Today is the anniversary of Igor Feodorovich Stravinsky's birth.
How great do you think his influence was upon ballet and dance?
Where do you think ballet and dance might have been without him?
Given Stravinsky's absence, how different might George Balanchine’s oeuvre have been if working with other composers active during his lifetime?

Link New York Times Obituary http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/on.../bday/0617.html

Thanks for the obituary link, Leonid. I hope a few people will take up your question. Meanwhile, look at Google's homepage today!

Love the image of the Firebird!

I don't believe it would have made much difference at all. The ballets he composed for were the results of many artists collaborating under the direction of Diaghilev. Who knows....another composer may have done as well! I actually believe Tchaikovsky had more impact, in that the ballets he composed for were more effective in promoting popularity of the artform, because of the music.
I think ballet would be exactly where it is now if Stravinsky had never written for it, but not if Tchaikovsky hadn't.

Would another composer's Apollo, if it had been written, have been the material with which Balanchine learned to simplify? And would have given us so many great black and white ballets?

I am out of my field, but I can't imagine 20th century ballet without Balanchine and I can't imagine Balanchine without Stravinsky. I hope that experts will address leonid's very interesting question. I can only respond with a personal account:

My first Stravinsky ballet was also my first NYCB performance and my first Balanchine ballet: Firebird, back in 1957, with the Chagall decor and Melissa Hayden in the (former) Tallchief role. I actually knew the music fairly well before I saw the ballet, since we had a recording of the "Highlights" at home. I was overwhelmed. It was this that brought me back to City Center within a few weeks, when I saw and heard a new work ....

... Agon, in its first season. A completely different musical and choreographic language. No "decor" as we understood it at the time. No story. But, to a teenage new to ballet, even more thrilling than Firebird.

For me, ballet is completely interwoven with Stravinsky's work. Can you really imagine what it would be like if Stravinsky had not existed or if he had not formed his extraordinary relationship with Balanchine? "Ballet" without Apollo, without Rubies, without Symphony in Three Movements, without Violin Concerto, without the lighter pieces like Pulcinella, or without the Stravinsky ballets by Fokine and Robbin --it's beyond my ability to conceive.

Firebird was a Fokine ballet.

It might have been originally, but bart was writing about the NYCB production choreographed by Balanchine, one of several versions he made, that was the first hit for the company.

There have been many choreographers that have been inspired by the score.

For those interested.... "Stravinsky: Once at a Border" (1982) is a fascinating documentary.

It was not just the ballets Stravinsky composed that is important for Balanchine, but the fact that it led to Balanchine's creative impulse being inspired to use Stravinsky's music in total for some 35 works(including reworkings of earlier works.) This I believe makes Stravinsky historically more significant to Balanchine oeuvre than Tchaikovsky although I am not sure how many works Balanchine choreographed to Tchaikovsky but surely not many more than ten.

The ballet audiences began to move on from Tchaikovsky a hundred years ago with the advent of Diaghilev. Alongside concert hall and opera house performances, Balanchine probably helped hundreds of thousands of people to know Stravinsky’s music opening them towards appreciation of more modern music. Since then all kinds of ballet and dance companies across the world today offer Stravinsky regularly, as well as what one might have once described as less accessible “avant garde” music far removed from Tchaikovsky.

By the time Balanchine created his successful “Mozartiana and “Serenade” ballets to Tchaikovsky’s music, he had already been choreographing for 13 years and possibly already created 50 works including “Ragtime”(There were several later versions) , “Le Chant du Rossignol” and the masterwork “Apollon Musagete” all to Stravinsky’s music.

Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky ballet, are for me sublime and uplifting and yes and they were in the past easier on the ear than Stravinsky for some members of ballet audiences. But I would suggest that Balanchine did not choreograph just for a popular audience, but followed his artistic inspiration and Stravinsky was tied deeply to his conceptual process. The thirty five works to his music confirms this.

You state, "I think ballet would be exactly where it is now if Stravinsky had never written for it, but not if Tchaikovsky hadn't." Possibly that is the case for ballet in general, but I am not sure it would be true for New York City Ballet or for its repertoires great influence around the world.

PS Balanchine had staged revised versions of elements of
Tchaikovsky’s ballets in the 1920’s.

Balanchine was certainly a great choreographer and a charismatic person (by all accounts) and you are right, NYC would not be where it is today without him, but on a global scale there were others who had just as much, if not more, influence on trends in ballet than he. I love his ballets, but I think there is a danger in idolising one person to the exclusion of others. In some ways he was very narrow-minded in his 'vision'. I think Fokine and Ashton had a greater influence overall on 20th century ballet.

How would you define this influence, particularly when neither's "home" company survived or produces much of his work? What choreographers absorbed or continue to absorb their influence primarily? What choreography that they influenced either survived from the times following theirs or is done today that reflects their aesthetic and/or technique?

What is your metric for determining the size of their influence? There are many posts on this board that rue that their influence is not more extensive, and feel that ballet would be in a much better place today if it were.

As far as I can remember only the Royal Ballet kept as many as three of Fokines ballets alive from the 1950's to date. Since the 1980's a Fokine industry has proliferated with his ballets poorly staged compared to those productions I had seen supervised by Tamara Karsavina, Serge Grigoriev, Lubov Tchernicheva, Lydia Sokolova, Nikolai Beriosoff and Dame Alicia Markova.

