Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering (1969) was a watershed ballet that tapped the mood of the 1960s. This moment at the end of the ballet exemplifies the ballet’s reflective, “easy does it” lyricism. Robbins told the dancers: “You should dance only to each other. As if the audience weren’t there. It’s very hard.”

  Robbins and George Balanchine worked together at the New York City Ballet on and off for several decades. Robbins was from an èmigrè Russian family; Balanchine was a Russian èmigrè. Robbins gave ballet an American accent, but no one “spoke” ballet as fluently as Balanchine.

  George Balanchine was born and raised in Imperial Russia. This picture with his wet nurse was taken in 1904, the year of his birth.

  Balanchine in a rehearsal for Agon with Igor Stravinsky in 1957. Balanchine was an accomplished musician and the two men could often be seen bent over a score. The pianist is Nicholas Kopeikine, another Russian èmigrè.

  Every year Balanchine prepared a traditional Russian Easter dinner, which he celebrated with friends—in this case the èmigrè composer Nicolas Nabokov, who worked with Sergei Diaghilev and created the music for Balanchine’s Don Quixote.

  Compare the snowflakes from Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov’s The Nutcracker (1892), which George Balanchine saw as a child in St. Petersburg (top), to the snowflakes from his own production, which premiered in New York in 1954 (bottom). The similarities are striking, but Balanchine made one important addition: his snowflakes are crowned, emphasizing their Imperial heritage.

  Balanchine’s Agon (1957) with Diana Adams and Arthur Mitchell. The stark setting, black and white practice clothes, and distorted, sexually tinged but abstract movements stunned audiences. The fact that Adams was white and Mitchell was black added a powerful racial overtone: the ballet premiered at a critical juncture in the Civil Rights movement.

  “Balanchine Amid His New Breed,” Newsweek, 1969. The 1960s may not always have suited Balanchine, but he knew how to capture their spirit!

  George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein toasting Igor Stravinsky in memoriam with shots of vodka onstage at the 1972 Stravinsky Festival.

  Balanchine’s angels. A rehearsal for Adagio Lamentoso, to the fourth movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, in 1981. The ballet master died two years later.

  These notes source quoted material only and are designed to be used with the bibliography, where the reader will find a fuller account of works used in each chapter, along with a list of archival sources and abbreviations. Translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own.

  Introduction: Masters and Tradition

  1. Plato, Phaedrus, 51.

  Chapter 1: Kings of Dance

  1. Ebreo, De Pratica, 47; Jones, “Spectacle in Milan”; Sparti, “Antiquity as Inspiration.”

  2. Yates, The French Academies, 24–25, 37, 23.

  3. Yates, The French Academies, 86; McGowan, L’Art du Ballet de Cour, 14.

  4. Mersenne, quoted in Yates, The French Academies, 24–25. As Yates points out, Mersenne’s heightened prose reflects the urgency he felt as Europe plunged into the Thirty Years’ War.

  5. Yates, The French Academies, 240. In the written preface to the ballet, Beaujoyeulx explained at some length that he had merged the “modern invention” of ballet with comedy—comedy in that the performance ended auspiciously, though its characters were gods and heroic figures. See “Au Lecteur” in Beaujoyeulx, Balet Comique de la Royne.

  6. McGowan, L’Art du Ballet de Cour, 43.

  7. McGowan, L’Art du Ballet de Cour, 37; Yates, The French Academies, 248; Christout, Le merveilleux, 62.

  8. Yates, The French Academies, 270.

  9. Ibid., 33.

  10. Williams, Descartes, 10. Guillaume Colletet was the author of several ballets, and Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc and François de Malherbe discussed ballets in their correspondence. Colletet in particular wrote about ballets with the idealistic verve of the sixteenth-century academicians, but his own ballets, created for the king, were larded with burlesque and pomp.

  11. As Louis XIV later put it, “The nation is not embodied by France, she exists wholly in the person of the King.” Apostolidés, Le Roi-Machine, 11–14.

  12. Dunlop, Louis XIV, 10.

  13. McGowan, “La Danse: Son Role Multiple,” 171.

  14. Solnon, La Cour de France, 349; Blanning, The Culture of Power, 32.

  15. Archives Nationales, Danseurs et Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, 27–28.

  16. Saint-Hubert, La Manière, 1. Ordinances in 1788, 1792, and 1818 stipulated that schools of dance be included in French military barracks.

