George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker

by Robert Adams Gottlieb

Written by the gifted author, editor, and dance critic Robert Gottlieb, George Balanchine describes the life and art of the celebrated, revolutionary ballet choreographer. Here is a necessary and singular look at the life of one of the great figures of the 20th the dynamic Balanchine, founder of The New York City Ballet, collaborator of Stravinsky, and inspiration to countless fans over the course of his long and storied career. George Balanchine is another engaging entry in the HarperCollins’ “Eminent Lives” series of biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published October 26, 2004

About the author

Robert Adams Gottlieb (April 29, 1931 – June 14, 2023) was an American writer and editor. He was the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker.

For many years, Gottlieb was associated with the New York City Ballet, serving as a member of its board of directors. He published many books by people from the dance world, including Mikhail Baryshnikov and Margot Fonteyn. He was also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Miami City Ballet

Gottlieb was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review, and had been the dance critic for The New York Observer from 1999 until 2020.

Reviews

[Katerina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Очень базовая биография Баланчина, из которой понятно только, что он был "безнадёжно гетеросексуален", имел привычку жениться на всех своих любовницах-балеринах, говорил по-английски с акцентом и поставил много балетов.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great place to start if you don't know very much about Balanchine. It's short, readable, and offers a high-level introduction to Balanchine's life and his contributions to ballet. Robert Gottlieb can get a little pretentious at times (as he keeps mentioning how he and other NYCB backers were more visionary than the dance critics writing about Balanchine's shows), but he does a nice job of distilling seventy years into 200 pages.

Balanchine on the Danes: "The people here are shit. Nobody understands anything. Their heads are empty unless they see something resembling a sandwich."

Balanchine on Colonel Wassily de Basil: "An octopus. A crooked octopus, and with bad taste."

Balanchine on choreographing an elephant ballet: "If they are very young elephants, I will do it."

His third wife on how Balanchine proposed: "'Maria,' he said, 'I would like you to become my wife.' I could barely speak, and the silence was awkward. I still called him Mr. Balanchine. Under the circumstances I thought it would be ludicrous."

Balanchine on that marriage: "You know I loved Maria, great dancer, great woman, was like tiger. Being married to tiger very exciting, but after awhile, being married to tiger takes too much energy."

Balanchine on my life philosophy: "I like to do things certain ways and I disagree with everybody but I don't even want to argue."

Gottlieb mentions early on that life in a ballet company is exactly as dramatic, and with just as many romantic entanglements, as you might expect. I LOVE it. From Danilova throwing lapis lazuli earrings at Balanchine ("I had expected diamonds, so I threw them in his face") to Balanchine chasing Suzanne Farrell for years (she leaves the company because he won't give roles to her husband), this does not disappoint. So many of the episodes are so quickly related that I know there must be more. On to a larger biography!

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A succinct survey of Balanchine, read just in time for Los Angeles Ballet's Balanchine Festival Gold (Balanchine Red is still running, fyi) which I saw with C and her dad. I can no longer tell what I learned from this book as opposed to the million other ballet memoirs I've read, but it does neatly encapsulate why Balanchine and his dancers have captured my fascination.

Here is Balanchine on his own beginnings as a dancer: "I was, as a matter of fact, a wonderful dancer."

Balanchine's philosophy on marriage: "I don't need a housewife. I need a nymph who fills the bedroom and floats out."

Which translates into his philosophy on romantic ballets: "...the man always seeks and the woman flees."

Here is second wife Alexandra Danilova on the lapis lazuli earrings he brought her: "I had been expecting diamonds, so I threw the earrings in his face."

Third wife Maria Tallchief's friend Vera Brown, upon learning of Balanchine's proposal to Maria, which took place at a time when Maria was still calling him Mr. Balanchine: "George who?"

Fourth wife Tanaquil LeClercq at their wedding: "Oh, my God, what Have I Let Myself IN FOR?"

