George Balanchine
Premiered January 17, 1958, by New York City
The Sarasota Ballet Performing George Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes | Photo by Frank Atura
The Sarasota Ballet Performing George Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes | Photo by Frank Atura
The Sarasota Ballet Performing George Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes | Photo by Frank Atura
stars and Stripes
This must be the most stirringly, upliftingly patriotic of Balanchine’s many tributes to his adoptive country. Arriving in the USA, with no English except “ham and eggs” until taught the language by Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, the choreographer became, as Jennifer Dunning wrote, “the most fervent of flag-wavers… with an unshakeable love for New York and the United States.” (The New York Times) Or, as Peter Martins put it: “He was Mr. New York…a true American in every way.”
Indelibly associated with the Fourth of July, whose parades it consciously evokes, Stars and Stripes is “a ballet in five campaigns” setting its large cast of dancers and five principals in Karinska’s brightly-colored uniforms, to Sousa’s ebullient band tunes in a blaze of twirling batons, military marches and exuberant, bravura dancing.
The ballet has been performed at important events, presidential and mayoral inaugurations, and is dedicated to the memory of New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. In 1981, learning of the imminent release of American hostages in Iran, Balanchine celebrated by adding a slap-bang finale to the “5th Campaign.”
This is not to overlook the artistry and fine dancing in a challenging showcase for a large cast of dancers—41 in the original cast, starrily led by Jacques d’Amboise, Melissa Hayden, Allegra Kent, and Diana Adams. The “4th Campaign” in particular, to the Liberty Bell and El Capitan marches, offers a virtuosic pas de deux, with variations and coda.
We should remember, too, Balanchine’s innate musicality. Asked why he would choreograph a ballet to Sousa’s marches, he simply replied, “because I like his music.” This is apparent in his entrusting carefully selected tunes to the fine arranger Hershy Kay, with whom he collaborated on Western Symphony and his Gershwin ballet Who Cares?. But, in the end, Stars and Stripes is a bold, brassy, banner-waving celebration of America.
Probably the most important and influential ballet figure in America, he was born Georgi Balanchivadze in St. Petersburg in 1904. More than three decades after his death in New York in 1983 we can appreciate more fully the huge impact of a choreographer whose creative life spanned 60 years, carrying the grand Russian classical style triumphantly into the modernist era, establishing one of the world’s leading companies—New York City Ballet—and giving America its own classical ballet tradition.
Graduating from the Petrograd Imperial School of Ballet in 1921 at age 17, Balanchine also studied piano and composition, and joined what is now the Mariinsky Ballet, where his first choreographies shocked the company’s traditionally-minded establishment. In 1924 he toured Germany with his own group of Soviet State Dancers until an audition for Diaghilev led to the Ballets Russes acquiring the talents of Balanchine, Tamara Geva (the first of his four ballerina wives), and Alexandra Danilova. Within a year, he was appointed Chief Choreographer, creating 10 ballets for the company, notably Apollo (1928), which Balanchine later described as the great turning point in his life, and Prodigal Son (1929)—both constantly revived to this day.
After Diaghilev’s death in 1929 and the fragmentation of the Ballets Russes, Balanchine worked in Copenhagen, Paris, and Rene Blum’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. It was in London during his directorship of Les Ballets 1933 that Lincoln Kirstein persuaded him to come to America, where they founded the American School of Ballet in New York (1934), out of which emerged The American Ballet (1935), Ballet Society (1946), and eventually the New York City Ballet (1948). Initially based at City Center, it moved in 1964 to its present home at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater, built to Balanchine’s specifications. During the 1930s and 1940s Balanchine also choreographed extensively for Broadway and the movies, including Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes and The Boys from Syracuse. He later married Maria Tallchief (1946-1952) and Tanaquil LeClercq (1952-1969), for whom he also created leading roles.
Balanchine’s ballets are notable in that his musical training enabled him to work closely with the music of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Webern—some of the greatest names of 20th century music—as well as reinterpret the music of the past: Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky. One of the world’s greatest choreographers, he created a neoclassical aesthetic that connected the vigor of American modernism with the Russian ballet tradition. Balanchine now stands as a ballet colossus between America and Europe, his rich repertoire of ballet constantly performed and appreciated around the world.
Ironically, the “American March King” was of mixed Portuguese and Bavarian descent. He was born in 1854 in Washington, DC. He learned violin, studied music theory and composition, and enlisted in 1868 at age 12 as an apprentice in the U.S. Marine Band (with which his father was a trombonist), leaving in 1875 to study conducting. At the 1876 centennial exposition in Philadelphia, he joined Offenbach’s orchestra. He returned to lead the U.S. Marine Band from 1880-1892, making it the leading U.S. military band, with over 60 phonograph cylinder recordings and a national reputation.
From 1892-1931, he led and recorded with his own Sousa Band, touring over 15,000 concerts internationally. By this time, Sousa was an established composer of marches (Liberty Bell, Thunderer, Washington Post, Semper Fidelis, and The Stars and Stripes Forever, among the best known). He had also developed the sousaphone, a portable tuba, to provide a marching bass. In World War I, Sousa enlisted again, but in the 1920s, promoted to lieutenant commander of the naval reserve, he saw no more active service. Sousa also wrote in other forms, including 11 operettas, most notably El Capitan. “The March King” died of heart failure in Pennsylvania, aged 77, on 6 March 1932, after conducting a rehearsal of The Stars and Stripes Forever.
Originally named Varvara Jmoudsky, Karinska was born 1886 in Kharkov, Ukraine. Karinska remained in Russia after the Revolution, remarrying and managing a fashion house and embroidery school, but when these were nationalized, she moved to Brussels and then Paris. She began making costumes for cinema and ballet, notably the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and Les Ballets 1933 and marked the start of her long collaboration with Balanchine. Her career continued to flourish in London, where she moved in 1936, before settling in New York in 1939.
Karinska was a top costume-maker and designer, winning an Oscar for Joan of Arc (1948), a nomination for Hans Christian Andersen (1952), and the first Capezio Dance Award for Costume. In 1964 she accepted a permanent appointment making costumes for Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, from which she retired in 1977, dying at the age of 97 in 1993.
