Apollo

Music

Igor Stravinsky
(Apollo Musagetes, 1927-1928)

Choreography

George Balanchine

Staging

Peter Boal

Lighting Design

Randall G. Chiarelli

Duration

35 minutes

Premiere

June 12, 1928
Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (Paris)

PNB Premiere

February 23, 1993

Apollo, choreographed in 1928 for the Ballets Russes by the 24-year-old George Balanchine and known originally as Apollon Musagète, is widely regarded as the fountainhead of contemporary classicism. The significance of Balanchine’s achievement was apparent from the first, most notably to Serge Diaghilev, the Ballets Russes’ great impresario, who, watching a rehearsal one day before the premiere, is said to have remarked: “What he is doing is magnificent. It is pure classicism, such as we have not seen since Petipa’s.”

This comment must be understood within the context of experimental choreography that Diaghilev himself had done so much to foster. Since the early years of the century, dance works had been created by young choreographers, among them Fokine, Nijinsky, Massine, Nijinska, and Balanchine himself, who, in their determination to bring ballet into the modern age, often had strayed far from their classical inheritance. With Apollo, Balanchine reclaimed that inheritance, demonstrating unmistakably that, in Lincoln Kirstein’s words, “tradition is…the very floor which supports the artist, enabling him securely to build upon it elements which may seem at first revolutionary, ugly, and new both to him and to his audience.” Unusual lifts, heel-shuffles, jazzy hip action, syncopated pointe work, swivels close to the floor, startling plastic configurations—these and a wealth of other innovations may have shocked Apollo’s first viewers, but, as Kirstein reminds us, “they were so logical an extension of the pure line of Saint-Léon, Petipa, and Ivanov that they were almost immediately absorbed into the tradition of their craft.”

Balanchine’s own account of the significance of Apollo gave credit, characteristically, to its music—the radiant neoclassical score that Igor Stravinsky had composed a year earlier for an American production but which he ultimately intended for Diaghilev’s company. Recalling the beginning of the extraordinary creative relationship between himself and Stravinsky that was to extend over nearly 50 years, Balanchine described Apollo as “the turning point of my life.” In examining Stravinsky’s score, Balanchine said, he first realized how he, too, might intensify the aesthetic effect of his own work by selection and restrain, by containing energy and feeling within formal unity. In essence, he affirmed anew the timelessness of classical values and appropriated them for himself.

It is perfectly apt that this commitment should first have been expressed by Balanchine in Apollo, a work whose subject matter itself is the genesis of classicism. In the ballet’s narrative, the infant god, here identified with music, is born, begins to develop his strength, meets and frolics with the three muses most closely associated with his art—Calliope (poetry and its rhythm), Polyhymnia (mime), and Terpsichore (dance), bestows on each the symbol of her art—the tablet, mask, and lyre respectively, watches as they invent those arts, celebrates the favored relationship between himself and Terpsichore, and, finally, fully masterful, assumes his godhead.

Notes by Jeanie Thomas.

Artist Biographies

George Balanchine

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, George Balanchine (1904-1983) is regarded as the foremost contemporary choreographer in the world of ballet. He came to the United States in late 1933, at the age of 29, accepting the invitation of the young American arts patron Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996), whose great passions included the dream of creating a ballet company in America. At Balanchine’s behest, the School of American Ballet was founded in 1934, the first product of the Balanchine-Kirstein collaboration. Several ballet companies directed by the two were created and dissolved in the years that followed, while Balanchine found other outlets for his choreography. Eventually, with a performance on October 11, 1948, New York City Ballet was born. Balanchine served as its ballet master and principal choreographer from 1948 until his death in 1983.

Balanchine’s more than 400 dance works include Serenade (1934), Concerto Barocco (1941), Le Palais de Cristal, later renamed Symphony in C (1947), Orpheus (1948), The Nutcracker (1954), Agon (1957), Symphony in Three Movements (1972), Stravinsky Violin Concerto (1972), Vienna Waltzes (1977), Ballo della Regina (1978), and Mozartiana (1981). His final ballet, a new version of Stravinsky’s Variations for Orchestra, was created in 1982. He also choreographed for films, operas, revues, and musicals. Among his best-known dances for the stage is Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, originally created for Broadway’s On Your Toes (1936). The musical was later made into a movie.

A major artistic figure of the twentieth century, Balanchine revolutionized the look of classical ballet. Taking classicism as his base, he heightened, quickened, expanded, streamlined, and even inverted the fundamentals of the 400-year-old language of academic dance. This had an inestimable influence on the growth of dance in America. Although at first his style seemed particularly suited to the energy and speed of American dancers, especially those he trained, his ballets are now performed by all the major classical ballet companies throughout the world.

Reprinted by permission of The George Balanchine Foundation.