New York City Ballet in Balanchine’s Serenade. Photo by Paul Kolnik.
What is it about certain ballets? Why do they follow you everywhere you go? If dance is truly an international language, why do some works (to sustain the metaphor) assume the roles of verbs rather than adverbs? The thought was prompted during a week-long trip last month to Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic and one of Europe’s more haunting cities. There, in the resplendent National Theater I caught a superior performance of John Cranko’s 1965 Onegin, danced with much delicacy by the National Theater Ballet of the Czech Republic. Not news, maybe, but over the past decade, I have also seen this full-evening work in two other European cultural centers (though not, in the past 30 years, in the Bay Area) and I didn’t gave to go out of my way to find it, either.
Similarly, it’s almost impossible when traveling in this country, and increasingly abroad, to avoid (not that one would want to) George Balanchine’s first American ballet, Serenade. I certainly understand why this work should be ubiquitous. First, it is a masterpiece. Second, the work was made in 1935 for students (at the School of American Ballet); perhaps, for that reason, Balanchine and, after his death, the Balanchine Trust, have been very generous in licensing the work for ballet troupes around the world. Then, the music, a rearranged version of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings is immediately lovable and, of great interest to financially strapped companies, it is in the public domain. Also, the casting distribution (17 women, four men) will approximate the proportion of genders one finds in many smaller ballet companies.
Yet, I think there is another reason that Serenade remains so popular with dancers and audiences. Balanchine insisted to his dying day that he had not embedded any plot elements in this ballet. Audiences, however, love narratives and most can’t resist finding a story in a field of abstraction. Balanchine made it easy. The 17 woman in tulle, arranged like a lozenge in luxuriant moonlight, the late-arriving corps woman, the business with the “dark angel” and, what looks like an elevation to divinity in the slow lift and cortège at the end—all this suggests a hidden plot that aficionados have spent the past 70 years attempting to decode.
The persistence of Onegin is a bit harder to explain, given the forces needed to produce it. This is one of the handful of full-evening narratives, not based on a 19th century classic, to have remained in the standard repertoire. Cranko made the work for the Stuttgart Ballet during the halcyon period when he was elevating that company to an international level. He chose a familiar subject, Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin, earlier and famously adapted for the opera stage by Tchaikovsky.
Cranko instructed composer Kurt-Heinz Stolze to prepare a pastiche score drawn from the Tchaikovsky catalog, with the caveat that no music from the opera could be included, a decision that annoyed Cranko’s bosses in Stuttgart. But when sitting through a performance, you usually think that you have heard the music before. Cranko also elicited gorgeous designs from Jürgen Rose, supplanted in recent years by Elizabeth Dalton’s satisfactory but less opulent sets. The decor just looks familiar, like an overstuffed living-room.
Onegin endures because it is a deeply romantic parable about love almost won and love forever lost, and it unfurls its story in telling romantic strokes. Naïve young Tatiana falls in love with the handsome, callow Eugene Onegin. He rejects her, kills her sister’s lover in an unnecessary duel and disappears. Years later, Onegin wanders into a soirée given by Prince Gremin, to whom Tatiana is now married. Onegin falls desperately in love with Tatiana, who suffers the pangs of hell before rejecting her latter-day suitor. Cranko made adjustments to Pushkin and Tchaikovsky’s scheme. Tatiana’s letter scene, a great moment in opera, doesn’t make for very good ballet, so Cranko added a dream pas de deux, the idealization of a love that never happened, and it’s a hot number, too, one of those fabulous moments that unleashes torrents of pent-up passion.
The enduring success of Onegin among European companies (it’s rarely been done by an American ballet troupe) also depends on the contrast between the intimate scenes and the opportunity for spectacle (much like the standard Romeo and Juliet). Tatiana’s birthday party and Gremin’s ball allow for plenty of that. The piece also affords major performance assignments for five dancers.
The Czech National Theater Ballet offers Onegin as a repertory piece, but there was no hint of routine in the performance I attended during the last week of October. Tatiana is a dream role and Teresa Podarilová grew magnificently in the part, from naïve adolescent to knowing woman of the world. Jirí Kodym showed us both the arrogance and the vulnerability behind Onegin’s posturing. Michal Stipa defined the impetuousness guiding the doomed Lensky, while Nicola Márová brought compassion to the flighty sister, Olga. I had never heard of any of these artists before this performance, but I will certainly retain their names for future reference. The original Stuttgart production of Onegin made international stars of Marcia Haydee and Egon Madsen, and that, alone, may be reason enough to bring the work into American houses. What dancer can resist parts like these?
I knew the late Clive Barnes only casually, but I remember a courtly gentleman who always asked after you, what you had been seeing, what you thought of it and really cared what you said. The long-time dance and theater critic, for both the New York Times and New York Post and countless other publications, passed away last week at the age of 81. The fact that Barnes could write with such purpose and clarity on deadline seemed to offend those critics who believed every review should afford an opportunity for extreme soul-searching at whatever length.
That was not Clive’s way. He told you what he thought and why, and what he wrote was predicated on a very long life of dance going. Anna Kisselgoff, Barnes’ successor as chief dance critic at the Times, would caution younger reviewers, “Be nice to Clive; he has seen more than any of us.” And so he had. If you were curious to know what a ballet looked like decades ago, you asked Clive.
Barnes had his passionate outbursts. He was furious that English choreography, distilled in Frederick Ashton’s genius, had been eclipsed by a lesser dancemaker, Kenneth MacMillan. But, over the last half century, if something important in dance was happening, Clive seemed to be on the spot reporting on it. He led an enviable career surrounded by beauty and he will be desperately missed in a profession that, every day, offers less opportunities to exercise that craft. Rest in peace.
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