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The growth, the development, and the appreciation of ballet in America are the result of a number of things, both individually and in combination. There may exist a variety of opinions on the subject, but one thing, I know, is certain: the present state of ballet in America is not the result of chance. In 1933 I had signed a contract with de Basil to bring ballet to America; yet there was an element of chance involved in that my publicity director, vacationing in Europe, saw a performance of the de Basil company, and spontaneously cabled me an expression of his enthusiasm. Since this employee was not a balletomane in any sense of the word, his message served to intensify my conviction that then was the time to go forward with my determination to follow my intuition. Here ends any element of chance.
The basic repertoire of the first years was an extension of the Diaghileff artistic policies. The repertoire included not only revivals from the Diaghileff repertoire, but also new, forward-looking creations. I was certain that a sound and orthodox repertoire was an essential for establishing a genuine ballet audience in this country.
In 1933, there was no ballet audience. It was something that had to be created and developed through every medium possible. I had a two-fold responsibility—because I loved ballet with a love that amounted to a passion, and because I had a tremendous financial burden which I carried single-handed, without the aid of any Maecenas; I had to make ballet successful; in doing so, willy-nilly I had the responsibility of forming a taste where no aesthetic existed.
For two decades I have had criticism levelled at me from certain places, criticism directed chiefly at my policies in ballet; I have been criticized for my insistence on certain types of ballets in the repertoires of the companies I have managed, and for my belief in adaptations and varying applications of what is known as the “star” system. The only possible answer is that I have been proven right. No other system has succeeded in bringing people to ballet or in bringing ballet to the people.
It will not be out of place at this time to note the repertoire of the de Basil company at the time of the breakdown of the relations between Massine and de Basil, which may be said to be the period of the Massine artistic direction and influence on the de Basil companies, from 1933 to 1937.
There were, if my computation is correct, and I have checked the matter with some care, a total of forty works, with thirty-four of them actively in the repertoire. Of these, there were two sound classics stemming from the Imperial Russian Ballet, creations by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanoff: Swan Lake, in the one-act abbreviation; and Aurora’s Wedding, the last divertissement act of The Sleeping Beauty or The Sleeping Princess, both, of course, to the music of Tchaikowsky. There were three Russian works, i.e., ballets on Russian subjects: Stravinsky’s Petroushka; the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor; and Le Coq d’Or, a purely balletic and entertaining spectacle, with the Rimsky-Korsakoff music rearranged for ballet by Tcherepnine. All of the foregoing were by Michel Fokine. Eight other Fokine works were included, all originally produced by him for Diaghileff: three, which might be called exotic works—Cléopâtre, to the music of Arensky and others; Thamar, to the music of Balakireff; and Schéhérazade, to the Rimsky-Korsakoff tone-poem. Five ballets typifying the Romantic Revolution: Stravinsky’s Firebird; Carnaval and Papillons, both by Robert Schumann; Le Spectre de la Rose, to the familiar Weber score; that greatest of all romantic works, Les Sylphides, the Chopin “romantic reverie.”
There were two works by George Balanchine: Le Cotillon and La Concurrence, the former to music by Chabrier, the latter to music by Auric. A third Balanchine work, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, was necessarily dropped from the repertoire because the costumes were destroyed by fire.
The largest contributor by far to the de Basil repertoire was Massine himself. No less than seventeen of the thirty-four works regularly presented, that is, fifty per-cent, were by this prodigious creator. Eight of these were originally staged by Massine for Diaghileff; two were revivals of works he produced for Count Etienne de Beaumont, in Paris, in 1932. Seven were original creations for the de Basil company. The Diaghileff creations, in revival—in the order of their first making—were: The Midnight Sun, to music from Rimsky-Korsakoff’s The Snow Maiden; Russian Folk Tales, music by Liadov; The Good-Humored Ladies, to the Scarlatti-Tommasini score; Manuel de Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat; The Fantastic Toyshop, to Rossini melodies; George Auric’s Les Matelots: Cimarosiana; Vittorio Rieti’s The Ball.
The two Beaumont works: Le Beau Danube, and the Boccherini Scuola di Ballo.