Of course Fokine formalised via Diaghilev the triple bill formula which had hardly existed at the Maryinsky Imperial Ballet until the 20th century.
The Royal Danes and the Borovansky Ballet kept at least two ballets alive in the 1950's, Festival Ballet had Les Sylphide and even in Russia it was only this work and the Polovtsian Dances that survived up until recent times.

Ashton's influence across the world is due mainly to productions of "La Fille mal Gardee" ably supervised by Alexander Grant a member of the ballets original cast. Two Pigeons is now performed in the USA and Georgia and Les Patineurs has been seen in the USa for some years now. ABT has staged Sylvia and I am sure other posters will tell me there are other Ashton works being performed there. When Ashton ballets have been strongly admired outside London, it has usually been so, when the Royal Ballet have performed them on tour to the USA and elsewhere retaining the correct Ashton style so difficult to achieve.

When the Kirov ballet tour, they have often taken a Balanchine repertoire with them. The Royal Ballet have just been performing Jewels and they have had in my time at least, something like 14 Balanchine ballets in their repertoire. and his ballets are peformed in Japan, Australiam a number of other European countrie exhibiting Balanchine's international influence which is possibly greater than Fokine's and seccond only to Petipa and sometimes enjoined with Ivanov.

You say, "The ballets he composed for were the results of many artists collaborating under the direction of Diaghilev. Who knows....another composer may have done as well!" Balanchine choreographed nine ballets for Diaghlev and to music by seven different composers. Of those ballets, as far as I know, only Stravinsky's Apollon Musagete and Prokofiev's Le Fils Prodigue have survived. Apollo was recognised as a major diversion away from the past and breaking new ground. Stravinsky's score to this work is widely admired. While for all it distinction and I admire it greatly, Le Fils Prodigue does to me looks a little like a homage to Fokine's methodology.

Of course Diaghilev was there with his advisers to oversee Balanchine's productions and this remains a practice to a lesser or greater degree even today. But, as we know Balanchine was a completely original voice established through his Petrograd experience, his music training, nd his sophisticated educated family background and Diaghilev was no choreographer.

I'm willing to say that Fokine had more influence on the first half of the 20th century, but surely Balanchine had more influence on the 2nd half. Would we have had Forsythe without Balanchine? Now whether his influence will be significant in the 21st century, I'm not sure ballet is still moving in the same direction. Who are Ashton's descendents? Wheeldon? Moving Pictures?


Perhaps tellingly, the other Prodigal Son with the exact same costumes and exact same music and perhaps the same dancers (?) did not do as well.... ?

My post on Stravinsky/Balanchine was purely personal. . I didn't intend to suggest that my own experience should be the norm for everyone.

Thanks very much, Helene, for clarifying the matter of the Fokine-Balanchine versions of Firebird, both of which I've seen a number of times. Balanchine's version has always struck me as a new ballet, despite drawing on elements of Fokine's story-telling.

I'd hate to see this interesting topic veer off into a discussion of the merits of Balanchine. Leonid's topic is a marvellous invitation to discuss Stravinsky as a ballet composer. There's so much to be said about the relationship between music and dance, in general, if we see see this matter through the prism of Stravinsky.

What about, for instance, the influence of his complicated metrical structure on an art form that had developed primarily in tandem with 2/4,/ 3/4,/ 4/4, or 6/8?

What about Stravinsky's own statements that his symphony compositions were not suited to ballet? (He was referring specifically to Symphony in Three Movements, and specifically to a proposal by Robbins).

Are there clear difference between the works commissioned for ballet (eg., Apollo, Orpheus, Agon, Jeu de Cartes), and those composed independently and choreographed later (The Cage, Rubies, the symphonies, etc.)

Stravinsky seems to me to be a supremely danceable composer. Was this evident from the beginning? Or was it something that Balanchine and a few others saw from the first but had to invent a movement language for before the general public saw it too?

What about the intense drama (expressed through rhythm, tempo, dynamics) of certain works not originally conceived as ballets? My own feeling is that "seeing" these dramatic pieces through choroegraphy -- and even feeling them, as our bodies respond to what the dancers are doing -- helps focus them and adds tremendously to them. Eg: the string concerto that Robbins used for The Cage. Personally, I've always preferred to "see" Stravinsky than sitting in a concert hall and merely listening. When Stravinsky is on the program at a concert, I find myself choreographing in my head.

Your are correct to say that David Lichine's version of The Prodigal Son " did not do so well" as the Balanchine version, but that does not mean that it was not a successful work.
It was well received by critics on three continents. I would absolutely concede that he did not have the talent of Balanchine, but then, he didn't have that group of highly influential good old Harvard boys behind him as Balanchine did to cushion his journey.

You are absolutely right... I spoke without having seen the piece and based my judgement on the survival of Balanchine's. I stand corrected.

Bart:


The pianist Stephen Hough makes an interesting reverse connection between Stravinsky's music and Balanchine's dance in an interview the Financial Times did with him in the July 18 / July 19 2009 issue:


Hough is playing not Stravinsky but Tchaikovsky on one of the programs the BBC Proms are doing this year of all the Stravinsky ballet music (Rubies/Capriccio not in the running, of course). A rather fresh account of "Petrushka" (Prom 15) is accessible online for a few more days. The conductor is Jiří Bělohlávek, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Some background on the differences between the original and the later version, according to Wikipedia:



The Stravinsky programs can be found through this link:

BBC Proms: What's on