Volume 32, Number 17 · November 7, 1985
Balanchine Variations
By Robert Craft
Balanchine's Tchaikovsky: Interviews with George Balanchine
by Solomon Volkov, translated by Antonia W. Bouis
Simon and Schuster, 252 pp., $19.95
Balanchine: A Biography
by Bernard Taper
Times Books, 438 pp., $19.95
"But First a School": The First Fifty Years of the School of American Ballet
by Jennifer Dunning
Viking/Elisabeth Sifton Books, 288 pp., $20.00
Portrait of Mr. B.: Photographs of George Balanchine with an essay by Lincoln Kirstein
Viking, 154 pp., $30.00
Balanchine's 'Mozartiana': The Making of a Masterpiece
by Robert Maiorano, by Valerie Brooks
Freundlich Books, 188 pp., $18.95
Dancing for Balanchine
by Merrill Ashley, with the assistance of Larry Kaplan, foreword by Clement Crisp
Dutton, 236 pp., $29.95
None of the books about George Balanchine discussed below will present him to more than a small fraction of the readers of Shana Alexander's Nutcracker,[*] now in its fourth month on the best-seller charts. This much-publicized story of Balanchine's involvement with Frances Schreuder, his 'last patron'—and coincidentally the psychopathic instigator of her father's murder by her son—does not change the perspectives of his life. But the connection cannot be dismissed as simply another grotesque act of 'fate.' After Mrs. Schreuder's arrest, 'George,' as she referred to him, supported her with his belief in her innocence. 'He cried with joy, when I was released from prison,' she claimed. 'He even offered to testify for me.'
Review, 5442 words
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