Chaconne

Music: Christoph Willibald von Gluck (ballet music from Orfeo ed Euridice, 1762, with music from the Paris production, 1774)
Choreography: George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust
Staging: Francia Russell
Costume Design: Karinska
Lighting Design: Randall G. Chiarelli
Duration: 33 minutes
Premiere: January 22, 1976; New York City Ballet
Pacific Northwest Ballet Premiere: March 3, 1983

Carrie Imler and Christophe Maraval in Chaconne.
Photo © Angela Sterling

Throughout his career, George Balanchine was called upon by opera companies around the world to stage the ballet portions of their productions, and on occasion an entire opera. Chaconne has its origin in one of these occasions—Balanchine’s staging of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice for the Hamburg Opera in 1963. Thirteen years later, in 1976, the choreographer consolidated most of the dances from that production into a complete ballet for his own company, adding only the initial pas de deux and, somewhat later, the introductory ensemble. In this form, Chaconne (which takes its title both from an ancient dance and from the popular name for ballet music used to end an opera), is a series of ensemble numbers and variations—pas de deux, pas de trois, pas de cinq—which capture brilliantly the rococo spirit of 18th century music and movement even as that spirit is re-created by Balanchine’s 20th century sensibility. With its festive elegance and exuberant ornamentation, Chaconne, in the words of Lincoln Kirstein, can be imagined “proceeding in some invisible throne room” where the dancers are “courtiers bringing birthday gifts to their sovereigns.”

But, as many viewers have noted, the first pas de deux for the principal dancers (with its opening ensemble) is strangely different in mood and style from the rest of the ballet. Preceding the splendid array of public and celebratory dances that include a spectacular pas de deux for these same principals, Balanchine has given us one of his most ethereal, private, and muted love duets, one that belongs not to this world but to a timeless and dreamlike landscape of the spirit. While some critics have found this contrast perplexing, in the unearthly and haunting loveliness of the first pas de deux (which is set to the well-known “Dance of the Blessed Spirits”), others have experienced the eternal wellspring from which flows the ideal social life visualized in the rest of the ballet.

Whatever unity of conception is discovered in Chaconne, most viewers have acclaimed it, with critic Clive Barnes, as a “late-blooming Balanchine masterpiece.”

Notes by Jeanie Thomas; edited by Doug Fullington, 2009.