  17. Kunzle, “In Search,” 2 (“the Elders”).

  18. Ibid., 7.

  19. Christout, Le Ballet de Cour, 166; Kunzle, “In Search,” 3–15.

  20. Hilton, Dance of Court and Theater, 15–16.

  21. La Gorce, “Guillaume-Louis Pécour,” 8.

  22. Réau, L’Europe Française, 12.

  23. Harris-Warrick and Marsh, Musical Theatre, 84–85.

  24. Lancelot, La Belle Danse; Hilton, Dance of Court. In the late seventeenth century the entrée grave was thought to be the apex of the danse noble, but there were also many other genres of dances corresponding to musical forms.

  25. “Beautiful being,” bel ester may also have been a play on belles lettres. De Lauze, Apologie de la danse, 17.

  26. Rameau, Le maître à danser, 2–4 (“air of ease” and “humiliation”); Hilton, Dance of Court, 67 (“well disposed”); Pauli, Elémens de la Danse, 112–13 (“one has yet”).

  27. Children were not exempt from the requirements of etiquette. In 1716, a man by the name of Des Hayes submitted a design for a child’s corset to the Academy of Science, and in 1733 he submitted a design for a chin strap to keep a child’s head upright, along with another mechanism to help those who were pigeon-toed to “turn their feet outward.” The Academy approved. See Cohen, Music, 77–78.

  28. Feuillet, Choregraphie, 106.

  29. Ibid., 26–27.

  30. Rameau, Le maître à danser, 210.

  31. Ladurie, Saint-Simon, 65.

  32. Walpole in Clark and Crisp, Ballet Art, 39.

  33. Johnson, Listening in Paris, 294.

  34. Ménestrier, Des Ballets Anciens et Modernes, 253.

  35. Éloge a Mlle. Camargo, 1771, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Collection Rondel, RO11685.

  36. Benoit, Versailles, 16; Jean-Baptiste de la Salle quoted in Franklin, La civilité, 205–6.

  37. Benoit, Versailles, 372; Maugras, Les Comédiens, 268–69.

  38. See Fumaroli, Héros et Orateurs.

  39. Ménestrier in Christout, Le Ballet de Cour, 232–33.

  40. Molière, Oeuvres completes, I: 751.

  41. Michel de Pure, quoted in Heyer, ed., Lully Studies, xii.

  42. This interpretation draws on McGowan, “La danse.”

  43. Molière, Don Juan and Other Plays, 271, 273, 266.

  44. The exact number of ballet masters performing in the ballet is uncertain: one observer put it at seventy, although the libretto calls for forty-six.

  45. Louis first established the Académie d’Opéra in 1669, but when the privilege passed to Lully in 1672, it was renamed the Académie Royale de Musique, and the name would later be changed again, several times. To avoid confusion I will consistently use “Paris Opera.”

  46. La Gorce, Jean-Baptiste Lully, 275.

  47. The tragèdie en musique ranged from Alceste (1674) and Atys (1676), which tried to fit opera to the mold of Racinian drama, to Isis (1677), which was full of ballets, machine effects, and spectacle. Isis, however, turned out to be an exception, and in the work of Lully and Quinault the Atys model prevailed.

  48. Brossard, quoted in Wood, Music and Drama, 184.

  49. On the querelle, see especially Fumaroli, “Les abeilles et les araignées.”

  50. Beaussant, Lully, 554.

  51. De Pure, Idée des Spectacles; Heyer, Lully Studies, x.

  52. Thoinet Ar
beau, writing in 1589, suggested that dance belonged to the seven liberal arts through its attachment to music and mathematics. In the seventeenth century, however, ideas about the liberal arts began to shift as aesthetic considerations and ideas about beauty came to the fore and the notion of the “fine arts” gained currency. Music was henceforth increasingly thought of as an aesthetic rather than a mathematical art.

  53. Listen, for example, to André Félibien, who produced spectacles at court: “The movements of a machine create effects that surprise and enchant audiences far more than anything in ordinary nature. In this way, His Majesty astonishes and delights with heroic and virtuous actions far surpassing anything nature or mankind can offer,” quoted in Apostolidès, Le Roi-Machine, 134; La Bruyère quoted in Oliver, The Encyclopedists, 10.

  54. Lesure, ed., Textes sur Lully, 115–16.

  55. Brocher, À La Cour de Louis XIV, 95.

  56. In 1714, for example, the Duchesse du Maine established her own theater at Sceaux, where she and her guests concocted ballets, operas, and plays and hired professionals to entertain them in the legendary Grandes Nuits de Sceaux.

  Chapter 2: The Enlightenment and the Story Ballet

  1. Habakkuk, “England,” 15.

  2. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 5.

