakened by Cupid’s Kiss”, in Metropolitan Museum, New York, since 1905.

4: Canova, second marble version of “Cupid Awakened by Psyche’s Kiss”, 1796, commissioned by Prince Nicolai Yousupov (1750-1831), now in Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

5: As captioned, the first known photograph of George Balanchine working with American dancers before the first performances by the School of American Ballet at White Plains, New York State, June 1934.

6-17: The Warburg home and estate, White Plains, New York, where Balanchine’s Serenade was given its first performance by the School of American Ballet in June 1934. Photographs taken by Paul Boos in summer 2019.

6-17: The Warburg home and estate, White Plains, New York, where Balanchine’s Serenade was given its first performance by the School of American Ballet in June 1934. Photographs taken by Paul Boos in summer 2019.

6-17: The Warburg home and estate, White Plains, New York, where Balanchine’s Serenade was given its first performance by the School of American Ballet in June 1934. Photographs taken by Paul Boos in summer 2019.

6-17: The Warburg home and estate, White Plains, New York, where Balanchine’s Serenade was given its first performance by the School of American Ballet in June 1934. Photographs taken by Paul Boos in summer 2019.

6-17: The Warburg home and estate, White Plains, New York, where Balanchine’s Serenade was given its first performance by the School of American Ballet in June 1934. Photographs taken by Paul Boos in summer 2019.

6-17: The Warburg home and estate, White Plains, New York, where Balanchine’s Serenade was given its first performance by the School of American Ballet in June 1934. Photographs taken by Paul Boos in summer 2019.

6-17: The Warburg home and estate, White Plains, New York, where Balanchine’s Serenade was given its first performance by the School of American Ballet in June 1934. Photographs taken by Paul Boos in summer 2019.

6-17: The Warburg home and estate, White Plains, New York, where Balanchine’s Serenade was given its first performance by the School of American Ballet in June 1934. Photographs taken by Paul Boos in summer 2019.

6-17: The Warburg home and estate, White Plains, New York, where Balanchine’s Serenade was given its first performance by the School of American Ballet in June 1934. Photographs taken by Paul Boos in summer 2019.

6-17: The Warburg home and estate, White Plains, New York, where Balanchine’s Serenade was given its first performance by the School of American Ballet in June 1934. Photographs taken by Paul Boos in summer 2019.

18: A rare action photograph of the first - open-air - performance of Serenade at White Plains, New York State.

19: Another live photograph of the open-air premiere of Serenade, from the collection of Joan McCracken, one of its original cast, with her written identifications below. Courtesy: Sharon Skeel.

20: The Nazi salute in a 1933 German rally.

Ruthanna Boris - a dancer who became a member of the original 1934 School of American Ballet cast of Serenade and who in 1944 danced its leading role with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo - later recalled that Balanchine mentioned and demonstrated the Hitler salute in his first rehearsal for Serenade, then deliberately adapted and transformed it to create the ballet’s opening gesture .

21: Could the Nazi salute have been inspired by this Paris 1924 poster image for the Olympic Games? My thanks to Jared Angle for drawing this to my attention:

22: The poster image (21) became a stamp.

23, 24: In 1935, the painter Jean Lurçat designed the first permanent costumes for Serenade, costumes that were used for most (not all) productions of the ballet until 1947, notably those by the American Ballet as seen in New York in 1935 and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1940-1948.
But there appear to have been several different versions of Lurçat’s costumes. Image 23, donated in 2016 by Nancy Lassalle to the Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, confirms one report of red/russet colours being used; image 24 shows two shades of blue, the colour with which Serenade subsequently became identified. Black-and-white films of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo show different costumes in 1940 from those in 1944: one set of them have small capes from the women’s shoulders. It’s possible that the costumes were differentiated, not uniform for all dancers; it’s also possible that Serenade had three different groups of costumes, one for each movement (Sonatina; Waltz; Elegy) until Balanchine added the Tema Russo and gave continuity to the four movements in 1940. Photo: Robert Greskovic.

24: Another costume design for Serenade by Jean Lurçat. The resemblance to the costumes seen in 25 is evident but not exact. Photo: Robert Greskovic.

25: There are many points of interest in this 1935 photograph of Serenade with American Ballet dancers who gave its first New York City performances at the Adelphi Theatre that year. Left to right, the dancers are Annabelle Lyon, Ruthanna Boris, Helen Leitch, Holly Howard, Elise Reiman. Their knee-length dresses are similar to those in 24.
To those who know Serenade today, this line of five women suggest either a fleeting line of five seen in the Sonatina or the five woman who open the Tema Russo (Russian Dance). In 1935, however, the Russian Dance had not been choreographed. Probably this group shows instead the opening dance of the Waltz, which in 1934-1935 began with five women. (Only in 1936 was a man added to the Waltz.) Serenade as we now know it abounds with you-saw-it before echoes; it’s not clear whether these echoes were already part of the 1934-1935 choreography.

