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n August 1935, after months of rumors, Edward Johnson hired George Balanchine and the Ameri­can Ballet to rake over the Metropolitan Opera's "dance features and diverrissements." Johnson,

the Met's new general manager, had vowed to revive its Depression-era fortunes by Americanizing the personnel and democratizing the audience. In engaging the company, he said, the Mer "was deriving the benefit of needed young blood and a fresh viewpoint."

The American Baller was definitely a young organization. Dreamed up by Lincoln Kirstein, funded by Edward M. M. Warburg and directed by Balanchine, whose centenary we celebrate this year, the compa­ny was barely six months old. The dancers, too, were young - their average age was nineteen - and all were American-born or -raised. Just as fresh was Balanchine's choreography. Although he had been creat­ing ballers for more than a decade - first in Perrograd, then in Paris, London and Monte Carlo - only in March 1935, with the American Ballet's debut season in New York, did Americans see a body of his

LYNN GARAFOLA charts the rocky course

of George Balanchine's ,,, career at the Met

during the Ed ward Johnson years

Clockwise from above: Ruthanna Boris and

William Dollar rehearsing Bartered Bride at the Met. 1936:

Balanchine: American Ballet ballerina Holly Howard: Lew Christensen as Balanchine's Apollo. a feature

work, including his first ballets choreo­graphed in the U.S.

Johnson's invitation thrilled Kirstein. "I fell promptly in love with the whole dusty fabric of the Met," he wrote years later. "Here histo­ry lived, as it must have for nearly a hundred years, in a genuine nineteenth-century house, a dinosaur in amber, static yet breathing .... [E]verything ... merged in a heady potion to poison me further with another serious attack of red-and-gold disease."

Alas, for Kirstein, the relationship soon foundered, and in the spring of 1938 the

American Baller left the Met. The parting was front-page news. "The tradition of the ballet at the Metropolitan is bad ballet," Balanchine declared. "I cannot do bad ballet. That is why I can­not stay." It wasn't the only reason. Three weeks earlier, Johnson had declined to renew the American Ballet's contract.

The choreographer's bitterness notwithstanding, his three Met seasons witnessed several milestones. Among them were Balan­chine's dances for operas such as Carmen, Aida, Tannhauser, Sam­son et Dalila, The Bartered Bride and Lakme; his luminous - if controversial - production of Orfeo ed Euridice, his first Stravin­sky Festival; the revival of his signature work, Apollo, and his first American baller, Serenade (both still danced by New York City Baller). Finally, thanks to the Met, the American Baller grew up. By 1937, critic Edwin Denby observed in Modern Music, it had become "the first-class institution it was meant to be."

From the first, Balanchine's Met appointment was controver­sial. John Martin, the influential dance critic of The New York Times, regretted "that once again American artists have been passed by for a high artistic post for which at least half a dozen of them are eminently fitted." Balanchine had taken to heart

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Johnson's desire to freshen up the ballet. In Aida, he abandoned the traditional "Oriental" and "Egyptian" motifs in favor of constructivist gymnastics and an acrobatic adagio that had Holly Howard, Balanchine's muse of the moment, slithering in a ring pose down her partner's entire body. He spiced up the Persian dance in Lakme and brought real fire to the Spanish dances in Car­men. In Tannhduser, boys rolled on top of girls, and in one particularly athletic duet, sexy Daphne Vane lost her top, revealing a modest bosom that caused the old chorus men to sigh "piccinina."

Aida split the critics down the middle. One who applauded Balanchine's changes was the New York American's Leonard Liebling. "Lovers of the dance had been offended and bored for years by the Metropolitan custom of having girls dressed as Negro boys furnishing unconvincing entertainment for Amner­is. Now that function is done by a group of black youths who indulge in a becomingly savage and lively dance." In the 1930s, cross-dressing, not blacking-up, was a problem.