A fellow company member on Suzanne Farrell's return to NYCB, six years after Suzanne married another dancer, whom Balanchine promptly fired: "Suzanne's coming back is the best thing that's happened to us since she left."

On the dual reasons for his love of Bach: "the mathematical precision of his music and, at the same time, its purely emotional and unfeigned striving for God."

Balanchine, when asked if Stars and Stripes had a story: "Yes. The United States."

Melodrama aside, the choreography we saw at Balanchine Gold was pretty wonderful. C and her dad liked La Sonnambula the best (which was originated by Tallchief as the Coquette and Danilova as the Sleepwalker! Balanchine also revived it for Allegra Kent during his Allegra Kent phase). My favorite piece from that night, the whole reason d'etre for seeing Gold and not Red, was Concerto Barocco, set to Bach's Violin Concerto in D Minor. The footwork got a bit lost but check out the YouTube video of LeClercq and Diana Adams, who portray the violins, personified. My next milestone is to go back to the source, NYCB, which I have never seen. ZOMG I just looked and NYCB will be performing Serenade in June!!

[Tiffany · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick but nice overview of George Balanchine's life, works, and time with American Ballet, New York City Ballet, and School of American Ballet.

The things I found most interesting were:
- that Balanchine insisted on starting the school (School of American Ballet) before the company so he could train his dancers the way he wanted them to dance and use their bodies in his choreography, rather than having to un-train and re-train established dancers (That makes complete sense, and I'd never thought of that before.);
- the way Balanchine worked *with* his dancers to come up with choreography that worked best for them. I like that in a leader. For one particular description of how Balanchine choreographed a piece on his dancers, Gottlieb quotes Ruthanna Boris as saying, "...he asked 'You can do like this? You say to me if is comfortable, not comfortable...You must say to me about if you can do en pointe. I am man--I do not go en pointe'" (79). She says that she and her fellow dancers "became participants in the process," and I appreciate that Balanchine wasn't so much of a prima donna choreographer that he would say, "This is how I want it. If you can't do it, too bad."
- the examples of his analogies when explaining a movement to his dancers. There are quite a few listed toward the end of the book, but my favorites were how "he would want the foot at certain times to look almost boneless, not like a joint--'like an elephant's trunk,' he would say, 'the way an elephant picks a peanut off the floor'" and "'move out your hand as if you're asking for money'" (93-94);
- what made some of his works revolutionary, and how he worked with the music and shapes. I think this would have been The Most Interesting Part of the Book for me, since 1) revolutionary ideas are usually interesting, especially when comparing them to pre-times, 2) I'm intrigued by shapes in choreography, and 3) the idea of "dancing the music" vs. "close to the music" vs. "in the music" (22-23) is one that I sometimes feel like I understand, but not fully and need explanation (and again, the way he worked with music was revolutionary for his time), but Gottlieb doesn't go into much detail in these aspects. Just when it feels like it's going to get good ("Ah! Balanchine was revolutionary! He worked with the music differently than other choreographers of the time did! Okay, here we go!"), Gottlieb just Stops. He left me wanting more! He left me wanting Anything! Like I said, this book is a *quick* overview of Balanchine.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had no idea that Robert Gottlieb was so involved with the New York City Ballet: "For people like me, the New York City Ballet, as Arlene Croce once put it, has been 'our civilization.'" This brief book about Balanchine is a gem and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to know who he was and what he accomplished in the ballet world -- and why so many of those who have been lucky enough to watch some of his masterpieces consider him a true genius.

[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good overview of the choreographers life and work. I really enjoyed the writing, it felt quite conversational.
I also liked how the author seems to not make any judgments; just tells us the facts (or as close as he can get to them) and lets the reader make their own conclusions. For me, an aspiring choreographer, there are many pockets of wisdom and inspiration I can take from this.

[Kathryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

This was clearly written by someone who loved Balanchine and glosses over any difficult or problematic aspects of his life, but I liked visiting the ballet world. Made me want to go see dance...which hopefully I can again in the not too far off future.