Annabelle Lyon later recalled that Balanchine asked all seventeen women in the Sonatina to execute thirty-two fouettés, but that she, trained by Mikhail Fokine, was unable to do those; Balanchine therefore had her leave the stage just before that passage. Improbable as it may seem that sixteen dancers could perform thirty-two fouetté turns together, Lincoln Kirstein confirms this aspect of the original choreography in his 1939 Alphabet of Ballet. Lyon also said that Balanchine spoke of choreographing the Tema Russo (Russian Dance) with her, but lacked the resources.

Ruthanna Boris, another member of the original 1934 cast, danced in Serenade for many years. In 1944, she danced the lead role in all four movements with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo production. There are film excerpts of her doing so in Chicago, recorded by Ann Barzel.

Holly Howard was widely known as Balanchine’s first American girlfriend, although Heidi Vosseler may have preceded her. Lincoln Kirstein’s diaries record that Howard later became pregnant by Balanchine. Other enduring rumours tell of her having no fewer than four abortions, but she went on dancing in successive Balanchine productions.

The opening of the Waltz in “Serenade” in 1935, with new costumes by Jean Lurçat. Left to right: Annabelle Lyon; Ruthanna Boris; Helen Leitch; Holly Howard; Elise Leiman.

26: This photograph of a famous configuration in the Elegy shows a 1935 cast from the American Ballet’s season at New York City’s Adelphi Theatre. Left to right, Katherine Mullowny (the original “Dark Angel” in 1934), Hortense Kahrlinsch (in the role now given to the “Russian” dancer), Charles Laskey (the first man to attend Balanchine’s 1934 rehearsals and a figure in other new Balanchine choreography), and Elena de Rivas (in the role Balanchine had created for Heidi Vosseler in 1934). Mullowny names were spelt many ways in 1934-1935 programmes, including Catherine Maloney. Decades later, she recorded an oral history for the Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

27: The opening image of Serenade in the oldest film footage of the ballet, taken in Chicago by Ann Barzel in 1940, showing the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. The hair-braids confer a certain uniformity of coiffure. The costumes seem to be variants of those by Lurçat in 23 and 24. The film, which shows excerpts of all four movements in the year when the Russian Dance (Tema Russo) was added, is in the collections of the Newberry Library in Chicago and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

28: This photograph of the American Ballet in the American Ballet’s 1941 tour of South America shows the ultra-short costumes designed by the Brazilian painter Candido Portinari (1903-1962), used only for that tour. This grouping, often photographed over the decades (see 18), is one of the earliest in the Sonatina.

29: This photograph of the opening image of Balanchine’s 1947 Paris Opéra production of Sérénade shows the designs by André Delfau. The women, as in Balanchine’s Scherzo à la Russe, wear little hats with trailing veils; they also wear long gloves and short skirts.

Of especial interest here is the statue of Eros on a plinth, surely referring back to Fokine’s baller Eros, choreographed in 1916 to the same music in St Petersburg and danced in 1923 by a cast including friends of Balanchine.

30: This photograph of the Paris Opéra Sérénade, clearly showing the costume’s use of a veil down the back from the hat, shows Christiane Vaussard with Michel Renault. They are surely in either the Valse or Tema Russo.

31: This photograph of the Élégie in the 1947 Paris Opéra shows just how differentiated the costumes for the heroine (Christiane Vaussare, left) and “Dark Angel” (Denise Bourgeois, right) were. The male dancer here is Max Bezzoni.

32: Bourgeois, Bezzoni, and Vaussard in the Élégie of Sérénade, Paris Opéra, 1947.

33: The young New York City Ballet initially presented Serenade in 1948-1950 without any credits for costumes. Yet the male dancer wore the same attire, with embossed gold chain around the neck, as was later credited to Karinska’s 1952 redesign.
Here, in a 1948 photograph, Pat McBride (“the original Pat McBride”) holds the Dark Angel’s arabesque, partnered by Frank Hobi, while Melissa Hayden is the heroine on the floor.

34: McBride, Hobi, and Hayden in the Elegy, 1948.

35:McBride, Hayden, and Hobi in the Elegy.

36: The Elegy at New York City Ballet in 1948-1950. The male dancer here is Nicholas Magallanes, who danced this role from 1944 (Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo) to the early 1970s.

37: The Elegy in Serenade at New York City Ballet in 1948 with Hayden, Hobi, and McBride.

38: Only in 1950, at the urgent suggestion of Frederick Ashton (in New York to create Illuminations for New York City Ballet early in the year - he, probably reminded of Balanchine’s Errante, asked for Serenade to be in “flowing robes l, does Balanchine finally dress this masterpiece in calf-length skirts. Costumes remain uncredited.
This studio photograph of María Tallchief with Nicholas Magallanes suggests a blue net skirt over blue tights and blue leotard for the woman while the man wore the same blue outfit with embossed gold chain at the neck as in 33-37.
Other photographs of the 1950-1951 period and some film clips, however, suggest that the women wore dark, even black, net skirts over paler tights and blue leotards.

39: Finally the ballet is redesigned in 1952 by Karinska (who is credited) in the dresses that have been associated with it ever since. This photograph of Melissa Hayden, who danced several of its leading roles, shows how well the dresses permit jumping. As designed in 1952-1963, the dresses have emphatic brassieres; they also are even longer at the back than at the front; and they have slanting waistlines.

