Mozartiana

Music: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Suite No. 4, “Mozartiana”, Op. 61, 1887)
Choreography: George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust
Staging: Suzanne Farrell
Costume Design: Rouben Ter-Arutunian
Lighting Design: Randall G. Chiarelli
Duration: 28 minutes
Premiere: June 4, 1981; New York City Ballet (Tchaikovsky Festival)
Pacific Northwest Ballet Premiere: November 15, 1994

Anne Derieux in Mozartiana.

Mozartiana is George Balanchine’s last masterpiece, choreographed in 1981 as the opening work of New York City Ballet’s Tchaikovsky Festival. The music is the Suite No. 4, opus 61. Called “Mozartiana,” the suite is Tchaikovsky’s orchestral transcription of four Mozart pieces—a gigue and a minuet (both for keyboard); a “Preghiera” based upon Liszt’s piano transcriptions of Mozart’s motet, “Ave verum corpus”; and a set of variations that Mozart wrote on a theme from Gluck’s opera, The Pilgrim from Mecca. Tchaikovsky’s tribute to his beloved Mozart, this music, beginning in 1933, drew Balanchine back again and again as he explored through dance his own relationship to these two composers that he adored.

But in 1981, just two years before his death, in returning again to this so personally compelling score, he re-ordered the parts, placing the “Preghiera” first. (PNB audiences will recognize the “Preghiera” as the musical setting for both the wedding and final scenes of The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.) It is a change of profound significance, for the ballet now opens with a simple and solemn gesture of prayer that embraces all the gloriously inventive, technically demanding, and joyful choreography to follow.

Suzanne Farrell, for whom Balanchine created the ballerina role in Mozartiana and who set the ballet for PNB in 1994, surmises that in this final version Balanchine imparted all his knowledge and feeling in the face of death. Deeply religious and mystical, “he saw not a blackness but rather a beginning, a lightness,” Farrell states. Indeed, Kent Stowell believes, “Mozartiana is a summation of everything Balanchine knew—about Mozart, about Tchaikovsky, about ballet, about life.”

Notes by Jeanie Thomas.