Danton Walker lined up with the naysayers. "The first Aida of the Metropolitan Opera's New Deal brought forth cheers, applause, laughter and - believe it or not - hisses," he report­ed in the Daily News. "The laughter and hisses were for the American Ballet, which, in its effort to be different, executed some of the most astonishing figures that ever shocked a Met audience. Many disparaging things have been said about Rosina Calli's old-regime ballet, but at any rate Mme. Galli never intro­duced snake-hips into the temple dances, had her ballerinas doing splits, or permitted the boys and girls to go piggy-back or jump between each other's legs in the victory scene."

Balanchine retaliated by inviting columnist Dorothy Kilgallen to the huge Fortieth Street rehearsal studio. "Mr. Balanchine's ballet," she told readers of the New York Evening journal, "kicked the music critics in their aisle seats and sent them choking to their midnight typewriters with words formerly used only in reviewing Harlem floor shows. It was this which delighted, if also slightly disturbed, Mr. Balanchine today. The critics don't know anything about dancing,' he declared in gentle Russian accents. 'They are like prima donnas. They think only of the singing, the singing .... What they called snake hips in Aida is the way Ethiopians danced in those days. Not on the toes, in night­gowns, but with the hips."'

It made terrific copy for a choreographer who had just landed his first job on Broadway. But it didn't halt the complaints about the temple dance. Within days, the "danse du ventre," as the Times delicately referred to belly dancing, had "undergone some alteration." It took two more revisions, the last signed "after Peti­pa," before "official silence gratefully closed," as Kirstein put it, over those scandalous snake-hips.

According to Anatole C hujoy, a Russian-speaking dance writer who enjoyed Balanchine's confidence, the choreographer agreed to the Met contract because it offered the possibility of presenting evenings of ballet. This was not spelled out in the

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contract, but it was understood by the dancers. As the Newark Ledger reported in an article about American ballet members "lured" from New Jersey, "at the end of the season, the ballet will probably have several weeks of just its own programs."

Throughout the year, the company took part in the Met's regular Sunday concerts. It also danced on programs that paired short operas with ballets from the company's repertory, including Reminis­

cence, Serenade, Chopin Concerto, Mozartiana and Errante. In February 1936, listeners as far away as Los Angeles could hear a live radio broadcast of Tchaikovsky's music for Serenade, along with Gianni Schicchi and Pagliacci. Soon, rumors were flying about an all-ballet evening. One idea was Rimsky-Korsakov's Le Coq d'Or, staged with huge success at the Met in 1918. There was talk of Afternoon of a Faun and even Act II of Giselle. Anoth­er tide bandied about was Cluck's Orfeo ed Euridice. In mid­April, the Met signed the company for the "popular" season ($3 top!) that began in May. Along with incidental dances, the com­pany agreed to "furnish" up to four ballets "for independent per­formances in conjunction with short operas."

The Bat, the first of the new works, was a critical and popular success. It was set to Strauss's Die Fledermaus music and paired improbably with Lucia di Lammermoor. Holly Howard and Lew Christensen played the eponymous bat, each with a huge wing of smoky China silk. There was a luminous blue-green back­ground, against which the dancers "romped fast and merrily" (as Pitts Sanborn wrote), although "the orchestra played Strauss's music none too well." The "audience ... received [the whole show) with unstinted enthusiasm."

Orfeo, two days later, was another story. The production was the brainchild of Pavel T chelitchew, a Russian emigre artist who had worked with Balanchine in Paris and recently moved to New York. "I am a mad Russian," he told the Met's chief carpenter, Carl Steinmetz. "In the spring, we will work together. Drink this whiskey. In April, you remember who I am and what I want."

The new Orfeo put the dancers onstage and the singers in the pit. "The vision was radical," wrote Kirstein. "We saw Hell as a concentration-camp with flying military slave-drivers lashing forced labor; the Elysian Fields as an ether dream, a dessicated bone-dry limbo of suspended animation, and Paradise as [a self­illuminated Milky Way)."