[Nancy Cook-senn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting bio

[Scott]

Fun and quick read about Balanchine, with great stories and glimpses of various stages of his life/career.

[Ellie Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book just validated my theory that the performance industry is just a bunch of people having affairs.

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. This is a great, short introduction to the genius of George Balanchine, his life story and all his contributions to American ballet.
I came in with basic knowledge of ballet, famous ballerinas and Balanchine, having seen a few of his ballets and being passionate about the art and the NYCB for a while now, so I was eager to learn more about him. This did the job, and I found myself actually smiling a lot, sometimes laughing outloud, as I was reading the many anecdotes, picturing him 'staging' ballets (as he would say), and realizing how incredible and gifted this man was.

There were some great quotes, that I feel really captured him and made me like him even more. I admit I laughed out loud when Gottlieb talked about seeing Cranko's ballet with a patched-together Tchaikovsky score and Balanchine goes "You know why that one die?" (Cranko had died young of a hear attack) "Tchaikovsky up in heaven looked down and saw that ballet and went to God and said, 'Get that one!'"

My favorite, however, was Martha Graham talking about Balanchine and his process of choreographing: "It's like watching light pass through a prism. The music passes through him, and in the same natural yet marvelous way that a prism refracts light, he refracts music into dance."

It's a concise, articulated and sweet biography of the best ballet choreographer of the 20th century that I would recommend to anyone eager to know the man behind some of the most famous moder ballets out there. I'm now looking forward to reading bigger biographies, and some books from his dancers like Farrell and Tallchief, and to keep expanding my knowledge on ballet history.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Writer Robert Gottlieb published his biography of George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker in 2004. Gottlieb was on “the New York City Ballet board of directors for many years” (217). Gottlieb was a former editor of the New Yorker magazine, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, and an editor of Simon & Schuster (217). Gottlieb first saw a ballet by George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet in 1948 as a high schooler (1). In the 1970s, Gottlieb edited a book written by a co-founder of New York City Ballet and one of the company's philanthropists, Lincoln Kirstein, on the ballet company (3, 108-109). Gottlieb was invited by Kirstein to serve on the board of the New York City Ballet (3). Gottlieb knew Balanchine, but only professionally (3-4). Gottlieb’s biography of Balanchine includes an article in Life magazine from June 1965 in which Balanchine describes his philosophy behind ballet choreography (Gottlieb 199-206). This section is called “Words by George Balanchine” (199, 199-206). Gottlieb’s biography does not include an index. Gottlieb’s biography includes an essay on “sources” (209, 209-214). Gottlieb’s biography includes an analysis of many of Balanchine’s choreography. This book is written for a lay reader. Robert Gottlieb’s book, George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, is a well-done short biography of George Balanchine.

[Cherylann · Rating 2 out of 5]

George Balanchine actually has a pretty fascinating life story, (Don’t worry Lucius, I’m not praising him as a choreographer) but this book was nearly impossible to get through because of the dull voice the author employed. Yes, this is a biography, thus non-fiction, but that does not automatically toss a book in the boring category. Certainly, a biographer’s job is different than that of a fiction writer. A biographer must stick to the solid facts, while a fiction writer is free to do whatever he or she pleases. The trueness of a biographer’s story does not excuse repetitive sentence structure and lack of voice. The duty of a biographer is to chronicle a person’s life, but it is also to write in such a way that people actually want to read it.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

fabulous, from gottlieb who was there. nice to mention in passing that you edited Catch-22; was editor in chief at the New Yorker; and worked to run the NYCB with Balanchine and Kirstein. Favorite anecdote: there's a techie smoking on the stage as he cleans up, Balanchine loses his temper for the only time in his life and screams at the man: "You don't smoke here! This is a stage! People DANCE here.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wasn't anything spectacular, but was a good no-frills summary of George Balanchine's life. It's only a couple hundred pages and though you could read something more lyrical and, let's face it, more juicy, this is a good way to get a quick snapshot in a short amount of time.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short and sweet.

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very good short bio of the best ballet choreographer of the 20th century.