Volume 30, Number 9 · June 2, 1983
George Balanchine (1904–1983)
By Arthur Gold, Robert Fizdale
George Balanchine liked to say, quoting Mayakovsky, 'I am not a man, but a cloud in trousers.' And now the luminous cloud has floated off, leaving us with a loss far deeper than the grave. Balanchine spoke for all of us. Diffident as he was in private life, in his ballets he shared his daydreams, his joys, his troubled loves, his fears, his instinct for elegance and order, and his passion for youth with those who admired his work. He has been a poet for poets, a musician for musicians, and a dramatist for anyone who wishes to understand the human heart. Reality for him was the stage and he gave us stylized visions that seem truer than life. His genius was multilingual. A couple in love walk slowly onto a twilit stage, music of Fauré is heard, and the perfume of French poetry lies lightly in air. The Four Temperaments and Kammermusik speak perfect German. Agon—cool, sarcastic, analytic, probing—is Sixties America. Stravinsky said when he first saw Movements for Piano and Orchestra, 'George shows me things in my own music that I didn't realize were there.'
Feature, 1158 words
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