BALANCHINE'S TCHAIKOVSKY

by Solomon Volkov

English (translation)
Original Russian

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir

202 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Solomon Moiseyevich Volkov (born 17 April 1944 in Uroteppa, Tadzhik SSR) is a Russian journalist and musicologist. He is best known for Testimony, which was published in 1979 following his emigration from the Soviet Union in 1976. He claimed that the book was the memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to himself.

Reviews

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 5 out of 5]

June 7, 2022 745am ~~ Review asap.

1045am ~~ I loved this book! It was fascinating!

The author explains in his preface how he introduced himself to Balanchine one day and ended up chatting with him a little bit about Tchaikovsky, the subject of a planned Festival by the New York City Ballet, which Balanchine directed at the time. Mr. B told Volkov to write something for their festival booklet. He did, and that led to more meetings and more conversations about the composer, and thatled to this book.

Volkov explains:
One reason why this was so remarkable an experience for me was that while I loved Tchaikovsky deeply and <.i>felt the composer's majesty, Balanchine understood why Tchaikovsky was so great and took pains to explain and clarify it for me, a professional musicologist.

They met many more times before the Festival. Volkov recorded their conversations, and the majority of the words in this book are Balanchine's. There are paragraphs here and there in italics where the author introduces topics from various phases of the composer's life, but this does not read like a question and answer interview. It feels much more personal than that.

I knew who Balanchine was, but never knew anything about him. In this book I learned not only much more about Tchaikovsky but plenty about Balanchine as well. It was simply wonderful, even the somewhat gossipy parts here and there discussing people I had never heard of at all.

The book has inspired me to explore Tchaikovsky's music in greater depth. I want to watch the ballets, I want to listen to the symphonies and the piano music and anything else I can find that Balanchine mentioned here. I love The Nutcracker ballet and will watch Balanchine's version of it again to start off this new project. And I will keep this book handy to refer to as I go!

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s amazing this book exists because aside from founding American ballet, Balanchine is famous for two things: his music and his quotes. (So he’s thirdly famous for his ladies but we won’t get into that here.) You can say what you like about Balanchine’s style but you can’t criticize his musicality. He used a huge range of music from the most astringent Stravinsky to the most romantic Faure, traditional Americana, and that song I only know as a camp song (“comet, it makes your mouth turn green”). He also briefly had a ballet set to an airline commercial jingle. It bombed, but Balanchine apparently liked a good ear worm. More exaltedly, some of his ballets were meant to be visualizations of the music, and the dancers were supposed to personify the instruments (“See the music, hear the dance”). He also talks about how he once had an extra $500 after working for Samuel Goldwyn in Hollywood, considered blowing it all on fancy cigarette cases, and ended up using it to commission the score for The Four Temperaments, which calls into question how the rest of us live our lives.

Balanchine is also the guy who brought us such gems as “Ballet is woman” and “There is only now,” and he was a real smartass besides. His notorious reply when asked what a ballet was about: “It’s about time. It takes 15 minutes to dance it.” And my favorite, about a ballet in which a woman called the Dark Angel masks the man’s eyes with her hand and marches him off stage, blind, while another woman reaches out to him in agony on the floor: “The only story is the music’s story.”

This book is a series of transcribed, translated conversations with Balanchine shortly before his death. Volkov was a journalist who ingratiated himself with Balanchine and got him talking, a lot, in Russian, about music, his work and his life. There aren’t grand pronouncements on music in here but the casual tone is misleading, and so much of Balanchine’s personality and beliefs come out in conversation.

Despite my life’s worry that there’s a whole universe of ballet out there that no one knows about (a phenomenon Balanchine reportedly called Gisellitis), one of my favorite parts of the book is about the Nutcracker. Balanchine talks about the St. Petersburg of his youth, and you can see the imagery and ethos that never left him:

I’ve never seen a Christmas like we had in Petersburg anywhere else—not here in America nor in France. It’s hard for us old Petersburgers! … In Petersburg they had the Christmas service at nearby St. Vladimir’s. And naturally in all the big cathedrals: at the Kazan, at St. Isaac’s. An unforgettable moment of mystery: when the candles were put out, the church was plunged into darkness, and the choir came in. They sang magnificently! In the Orthodox church, the service is a real theatrical production with processions and all that. The priests come out in pairs wearing velvet kamilavka on their heads, the deacons and alter boys in brocade vestments. And finally, chasuble glittering, the Metropolitan himself. …

The Nutcracker at our theater is for children young and old. That is, for children and for adults who are children at heart. Because, if an adult is a good person, in his heart he is still a child. In every person the best, most important part is that which remains from his childhood.