Ruthanna Boris, a charter member of the American Ballet, remembers Hell as full of "monkey business." Dancers slithered on the wide, shallow steps, while male devils on wires flew over­head. By contrast, the Elysian Fields was beautifully choreo­graphed, with the dancers shrouded in veils that Orpheus lifted searching for Eurydice.

The critics hated it. Samuel Chotzinoff, in the New York Post, was reminded of the

"poses and gestures ... one sees in the usual solemn ballets of our numerous dance groups" - a reference to the flourishing mod­ern-dance scene. "Amor was entrusted to Mr. William Dollar, a

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strong and muscular gentleman who, at the finale, was hoisted up in the flies by visible cables. The scenes ... expressed, no doubt, something deep and cosmic, since they elud­ed identification. I thought that the Garden of the Temple of Love rather resembled a huge portion of sweetbreads. At the final curtain a backdrop with ... lines and dots began to shimmer and glow, looking for all

Balanchine and dancers watch Howard and Charles Laskey rehearse Mozartiana. 1934. above:

Laskey and corps members in Serenade. left: Boris in the solo Balanchine created

for her in Carmen. 1935. below

the world like an illuminated road map of Connecticut."

The Times dripped venom. Difeo, wrote Olin Downes, was "the most inept and unhappy spectacle" he had ever seen. "Ir is absurd as interpretation of the opera. It is ugly and futile, impu­dent and meddlesome, wholly ineffective in performance." He then turned his ire on Kirstein, Balanchine's indefatigable apolo­gist, and Warburg, who had paid for the scenery and costumes. "The writer is perfectly aware that certain sophisticates and dilet­tantes of the operatic stage will claim the contrary and accuse him ... of blindness, antagonism, prejudice and all the rest of it. It is, however, simple fact that this production, so far as the stage and the choreography are concerned, is plain bad - bad and dull, bad and unconducive to any appreciation of the real nature of Gluck's opera. It is ... pretentious dilettantism that is superfluous."

Despite the Difeo debacle, the American Ballet's contract was renewed for the 1936- 37 season. It was a relatively peaceful sea­son, the high point being a project close to Balanchine's heart -a program of three ballets to music by Stravinsky. The Stravinsky Festival opened on April 27, with the first American revival of his 1928 signature work, Apollon Musagete (later known as Apol­lo), his first staging of Le Baiser de la Fee and the premiere of jeu

OCTOBER 2004

de Cartes (or The Card Party, as it was called at the Met), with a score commis­sioned by Kirstein and Warburg. War­burg paid for everything and even hired the Philharmonic to play.

The Met revival gave Apollo a new, American lease on life. In Lew Chris­tensen, a Mormon boy from Utah, Balan­chine found a handsome new Apollo -tall and blond, "a magnificent classical dancer, with flawless technique and a sure grasp of noble style," as George Amberg later wrote. Balanchine threw away his wig, and Tchelitchew cut away half his gilt-leather armor. Balanchine also reworked the prologue. Now, Leto gave

birth to Apollo with a series of Martha Graham's trademark con­tractions. Jane Burcholzer, who danced the part, recalls Balanchine putting his arm across her shoulder and saying, "Jeanne and I are going to do artistic childbirth," which really caused a stir.

For Kirstein and Warburg, ]eu de Cartes (in which the dancers were cards in a poker game led by the duplicitous Joker) was the big event. It brought Stravinsky to New York, not only to con­duct the premiere but to attend rehearsals - and it brought cachet to the American Ballet and its "angels." Kirstein wrote about the experience in Modern Music.

Stravinsky would appear punctually at rehearsals and stay on for six hours .... He always came meticulously apparelled in suede shoes, marvelous checked suits, beautiful ties - rhe small bur perfect dandy, an elegant Parisian version of London tailoring. During successive run-rhroughs of the baller he would slap his knee like a metronome for rhe dancers, then suddenly interrupt everything, rise and, gesticulating rapidly ro emphasize his points, suggest a change.

