Wafting Airy Melodies

Premiering on May 9, 1980, George Balanchine’s Ballade was last performed on the New York City Ballet stage in 2003. Writing for The New York Times in May of that year, Jennifer Dunning called it “a pure romantic pas de deux with a fleeting bit of introspection,” in which “one expects the women's long hair to come unbound at any moment. It doesn't. And that is one of the great pleasures of the piece.” Though praising the ballet and its leads, then-Principal Dancers Jenifer Ringer and Robert Tewsley, these descriptions suggest a certain insubstantiality to the work, the unique strengths of which were a hint of self-reflexivity and restraint. Essentially a pas de deux, the couple enter, embrace, separate, return to one another, and separate again, occasionally accompanied onstage by a corps of ten women, throughout the ballet’s 14 minutes. Simple on its face and a notably romantic work from Balanchine, Ballade appeared within the repertory, only to disappear and reappear briefly—and is reappearing again this fall. 

Scored by Gabriel Fauré’s Ballade in F-Sharp Major, Opus 19, this was only the second work for the company Balanchine set to the French composer’s music, following the Emeralds section of 1967’s Jewels. A devoted student of Camille Saint-Saëns, Fauré was known in his lifetime as much for his introduction of contemporary styles and innovations like jazz into his music as for his good looks—he was apparently quite charming on both counts. Straddling the waning of Romanticism and the arrival of the experimentation and modernism to come, Fauré’s music has suffered a certain neglect in comparison to the likes of his peers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, due in part, perhaps, to these qualities. During his lifetime, however, he enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the writer Marcel Proust, who very likely based the Vinteuil character in his In Search of Lost Time on Fauré. In a letter to the composer, Proust effused, “I know your work well enough to write a three-hundred-page book about it,” describing Fauré’s “way of wafting airy melodies over an unstable harmonic ground, and how familiar chords dissolve into one another in unfamiliar ways.”

Ballade [is] one of Fauré’s most charming pieces: a reminder of halcyon, half-remembered summer days and bird-haunted forests.

Bryce Morrison, Introduction to The Complete Piano Works, 1995

Composed in 1925, Ballade is most often mentioned in the retelling of an anecdote from the composer’s formative days. In 1877, Saint-Saëns brought Fauré to Weimar to introduce him to a towering figure in the young musician’s universe: Franz Liszt. Liszt requested a work from the composer’s growing output to play; shortly after starting Fauré’s Ballade, he apparently stopped, saying, “I’ve run out of fingers,” and asked Fauré to finish the piece. A prodigious performer of singular talent, it’s far more likely that Liszt simply didn’t like the Ballade enough to play it through than that it was actually too difficult. Despite such an apparent indictment, the piece clearly has its fans, Proust included. According to J.M. Nectoux, author of Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life, “What touches us in the Ballade is the evocation of a distant past, the past of legend; it is also the recreation of an atmosphere.” The parallels in this description to the themes of Proust’s opus are apparent. In evoking a “past” and recreating an “atmosphere,” the music itself is not unlike the infamous madeleine of In Search of Lost Time, the taste of which vividly transports the novel’s protagonist to the madeleines of his youth, immersing him for a moment in a world long departed. 

As he told Martha Duffy in an interview for TIME in May 1980, Balanchine was attracted to Ballade by its “beautiful color and atmosphere. I think of perfume, of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, of Proust’s A l’ombre de jeunes filles en fleurs [often translated as Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of In Search of Lost Time].” “Perfume” recurs in many descriptions of Emeralds, as well as Balanchine’s Ballade; and what could be more like a poignant memory than perfume, “wafting” and “airy” yet richly evocative? Reviewing the ballet’s premiere, Anna Kisselgoff wrote in The New York Times that though Balanchine was covering similar choreographic and thematic territory to that of ballets like Emeralds, "Ballade differs from these neo-Romantic works in its strong sense of the ephemeral. ... [The] beauty of the ballet is its dramatic aura of wafting impermanence.”

That quality of impermanence, noted in the music, is mirrored in the lead couple’s brief interactions, as original performer Merrill Ashley describes: “...our fleeting encounters [seem] to suggest both strong desires and vague yearnings ... At the end, we face each other, clasping hands, and then withdraw in an exact reversal of our first entrance, each returning to his own private world.” Ballade was the first new Balanchine ballet to premiere following a short absence for the choreographer; “The merest suggestion that he has been away makes him bristle,” Duffy wrote. “‘For eight hours only’ is the retort, that being the length of his 1979 heart bypass surgery.” As both Ashley and contemporary reviewers described, the work was in part made to challenge the dancer, and bring out a new facet of her onstage persona. “Ballade slows [Ashley] down, softens her edges, amplifies her presence, and stretches her range—all through its pursuit of the legato phrase,” wrote Arlene Croce in The New Yorker. Softening, romance, ephemerality: as is true of the score, Ballade has an undeniably wistful quality, landing as it did within the final years of Balanchine’s life. 

And yet, throughout its creation, Balanchine was still demonstrating every step of the ballet to the dancers, as Karin Von Aroldingen recalled to Duffy: “‘It must go through his body before he can impart it to us.’ Or as Balanchine puts it, ‘I am the mother in this world of dance.’” Like a temporary, gossamer gift from its choreographer, Ballade drifts back into the NYCB studios now, and presents an invitation to the dancers and audiences alike to enter again into the past. 

_{Performance photos © Paul Kolnik}