How Balanchine saw the music and heard the dance

At first glance, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Igor Stravinsky seem like vastly different composers. We revere Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) mainly for his lush ballets and stirring symphonies. Works by Stravinsky (1882-1971), even his ballet scores, are full of off-kilter, propulsive rhythms and spiky, sometimes discordant, melodies.

Yes, they’re both Russian and many of their works are concert hall staples. But they also share another, perhaps surprising, bond. George Balanchine, founder of the New York City Ballet and one of the 20th century’s greatest ballet choreographers, considered both composers’ music intrinsically danceable.

This fall the Chicago Symphony Orchestra offers a generous sampling of pieces by Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, several written expressly for the ballet stage. The CSO season opened with Andrés Orozco-Estrada conducting a program including Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture Sep 19-20 and a suite from Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird Sep 21. Performances Sep 26-28 include Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4. On Nov 17 the CSO’s newest artist-in-residence, pianist Daniil Trifonov, gives a recital featuring a Tchaikovsky sonata and a piano suite of music from the composer’s ballet Sleeping Beauty. Stravinsky’s angular Violin Concerto, a 1931 work that 41 years later became one of Balanchine’s most critically acclaimed ballets, is scheduled for concerts Nov 21-23 with conductor Hanna Lintu and Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang. The program also includes a suite from Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake. 

As a ballet student in St. Petersburg, Balanchine (1904-1983, born Gyorgy Melitonovich Balanchivadze) made his stage debut at age 10 in Sleeping Beauty. He was a dancing cupid in a production of the 1889 ballet at the Mariinsky, the Russian capital’s most prestigious theater. During his student years, he also danced in productions of Tchaikovsky’s operas Eugene Onegin and Queen of Spades.

“Imagine yourself in a church, and suddenly the organ starts playing overwhelmingly grand music in all registers,” Balanchine said during a conversation recounted in  Solomon Volkov’s 1985 book Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky. “And you stand there with mouth agape in astonishment. That’s how I always felt about Tchaikovsky.”

Also a gifted music student, Balanchine came to see beyond Tchaikovsky’s lilting tunes and dancing rhythms. “I played piano, and I started to compose,” he told Volkov. “I understood what a smart composer Tchaikovsky had been. He is a composer for wise and subtle listeners. He is a refined artist.”

Stravinsky was in his early forties and already internationally acclaimed in 1925 when he and Balanchine met in 1925. Between 1910 and 1913, Stravinsky stunned European audiences with scores composed for three ground-breaking ballets for the Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes—The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. In 1925 Balanchine was a 21-year-old fledgling choreographer who had fled Soviet Russia and landed in Europe with a few dancers and no money. While in school, Balanchine set a few student ballets to music of Stravinsky. In 1925 Diaghilev asked him to create new choreography for Le chant du rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale), a Stravinsky work from 1917. The two Russian expatriates felt an immediate connection, one that lasted until Stravinsky’s death in 1971.

“There is a stupid idea about Stravinsky: that he is a cerebral composer whose music is too complex and calculated. Actually, Stravinsky’s music is jolly, springy, very danceable,” Balanchine said. “Stravinsky understood ballet as well as Tchaikovsky did. . . . He understood that you can’t write boring music for ballet. Everything has to move smoothly and swiftly — tempo! Like an express train without stopping at unimportant stations.”

“Stravinsky understood ballet as well as Tchaikovsky did. . . . He understood that you can’t write boring music for ballet. Everything has to move smoothly and swiftly — tempo! Like an express train without stopping at unimportant stations.”

Balanchine underscored his devotion to both composers by mounting festivals focused on their music. The New York City Ballet produced a 10-day Tchaikovsky festival in 1981 and two Stravinsky festivals: one in 1972, the year after his death, and another in 1982 honoring the centennial of his birth. (Balanchine also led a Stravinsky Festival with the American Ballet in 1937.)

But Balanchine, with a few notable exceptions, largely ignored both composer’s full-length ballet scores. True, the 1954 Nutcracker production he choreographed for the New York City Ballet was a huge success. It inspired countless imitators throughout the U.S., and the New York City Ballet has performed nothing but Nutcracker between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day virtually every year since its debut. One of the first successes of Balanchine’s newly formed New York City Ballet was his 1949 staging of Stravinsky’s The Firebird. With Maria Tallchief in the title role, the ballet made her a star and significantly raised the young company’s profile.

But Balanchine’s most memorable Tchaikovsky ballets focused on the composer’s concert music. Serenade, choreographed in 1934 and the first ballet he created in the U.S., is set to the Serenade for Strings in C Major. In 1941 he used an arrangement of the Second Piano Concerto for his glittering Ballet Imperial. The Diamonds section of Balanchine’s evening-long ballet Jewels, created in 1967, is set to four movements of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3.

It was the same with Stravinsky. Balanchine used Stravinsky’s music for numerous  ballets. A few of his most brilliant works — Apollon Musagéte and Agon — were composed explicitly for the ballet stage. But the music for some of Balanchine’s equally important Stravinsky ballets — Symphony in Three Movements, Danses Concertantes, Duo Concertante, Stravinsky Violin Concerto — were composed for the concert hall.

One reason Balanchine stayed away from the two composers’ best known ballet scores is very simple. He didn’t much like ballets that told stories.

“A plot is a very difficult thing for a dance,” he once said. “You cannot dance a story.” “A man and a woman on stage is already a story,” he would often say. Or, in one of his more memorable quotes, “There are no mothers-in-law in ballet.”

Both Stravinsky and Balanchine described their collaboration in philosophical terms. “Choreography...must realize its own form, one independent of the musical form,” Stravinsky once said. “[I]t must not seek to duplicate the line and beat of the music. I do not see how one can be a choreographer unless, like Balanchine, one is also a musician.’

“When I choreograph to Stravinsky’s music, I am very careful not to hide the music,” said Balanchine. “Usually choreography interferes with the music too much. When too much goes on on stage, you don’t hear the music.” Or as he pithily put it: “See the music, hear the dance.”

“When I choreograph to Stravinsky’s music, I am very careful not to hide the music,” said Balanchine.

Stravinsky and Balanchine were ideal collaborators working toward Balanchine’s vision of plotless ballets, abstract yet deeply engrossing works.

In vibrant contrast to their lofty goals, one of the most endearing traits of the Balanchine—Tchaikovsky—Stravinsky troika was their refusal to see themselves as divinely inspired geniuses. Each was well aware of his phenomenal talent, and all three aimed for the stratosphere with their art. But they liked to describe themselves as craftsmen rather than cosmically anointed artistes waiting for inspiration from above.

“I make my ballets on union time,” Balanchine often joked.

“I sit down to the piano regularly at 9 a.m.” Tchaikovsky said, “and Mesdames les Muses have learned to be on time for that rendezvous.”

Stravinsky and Balanchine carefully plotted every gesture and the timing of every musical bar as they worked on their ballets. Maria Tallchief often told the story of how Stravinsky composed the music to Orpheus, Balanchine’s 1948 retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. At the end of the pas de deux Eurydice dies when Orpheus looks back at her, defying the gods’ orders. “Maria! How long will it take you to die?” Stravinsky asked. As she slowly sank to the ground, he snapped his fingers, counting the beats. He stopped at four beats. “That is enough,” he said. “Now you’re dead.”

Inspiration, perspiration; the ratios are infinitely variable for all of us. But it’s refreshing to realize that some of the world’s greatest artists have spent hours tussling with the nuts and bolts of their craft.