A Bird Made of Gold

George Balanchine’s Firebird premiered on November 27, 1949, to a “touchdown roar” (per a Time magazine review), with audiences chanting “Tall-chief! Tall-chief!” in adoration of the ballet’s original lead performer. It was an undeniably watershed moment in the still-new company’s history, which would essentially guarantee New York City Ballet’s survival. Firebird has since remained a mainstay and audience favorite in the repertory, returning regularly to the stage. This storybook ballet’s own history, however, begins far earlier, reaching as far back as the 1800s. 

In 1910, Serge Diaghilev’s Paris-based company Ballets Russes was still in its infancy, performing works created according to the impresario's uniquely involved direction. In a project launched in previous iterations via touring exhibitions and operas, Diaghilev was invested in conveying a particular image of “Russianess” which he saw as nearly extinguished by the shifting cultural and political tides, and developing a simulacrum of the folk or peasant past he imagined of his homeland to preserve and export to Europe and the world at large. This vision informed the Ballets Russes’ programs and instigated the commission of Firebird. 

The creatives brought together to achieve Diaghilev’s suggested themes included Russian luminaries from a number of fields, led by choreographer Michel Fokine and including artist Alexandre Benois, composer Nikolai Tcherepnin, designer Léon Bakst, composer and writer Walter Nouvel, artist and designer Aleksandr Golovin, and others—a bevy of emigres looking to the pastoral past of their previous home for inspiration. Such arrived in an excerpt from a 19th-century poem in the Russian romantic style called “A Winter's Journey,” by Yakov Polonsky: 

And in my dreams I see myself on a wolf's back
Riding along a forest path
To do battle with a sorcerer-tsar
In that land where a princess sits under lock and key,
Pining behind massive walls.
There gardens surround a palace all of glass;
There Firebirds sing by night
And peck at golden fruit.

From these evocative lines they fleshed out a concept using fairy tales and collected stories which would provide the structure for the forthcoming ballet. In the simplest telling, Prince Ivan encounters and captures the Firebird while hunting in the woods; he swiftly realizes the error of imprisoning such a mystical creature and releases her. The Firebird gifts him a magical feather in gratitude. When the Prince’s beloved is later captured by the evil Wizard Kastchei and his devilish minions, Ivan uses the feather to call forth the Firebird, who frees the comely prisoner. A happy marriage ensues. 

After Tcherepnin left the project, Diaghilev considered a number of composers—including Alexander Glazunov—before landing on Igor Stravinsky, who was still fairly new to Parisian audiences, though he’d successfully completed an orchestration of Chopin’s music for Les Sylphides for Diaghilev the prior year. In composing his sketches for the score, Stravinsky turned to ethnographies of Russian folk music and more recent interpretations of these vernacular traditions popular with French audiences of the time. Fokine essentially drove the ensuing collaboration, dictating the required numbers and strict storyline for the ballet. The choreographer would listen to Stravinsky’s initial compositions passage by passage, mandating edits, cuts, and rewrites to match the demands of the footwork, the unfolding narrative, and the production as planned by Diaghilev and his creative committee, an arrangement the composer would decidedly avoid in future commissions.

As the Ballets Russes’s original Firebird Tamara Karsavina recalled, Stravinsky was actively involved in the ballet’s development, rehearsing at the piano and coaching the dancers in his innovative approach to the score. She described the way in which “...the rhythm lived in, and at times took possession of, his body” as he hammered away at the piano keys. Despite Stravinsky’s frustrations with the process, dance critic André Levinson wrote following the premiere that the score had proven Stravinsky’s “witchery of modern orchestration.” The ballet’s success was thus a boon for the Ballets Russes, and a seminal achievement for the composer; it was the first of many beloved ballets he’d eventually write, including Les Noces and Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), followed by his singular collaborations with George Balanchine.

At just 21 years old, Balanchine joined Diaghilev’s company as a dancer and choreographer, having escaped the stultifying strictures of the Russian ballet world. Though given a remarkable degree of responsibility and creative freedom for such a new figure on the scene, Balanchine was skeptical of Diaghilev’s nostalgic project and viewed the ballets created in that vein as rather antiquated. Amidst shaping his own vocabulary, he often performed character roles with the company, including that of Kastchei in Firebird.

At a June 1926 Ballets Russes performance, a young Lincoln Kirstein was generally critical of the company, as he noted in his diary; “But one exciting moment. In Firebird, the magician Kastchei was made up… with long fingernails like gilded claws, a frightful vulture. In a fantastically evil way he manipulated the others. Afterward, to a restaurant; there he was, among other dancers. I wanted to ask him for a drink, but didn’t dare.” This dancer that’d caught the writer’s eye was, of course, Balanchine; though they didn’t meet until Kirstein had seen more of Balanchine's dancing and both were traveling in London a full seven years later, that first impression retained its vivifying power. Before 1933 was over, Kirstein had secured passage to the United States for Balanchine, and the School of American Ballet would open on January 2, 1934.

For Balanchine, Firebird was representative of the backward-looking trend in Diaghilev’s approach that the choreographer wished to transcend with his own work. Therefore, as he and Kirstein built their American company, it was not a piece he intended to revisit—despite its importance to his own and his future musical collaborator's professional establishment. For one, he said, “The story is too complicated. First, the Russian legend is not about a firebird—it’s a bird that is made of gold. Like the sun, you can’t look at it because it’s so glittery. The story is about eggs, pike, ducks, apples, and Kastchei lives thousands of years. You can’t make a ballet out of it.”