40: This specially designed page in Lincoln Kirstein’s New York City Ballet (1973) shows the 1952 costumes. The central photograph also shows perhaps the most remarkable moment in all the ballet, in the Sonatina, when a soloist falls to the floor centre-stage (this is the original “girl who fell down” reference) while fifteen other women enter from different corners and create a highly formal geometry around her before executing formal ports de bras. Early photographs and films (before 1948) show that the soloist used to lie as if dead or prepared for burial.

41: The Karinska dresses transform several of Balanchine’s most-photographed configurations. See 18 and 28.

42: Melissa Hayden with partner in a passage of the Tema Russo.

43: Another of Serenade’s most-photographed configurations is again transformed by the Karinska dresses. See 26, 36.

44: In May 1964, Balanchine goes to London to help stage Serenade for the Royal Ballet. The costumes were not credited to Karinska until 2008, but are along Karinska lines; the men are in blue tights with embossed gold chains around the necks (a pre-Karinska effect). In this photograph, Balanchine poses with the leading four dancers of the Elegy: Annette Page (left, “Dark Angel”), Nadia Nerina (centre), David Blair, and Svetlana Beriosova (right). Balanchine has choreographed a central role for Beriosova in 1950 (Trumpet Concerto) before her eighteenth birthday; she has danced both soloist and ballerina roles in his Ballet Imperial at Covent Garden. Earlier in the 1960s, he applied for her to spend six months as a guest with New York City Ballet; negotiations failed when she insisted on bringing her partner. Nonetheless she was in the Royal Ballet first casts of Serenade (1964) and Apollo (1966).

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45: The Karinska dresses also transform the ballet’s opening ritual. The lighting by Jean Rosenthal and her successors has fixed the moonlight look of the ballet’s stage world: Balanchine says simply that it is a “serenade… to the light of the moon”.

46: This upstage diagonal corner configuration, occurring early in the Sonatina, is like nothing else In Balanchine, with the women all arching back in closely banked rows. The arrangement closely resembles one given by Bronislava Nijinska to four rows of men in the second scene of Les Noces (1923).

47: In 1976, Balanchine makes the last and most controversial of his important revisions to Serenade, making adjustments to the choreography for the four leading figures of the Elegy but above all having the lead three women loosen their hair. (This is a return to a brief-lived attempt in 1944 to loosen the hair of the leading two women, also from the start of the Elegy. This can be seen in Ann Barzel’s 1944 Chicago films of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.) During his lifetime, Balanchine asked no other company to follow suit. Since his death, most have; but some still dance the Elegy with hair up, preserving the overall anonymity of Serenade established since its beginning.)

The cast with whom he first rehearsed this was Karin von Aroldingen (as the Elegy heroine), Kipling Houston (as the Orpheus figure who partners her), María Calegari (as the “Dark Angel”) - photographed here - and Colleen Neary (as the “Russian dancer”).

48: María Calegari as the “Dark Angel”, with loose hair, is supported in arabesque by Kipling Houston. (See 47.) The heroine on the floor may perhaps be Kay Mazzo.

49: In the final section of Serenade, six dancers bourrée on the spot in circles, with fourth-position arms, as if blown by the impetus of the heroine’s rush downstage to embrace her “mother”. They are not required to bourrée or turn in synch with one another; and this relative freedom makes this moment unusual within both Serenade and all Balanchine.

This photograph was taken by the choreographer Troy Schumacher. The “heroine” (probably Sara Mearns) and “mother” can be seen in their embrace.

50: As she is lifted away at the end of Serenade, only the heroine has loose hair in the new 1976 revision. This apart, it is remarkable how little the ballet’s ending has altered. A 1940 film of Nathalie Krassovska shows this ending to be virtually identical. Details of the final gesture and port de bras performed by the heroine as she is borne away have sometimes been revised, but her backbend is the same.

51:This photo of the fourth point of the Serenade opening ritual is by Fred Fehl, showing young dancers (probably all in their teens) of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, from either fall 1946 or some point in 1947. The dancers are identified as, left to right, Merriam Lanova, Bernice Rehner, Myrna Galle, Sonja Taanila, Patricia Wilde, Constance Garfield, Joy Williams, and Pauline Goddard. All of them - see Jack Anderson’s book The One and Only: The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, with its useful appendices - joined the Monte Carlo in 1945 or 1946; Serenade, absent for the 1945-1946 season, was revived in 1946; thanks to an injury, Joy Williams did not dance with the Monte Carlo after 1947.

52-53: Melissa Hayden, Nicholas Magallanes, and Maria Tallchief in the final Elegy of Serenade in 1950. These photographs by Baron was taken in London, during or immediately before New York City Ballet’s 1950 six-week season at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. It clarifies the nature of the net skirts - matched here by the net attached to the women’s chignons - that were the first, in these 1950-1951 pre-Karinska designs, to make this a ballet of “Romantic” skirt length.

54.Another of Jean Lurçat’s 1935 designs for “Serenade”.

55.A 1952 rehearsal of the “Serenade” Elegy: photograph, Roger Wood. Left to right: Melissa Hayden; Nicholas Magallanes; Maria Tallchief.