  3. Prynne quoted in Foss, The Age of Patronage, 5; Ralph, Life and Works of John Weaver, 117; Playford, English Dancing Master, introduction.

  4. Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 15.

  5. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, 239.

  6. Ralph, Life and Works, 25. In the 1830s, Charles Dickens took the trouble to edit the memoirs of the clown Joseph Grimaldi, whose mischievous and often politically polemical performances were derived from the commedia dell’arte and had enchanted Dickens as a child.

  7. Ralph, Life and Works, 401, 8.

  8. Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? 426.

  9. Klein, Shaftesbury, 197.

  10. Ibid., 175, 190.

  11. Ralph, Life and Works, 1005.

  12. Gallini, Critical Observations, 120–21; Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 91.

  13. Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? 438 (“their Smuttiness”); Loftis, Steele at Drury Lane, 4, 15.

  14. Ralph, Life and Works, 25, 150.

  15. Ibid., 54, 56.

  16. Dacier, Une Danseuse, 69.

  17. Astier, “Sallé, Marie”; Macaulay, “Breaking the Rules,” part 3.

  18. Dacier, Une Danseuse, 89.

  19. Guest, The Ballet of the Enlightenment, 39–40 (“dance like a man”); Capon, Les Vestris, 195, quoting Bachaumont (“watching Vestris”).

  20. In L’Académie Royale de Musique, Émile Campardon documents many cases in which a young dancer complained that a man presented himself at her domicile promising to lui faire du bien but in the end robbed her. For example, one Mademoiselle LeMonnier (Marie-Adélaide), who danced at the Opera from 1773 to 1776, lodged a complaint against the Sieur de Roseville, bourgeois de Paris, who seduced her, made her pregnant, and then abandoned her. Mademoiselle Lilia and Mademoiselle Dumirail complained of similar treatment. Catherine de Saint-Léger was publicly harassed and accused of being a woman of questionable honor—and, worse, of having had syphilis. She defended her name and reputation.

  21. Capon and Yves-Plessis, Fille d’Opéra, 26.

  22. “Factum pour Mademoiselle Petit, Danseuse de l’Opéra, Révoquée, Complaignante au Public,” nd., np., and “Démande au Public en Réparation d’Honneur contre la Demoiselle Petit par Messieurs Les Fermiers Généraux,” Paris, 1741, Bibliothèque de l’Opéra de Paris, dossier d’artiste, Mlle. Petit.”

  23. Carsillier et Guiet, Mémoire, 6–7.

  24. Noverre’s Lettres were published in Vienna, Hamburg, London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, St. Petersburg, and Paris. Plans existed for an Italian translation in Naples in the late 1770s but the project stalled; selections of the Lettres were published in installments in the newspaper Gazzetta urbana veneta in 1794.

  25. The musician Charles Collé quoted in Hansell, “Noverre, Jean-Georges,” 695.

  26. Haeringer, L’esthétique de l’opéra, 156; see also Cahusac, La Danse Ancienne, 3: 129, 146; Rousseau, Émile, 139–40.

  27. Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 12: Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, Supplement, 18: 756.

  28. Noverre, Lettres, 138–39 (“speak” and “portrait of humanity”); Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 296.

  29. Ballet d’action became a term of art to describe ballets that told a story. Other terms, some interchangeable, others slightly different, included “heroic ballet,” “tragic ballet,” and “pantomime ballet.”

  30. Noverre, Lettres (1952), 188, 44, 192–93.

  31. Noverre, Letters on Dancing and Ballets, translated Beaumont, 149.

  32. Noverre, Lettres (1952), 108.

  33. Goethe quoted in Reau, L’Europe Française, 293–94 (“perfidious language”); Mercier, Mon Bonnet de Nuit, 2:172.

  34. Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau in Oeuvres, 457, 470, 473.

  35. Diderot’s pessimism about French music was also part of a larger debate over the respective merits of French and Italian music. Diderot was firmly on the side of the Italians.

  36. Médée et Jason was later staged in Paris by G. Vestris in 1767; in Warsaw and Paris (with new music), 1770–71; in Venice and Milan by Le Picq in 1771 and 1773 and later in St. Petersburg; in Vienna by Noverre in 1776; and finally in Paris with additional music by Rudolph in 1780.

  37. Beales, Joseph II, 33.

  38. Harris-Warrick and Brown, eds., The Grotesque Dancer, 71.

  39. Angiolini, Dissertation.

  40. Baron Van Swieten to Count Johann Karl Philipp Cobenzl, Feb. 16, 1765, quoted in Howard, Gluck, 74–75 (“far too pathetic”); Brown, Gluck, 336.

