Biography of George Balanchine

About the Artist

No choreographer is more deserving of the title "the father of American ballet" than the great master, George Balanchine. In late 1933, an invitation from Lincoln Kirstein brought Balanchine to the United States after a career as dancer, ballet master, and choreographer that took him from Russia throughout Europe. Kirstein had been impressed by Balanchine's company, Les Ballets, in Paris, and proposed that Balanchine come to the United States to help him establish an American ballet company equivalent to the European ones.

The first result of the Balanchine-Kirstein collaboration was the School of American Ballet, founded in early 1934, an institution that still exists today. Balanchine's first ballet in the United States was performed as a workshop by students of the school. Set to music by Tchaikovsky, Serenade premiered outdoors on a friend's estate near White Plains, New York.

In 1935, Kirstein and Balanchine set up a touring company of dancers from the school called The American Ballet. The same year brought an invitation from the Metropolitan Opera for The American Ballet to become its resident ballet and for Balanchine to become the Met's ballet master. Tight funding, however, permitted Balanchine to stage only two completely dance-oriented works for the Met, a dance-drama version of Gluck's Orfeo and Eurydice and a Stravinsky program featuring a revival of one of Balanchine's first ballets, Apollo, plus two new works, Le Baiser de la Fee and Card Game.

Although Balanchine enjoyed much success critically and popularly with the Met, he left in early 1938 to teach at the school and to work in musical theater and in film. He and Kirstein assembled the American Ballet Caravan, which made a goodwill tour of Latin American countries featuring such new Balanchine ballets as Concerto Barocco and Ballet Imperial. From 1944 to 1946, Balanchine helped revitalize the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo by becoming artistic director. For them, he created Raymonda and La Sonnambula.

Balanchine collaborated again with Kirstein in 1946 to form Ballet Society, a company which introduced New York subscription-only audiences over the next two years to such new Balanchine works as The Four Temperaments (1946) and Stravinsky's Renard (1947) and Orpheus (1948).

In October of 1948, Morton Baum, the chairman of the City Center finance committee, was so impressed by a Ballet Society performance that he negotiated to have the company join the City Center municipal complex (home to the New York City Drama Company and the New York City Opera) as the New York City Ballet. Balanchine's work now had a permanent home.

Among Balanchine's most famous New York City Ballet performances are: The Firebird (1949; restaged with Jerome Robbins in 1970), La Valse (1951), The Nutcracker, Ivesian (1954), Agon (1957), Seven Deadly Sins (1958), Episodes (1959), Monumentum Pro Gesualdo (1960), Liebeslieder Walzer (1960), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1962), Don Quixote and Harlequinade (both in 1965), Jewels (1967), Metastaseis and Pithoprakta (1968), and Who Cares? (1970). The New York City Ballet appeared in Washington more frequently than anywhere outside New York.

The son of a composer, Balanchine gained a knowledge of music early in life that far exceeds that of most choreographers. At the age of five, he began studying piano, and he enrolled in the Conservatory of Music upon graduating, in 1921, from the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg. His extensive musical training made it possible for him to communicate with Stravinsky, and it enabled him to reduce orchestral scores on the piano and to translate music into dance.

Balanchine defended his technique of de emphasizing the plot in his ballets by saying, "A ballet may contain a story, but the visual spectacle, not the story, is the essential element. . . It is the illusion created which convinces the audience, much as it is with the work of a magician. If the illusion fails, the ballet fails, no matter how well a program note tells the audience that it has succeeded." He will always be remembered for the calm and collected way in which he worked with his dancers. Balanchine died in 1983 at the age of 79.