George Balanchine

George Balanchine (1904-1983), Russian-born American choreographer, one of the foremost choreographers in the history of ballet, particularly in the neoclassical style. The son of a composer, Balanchine was born Georgy Melitonovich Balanchivadze in Saint Petersburg, Russia. He was trained at the Imperial Ballet Academy and studied composition at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. His early works, for the 1922 series Evenings of Young Ballet, were criticized as too avant-garde. In 1925, while touring in Europe with his small company, he joined the Diaghilev Company in Paris as a choreographer. After the impresario Sergey Diaghilev died in 1929, Balanchine choreographed for several companies, and in 1933 he organized his own group, Les Ballets. At the invitation of American ballet patron Lincoln Kirstein, Balanchine moved to New York City and together they founded the School of American Ballet in 1934 and the American Ballet Company in 1935. While with that company, Balanchine created works for various opera and ballet companies and for musical comedies. After the American Ballet Company dissolved in 1938, Balanchine's work for The Boys from Syracuse (1938) and the famous ballet sequence “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” in On Your Toes (1936) established ballet as a permanent element of the musical. With Kirstein he cofounded Ballet Society in 1946, which in 1948 became the New York City Ballet. Under Balanchine's direction, the company became one of the world's great performing groups, with a repertory consisting largely of his ballets.

Balanchine is considered the foremost representative of neoclassicism in ballet. Through him, ballet in the United States has a direct connection with the Russian classical ballet tradition of celebrated 19th-century choreographer Marius Petipa. Although some of his ballets, such as The Nutcracker (1954; revised 1964) and the powerful Don Quixote (1965), have a story line, Balanchine is best known for his plotless ballets, such as The Four Temperaments (1946) and Jewels (1967), which explore pattern and the movement of the human body to music. Balanchine's style ranged from classical stagings to choreography for more contemporary and modern composers, including the works of Americans George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers. Known also for his musical sensitivity, he choreographed music of many 20th-century composers, among them the Russian Sergey Prokofiev (The Prodigal Son,1929), the Austrian-born Arnold Schoenberg (Opus 34,1954), and the American Charles Ives (Ivesiana,1954). His nearly 40-year friendship with the Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky resulted in works such as Apollon Musagète (1928; revised as Apollo,1957), Agon (1956), and Violin Concerto (1972). Balanchine's more than 100 ballets also include the lyric Liebeslieder Walzer (1960) and Americana such as Stars and Stripes (1958).