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Unlike Kirstein, John Martin did not care for jeu de Cartes. But he applauded the shift in Balanchine's work from the "artiness and affectation" of his Diaghilev-era ballets to a freer, more straightfor­ward style of composition. Baiser, he observed, was "deliberately reminiscent of the romantic ballet" but "not ... an exact reproduc­tion of the style." It thus marked a new approach to the past, a

American Ballet dancers publicizing their appearance in the 1937 film

The Goldwyn Follies. above: Tamara Geva in the

1935 American Ballet production of Balanchine's

Errante at the Adelphi Theater. right

neoclassical synthesis that anticipated Bal­anchine's great ballets of the 1940s.

The Stravinsky Festival was a critical and popular success , and the Met renewed the American Ballet's contract for the 1937-38 season. But dancers left to join Ballet Caravan, the small touring company organized by Lincoln Kirstein to showcase American talent and work. Warburg also pulled out. His father had died, and with conditions deteriorating in Europe, there were more important things for the son of a leading Jewish fam­ily to do than run and fund a ballet com­pany. Balanchine imported Jacques Lidgi, a Bulgarian lawyer trained in France, to take his place. He ordered new letterhead - Georges Balanchine Ballet, Inc., was now the official compa­ny name - and moved from fancy offices in Rockefeller Center to the School of American Ballet. He also commissioned a piece of music from Hindemith that would not come to fruition until 1946, as The Four Temperaments, Balanchine's first leotard ballet.

With Warburg and Kirstein off the scene, the American Ballet was up for grabs. There were rumors that it would merge with Leonide Massine's new American-based company; that impre-

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sario Sol Hurok - or Broadway producer Dwight Deere Wiman - had signed it up and was planning a national tour; that Balanchine was negotiating with the Met for independent ballet performances on Tuesdays when the house was dark. None of this transpired.

Although the dancers appreciated a regular paycheck, they didn't like working at the Met. They came late to performances and sent substitutes when they were supposed to super. They hated the filthy costumes (which made them itch) and the dickering over shoes and the fact that running water never reached the fifth-floor studio where the men had to change. During a performance of Mozartiana, reported an outraged Chujoy, the conductor "sudden-ly stopped the orchestra ... and picked up the music only after a courageous little dancer ... continue[d] her dance unaccompanied." And nobody alerted Balanchine that thirty-two bars had been cut from the Polka in the orchestral score of The Bartered Bride.

On March 19, 1938, Edward Johnson notified Balanchine that the Met would not be renewing the American Ballet's con­tract for the following season. According to Chujoy, the expected announcement was late in reaching Balanchine, and he was urged to force the issue. He went to see Johnson, but instead of renewing the contract, Johnson canceled it - that very day. Why did Balanchine wait three weeks before going public? And why did he say that he had quit, when he had actually been fired?

Probably he was trying to save face. Chujoy says that Balan-chine was "incensed" by Johnson's letter. He was a leading classical choreographer, with Broadway and West End hits to his credit as well as a Hollywood movie. Not only had Johnson chucked him out, he had publicly humiliated him. Only days after Balanchine's ill-timed public state­ment on April 8, Johnson named Boris Romanov, a Russian then working in Italy, to head the Met's new in-house bal­let troupe. The dance world is a small world, and Balanchine must have had some inkling of what was afoot.

Balanchine returned to the Met in 1953, at Stravinsky's request, to stage The Rake's Progress. He returned again in 197 4 to stage the Polonaise in Boris Godunov. He spent the last nineteen years of his life working at the New York State Theater, which his genius and the New York City Ballet had made the cap­

ital of the dance world. The building was only steps away from the "new" Met, but Balanchine kept his distance. Unlike the Mariinsky or the Paris Opera, the Met was a musicians' opera; it favored the magnificent voice over dance, design and mise­en-scene. For someone like Balanchine, who wanted to make ballets that spoke his personal language, the Met could never be home. D

LYNN GARAFOLA teaches at Barnard College and is the author/editor of several books about dance history.

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