But the exigencies of the art form and the young company’s precarious financial position finally pushed Balanchine to take up the ballet again in 1949. Morton Baum, chairman of the executive committee for New York City Center, then the company’s home, insisted upon a crowd-pleasing ballet of this sort. The occasion that finally cemented the idea for the choreographer was, according to Maria Tallchief’s autobiography, an encounter at the Russian Tea Room with Ukrainian impresario Sol Hurok. Hurok foresaw Tallchief’s potential as the star of such an “exotic” production, offering to sell set designs and costumes Marc Chagall had made for an unsuccessful 1945 Ballet Theatre production at a pittance; Balanchine, dissatisfied with that staging’s choreography by Adolph Bolm, which sought to recreate that of Fokine, decided to develop his own, using, to Stravinsky’s delight, the streamlined score completed in 1945.

Stravinsky worked closely with Balanchine as he developed his version of the ballet, another early instantiation of their potent partnership. The resulting work, with Tallchief, Francisco Moncion, and Pat McBride in the lead roles, was a resounding success. Following its premiere, Eugene Berman telegrammed Stravinsky, saying, “Balanchine’s new Firebird marvelous, wonderful, and deeply moving choreography. Maria absolutely magnificent. A real triumph which may change the whole destiny of Ballet Society,” as the precursor to NYCB was known. Tallchief and the rest of the cast were taken aback by the response, having failed to even prepare bows; as she recalled, “A firestorm of applause erupted in the City Center, and the audience was on its feet clapping, stomping, and shouting. We just stood there dumbfounded.”

Dance critic Walter Terry concurred: “Balanchine devised some magnificent movements for the title figure. They are fluttering, flashing, soaring and, at the proper moments, they fairly flame with dynamic tension and speed,” adding that though the work was at its heart classical and clearly representative of a respect for the ballet’s Russian roots, Balanchine’s innovations in “sequence and of accent” had brought the classical into the realm of the contemporary.

As time bore out, Berman was right. Additional performances were added, and eventually, the company would embark on its first international tour on the wings of this early success. Though the latter proved fraught, with continental audiences remaining hostile to what they considered an interloper’s abuse of the legendary Fokine masterworks, this first New York reception contributed to the foundation of a deeper connection between Stravinsky and the nascent ballet company—one that would blossom and endure through later era-defining collaborations like Agon.

“The New York City Ballet production of Firebird has been revised over the years, like all ballets of any interest, and most importantly perhaps by Jerome Robbins and me at the New York State Theatre, May 28, 1970,” Balanchine wrote in The Complete Stores of the Great Ballets. The first of the most notable changes realized that year was in the rebuilding of the backdrops by Chagall. When he’d first choreographed Firebird, Balanchine was concerned that the intensity of the set design threatened to overshadow the dancing onstage; he therefore let the aging sets decay until the artist, aware of his work’s sorry state, reached out unsuccessfully and eventually published a letter condemning such neglect. This was one among the hits the company took amidst that ill-fated early European tour. As he told Dance Magazine, Balanchine finally met with Chagall in 1970; the artist furnished the choreographer with “more than 100” watercolors for refining the backdrops. Following this development, Balanchine reportedly said of Firebird, “This is not a ballet by Balanchine with decoration by Chagall—it is a ballet in which we present Chagall’s painting, and Stravinsky’s music to the people.” 

The second major change that year was in the assistance of Jerome Robbins, who had recently returned to the company. Robbins was key in restaging the work as a whole, particularly as the ballet was expanded to fit the much larger State Theater stage—though his most marked contribution was in the choreography for Kastchei’s fantastical retinue, a sequence regularly singled out for praise in contemporary reviews.

Gelsey Kirkland, just 17 at the time, danced the title role in this revisioned version of Firebird, in a costume notably different from that worn by Maria Tallchief and the dancers between them. In its initial designs, the Firebird was like a vibrant cardinal with a fiery red bodice and tutu, and a small feathered headdress suggestive of a bird’s plume. Echoing Balanchine’s comments about the story’s protagonist being “made of gold,” the majority of Kirkland's tutu was now that shimmering hue, with dramatic drapery and additional feathers that seem aimed to inject a certain formality into the birdlike qualities of the choreography—a counterweight, perhaps, to the hummingbird quality of Kirkland's performance.

Again in 1974 the costume was redesigned, with Karin von Aroldingen taking on the lead; as Anna Kisselgoff wrote in The New York Times, “Marc Chagall's costume for Miss von Aroldingen, with its long train and large white wings, makes her an intimidating temptress rather than a captured magic creature and symbol of good, who pleads for freedom.” A white evening gown of sorts, with large white wings, white gloves, a headdress that features the full additional head of a bird, and, in one hand, a bouquet of red roses, the Firebird's costume now projected regality and glamorous strength. 

Both these remarkable shifts in the lead character’s appearance are revealing examples of Balanchine’s insistence on creating for the dancers of “now.” The role is one which the choreographer reshaped for the performers who stepped into it, adjusting the emotional valence of the mystic and majestic Firebird’s performance in an otherwise well-known tale. Today, the costume is similar to that worn by Tallchief, recognizing, perhaps, the indelible signature she's left in the movement.

A powerful statement early in Stravinsky’s career, and a vehicle for the young Balanchine to catch his future co-founder Lincoln Kirstein’s eye; a foundational work for New York City Ballet in its infancy, and a lasting, cherished ballet in the repertory; an opportunity for Jerome Robbins’ collaboration and choreography to shine, and an exemplary role for the women who shaped it (and its costume): Firebird is perhaps one of the most significant ballets to the company's history. Such is the power of a simple fairy tale to shape the history of the art form, a power corollary to that of the work itself experienced by generations of audiences through to today.

_{Header photo © Erin Baiano. Photo of Kastchei's monsters © Paul Kolnik.}