Pas de deux: Part 2

There, however, the collaboration ended for almost a decade. Stravinsky, needing an income, turned to concert pieces that would give him a repertory as a conductor and pianist. Balanchine took work where he could get it, in London, Copenhagen, Monte Carlo, Paris. Not until 1933 did he find a settled home, when the young arts patron Lincoln Kirstein invited him to New York. There he founded the School of American Ballet, preparing a company that gave its first performances in 1935. Almost at once Stravinsky was asked to write a score.

The result was Jeu de cartes (Card Game), commissioned by American Ballet to be performed alongside revivals of Apollo and Le Baiser de la fée (The Fairy's Kiss), another Stravinsky score from the late 1920s. This was probably the moment when the relationship became fixed. Stravinsky's letters to Balanchine, when the project was under discussion, suggest he did not yet have the measure of his choreographer. But, over in the United States on a long tour, he was able to work with Balanchine at rehearsals of Jeu de cartes in April 1937, and following the premiere, which he conducted, he wrote of the latter's 'wonderful direction'. Soon he was thinking of the piece, as also of Apollo, as a joint creation.

After this the two men worked together regularly. From 1940 onwards Stravinsky was living in Los Angeles, while Balanchine had his home in New York, but both of them had frequent occasions to meet when on tour. In January 1941 Stravinsky was in the pit again in New York to conduct his violin concerto, which Balanchine had choreographed as Balustrade. Later that year Balanchine telephoned the composer to ask if he would write the music for a polka to be staged by the Ringling Bros Circus as 'a ballet for 50 elephants and 50 girls'. He would. The result was Circus Polka, at whose first performance Balanchine's then wife, Vera Zorina, was borne around by Modoc the elephant and gently deposited to the ground, though it is not clear how much of Modoc's movement was stipulated by the exacting dancemaster.

During this period Stravinsky also asked for Balanchine's help in defining a scenario for his Danses concertantes (1940-42), which he wrote as a concert piece in the form of an imaginary ballet, but which Balanchine actualised on stage in 1944. Edwin Denby, writing about this production in the Tribune, got to the heart of the special composer-choreographer relationship: 'Astonishing is the ease with which Balanchine understands the unsymmetrical periods of the music and gives them a visual grace and logic that illuminates the musician's musical intentions'.

For both choreographer and composer, however, adjustment to the New World was not straightforward. Balanchine's dancers had found a home at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, but only for a couple of seasons. A touring company he and Kirstein then founded, Ballet Caravan, did not last. By the time of Danses concertantes he had moved on to the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, an offshoot of the Diaghilev company that retained its name despite being settled in New York.

Click here to continue to the final part