  41. Noverre, La Mort d’Agamemnon, 146.

  42. Beales, Joseph II, 159, 233.

  43. Francesco Algarotti, quoted in Strunk and Treitler, Source Readings in Music History, 69 (“irrational caprioling”); Hansell, Opera and Ballet, 771 (“richness”); Brown, Gluck, 150 (“If Italy”).

  44. Hansell, Opera and Ballet, 859.

  45. Ibid.

  46. Noverre, Euthyme et Eucharis, Milan, 1775; trans. Walter Toscannini, NYPL, Jerome Robbins Dance Collection, *MGZM-Res. Tos W, folder 3. Miscellaneous Manuscripts.

  47. Lynham, The Chevalier Noverre, 84.

  48. Gardel, L’Avenement de Titus à L’Empire; Journal des Dames, vol. 4: Nov. 1775, 205–12.

  49. Gossec quoted in Archives Nationales, Danseurs et Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, 36–37.

  50. Engel, Idées, 40–42 (Engel even offered a sketch of the poor actress delivering her line, fist in mouth); Guest, The Ballet of the Enlightenment, 416.

  51. Mercure de France, April 22, 1786, 197–201.

  52. Noverre, Lettres (1803), 168–69.

  Chapter 3: The French Revolution in Ballet

  1. Capon, Les Vestris, 211.

  2. Noverre quoted in Campardon, L’Académie Royale de Musique, 2:214.

  3. Affiches, Annonces et Avis Divers, Aug. 13, 1783, 132. Noverre had also created a ballet on the same theme, La Rosière de Salency, first performed in Milan in 1775 and later in London in 1781, but the plot was not at all comic or light: audiences had to endure stormy arguments, heart-wrenching betrayals, and threatened suicides before the rosière was finally vindicated.

  4. Guest, Ballet of the Enlightenment, 139. See also reviews of Guimard’s performances in the Journal de Paris, Mar. 11, 1778, 279; Jul. 10, 1778, 764; Aug. 30, 1778, 967; Jan. 12, 1784, 59; Mercure de France, Oct. 2, 1784, 41.

  5. Mercure de France, Aug. 31, 1782, 228.

  6. Le Goff, “Reims: City of Coronation,” 238.

  7. Correspondence Littéraire, 12:231–35. On the rule of the dancers, see also AN, O1620 126; on insubordination, see Comité de l’Opéra, Feb. 4, 1784, AN, O1620 192; letter from Dauvergne, May 12, 1787, Bibliothèque de l’Opéra de Paris, dossier d’artiste for
Gardel; letter from Dauvergne to de la Ferté, Sep. 1, 1788, AN, O1619 386; letter dated 1788, AN, O1619 386.

  8. Capon, Les Vestris, 254–57; see also Correspondance Littéraire, 12:231–35, 13:46–48 (Grimm’s account is dated 1784).

  9. Furet, Revoluntionary France, 50–51.

  10. Mémoire justicatif des sujets de l’Académie royale de musique. See also Framery, De l’organisation des Spectacles de Paris.

  11. Bournonville, My Theater Life, 3:452–53. Gardel stepped aside reluctantly: in 1830 he wrote a letter to the queen asking to be appointed ballet master of the court.

  12. On Marie Gardel, see L’Ami des Arts: Journal de la Société Philotechnique, 1 Frimaire, an 5 de la République [Nov. 21, 1796], 2:6–7, Bibliothèque de l’Opéra de Paris, Fonds Collomb, pièce 8; Amanton, Notice sur Madame Gardel, 4–5. Madame Collomb, another prominent ballerina in the revolutionary years, was also known for her virtuous conduct. See Journal des defenseurs de la patrie, 3 Fructidor, an II de la République [no. 516], 2–3.

  13. Télémaque, manuscript scenario with notes by Gardel, 1788, AN, AJ13, 1024; Castil-Blaze, La Danse, 216.

  14. Caron, Paris Pendant la Terreur, 2:321 (see also the report of a conversation at a café in which it was said that the actors at the Opera harbored “un préjugé aristocratique qui était indestructible chez eux,” although someone else had insisted that this was completely false and that the performers at the opera were good republicans every one; ibid., 4:330); Baschet, Mademoiselle Dervieux, 166–67; Johnson, Listening, 120; Gardel et al. report, AN, AJ13 44, dossièr IV, process verbeaux et séances du Comité du Théâtre des Arts, an 2 (“completely” and “decent”).