Nutcracker’s second act is an enormous balletic sweetshop. In Petersburg there was a store like that, it was called Eliseyevsky’s: huge glass windows, rooms big enough for a palace, high ceilings, opulent chandeliers, almost like the ones at the Mariinsky….The store had sweets and fruits from all over the world, like in A Thousand and One Nights. I used to walk past and look in the windows often. I couldn’t buy anything there, it was too expensive. But I remember the store as clearly as if I had been staring in the window just yesterday.

Thoughts on other ballets are also pretty fun:

How can you take the story of Swan Lake seriously? They took a German fairy tale and reworked it for a ballet: an evil man, Rothbart, bewitched girls, turning them into swans. It’s time for a young prince to marry, he falls in love with a girl-swan, and naturally nothing good comes of it. It’s nonsense!

He still made a Swan Lake though, blessedly all in one act:

We try not to drag out Swan Lake, so that Tchaikovsky’s music sounds in all its beauty. Presently in Russia and Europe Swan Lake barely moves, as if the dancers are afraid of spilling. For instance, the Dance russe: you’re supposed to feel a real Russian push in that. And instead a few ladies fall asleep on their feet onstage.

Not that Balanchine knocks Swan Lake entirely. The music is very beautiful and I DIE because Balanchine calls out my favorite two minutes of it:

Tchaikovsky’s ballet music is as wonderful as his operas: you can sing it! Take any pas de deux - from Swan Lake, for instance— or any of his incredible waltzes. Their melodies are absolutely vocal. Think of the exquisite theme from the middle of the waltz at the beginning of Swan Lake!

And my favorite thing Balanchine says about Tchaikovsky:

And most important, as soon as it starts, you know that it’s Tchaikovsky. Practically from the first note you can say—it’s him, it’s all his! Not many achieve that.

The photos are also a treasure trove. We get snapshots of old St. Petersburg, Balanchine in his youth, drawings and photos of the great artists and composers Balanchine revered all his life, and several beautiful portraits of Balanchine close to the time of his death, still creating ballets.

Anyway, God bless Mr. B. He ruined classical ballet for me, and it was because of his music, and I can never go back.

[marine ♡ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Second autobiography/biography i’m reading.
Last time I said I couldn’t be the judge of someone else’s life but that I could judge their writing.
Well let’s do that.
This book was terrible. I’m sorry but can someone calm down this man?
I was supposed to read a book on Tchaikovsky but the only thing I remember is Balanchine’s life and how he seems to have absolutely no critical view on it.
I do not regretting this book because I did learn things on Tchaikovsky and Balanchine (mostly Balanchine), but this did not help me to hold Balanchine in higher esteem for sure.

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nearly finished and find this quite a bit more than its title suggests. It's not just Tchaikovsky Mr B explores, though he sheds more than ample light on the composer. We find out so much about the choreographer's childhood and adolescence in St. Petersburg, his early days with Diaghalev, his attitudes about traditional ballet, his appreciation and criticism of other composers and his religious and nationalistic attitudes. As I read other books about Mr B and his work, I realize the most often quoted by others is this one. It is one long interview over several meetings and the artist does speak to us directly and openly. Revelations abound!

[Vincent Hernot · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ultimately disappointing, but that's probably my fault: seeing who he was, who he worked with, how he got to the West and all that, you'd want this book to say so much more. Plus I don't anything about Tchaikovsky :( But Balanchine wrote about him, he didn't set out to write his own life story, so there. Still, can't help but be disappointed!

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tchaikovsky through Balanchine's lens. Engaging, conversational, and evocative of a St. Petersburg gone by a few times over.

[Autumn Kearney · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps the other reviewers and I read different books. I was bored and disappointed. The writing was subpar.

[Deirdre Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is more than a book about Tchaikovsky, although the insights into this most gifted Russian composer's life and musical creations are eye-opening. Written from a series of intellectual conversations, disguised as interviews, which the author, Solomon Volkov, had with George Balanchine shortly before Balanchine's death in 1983, the book is also a profound exegesis on the work of the great choreographer, especially on how music -- Russian music -- informed everything he did. A must-read for ballet lovers.

[Tweedledum · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is like travelling back in time to read Balanchine's conversations with Volkov. While the starting point for the conversations is his memories of Tchaikovsky we learn so much more along the way OT least about Balanchine himself.

[Marc Haegeman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Self-explanatory.