George Balanchine Biography Quotes 6 Report mistakes

Early Life and Training
George Balanchine, born Georgi Melitonovich Balanchivadze on January 22, 1904, in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, grew up in a household steeped in music. His father, the Georgian composer Meliton Balanchivadze, and a musically literate mother recognized early his acute ear and facility at the piano. As a child he entered the Imperial Ballet School (later the Vaganova Academy), where the rigorous classical tradition shaped his understanding of form, musicality, and discipline. Alongside dance he studied seriously at the Petrograd Conservatory, absorbing harmony, counterpoint, and keyboard technique that would later infuse his choreography with an uncommon sensitivity to musical structure. He performed as a student with the Maryinsky Theatre and experienced firsthand the repertory inheritance of Marius Petipa, the court classicism that became both a foundation and a foil for his own later innovations.

The upheavals following the 1917 Revolution left the imperial institutions transformed, but Balanchine, now dancing and choreographing in the nascent Soviet cultural scene, continued to experiment. By his late teens he had formed small groups to show new work and began to test the boundaries between classical technique and a more streamlined, modern sensibility. A youthful marriage to the dancer Tamara Geva accompanied these early professional steps; together they sought opportunities beyond the constraints of post-revolutionary Russia.

Departure and the Ballets Russes
In 1924 Balanchine left the Soviet Union with a small group of dancers, among them Alexandra Danilova and Geva. In Paris, Sergei Diaghilev engaged him as ballet master to the Ballets Russes, placing him in a crucible of modern art where collaboration with composers, designers, and dancers was the norm. With Diaghilev he forged a partnership with Igor Stravinsky that would define both artists. Apollo (1928), envisioned as a study in clarity and restraint, and The Prodigal Son (1929), set to Sergei Prokofiev, announced Balanchine's voice: distilled, musically exact, and dramatically concise. Serge Lifar, one of Diaghilev's leading men, created central roles that projected the clean, architectural line Balanchine prized.

Diaghilev's death in 1929 ended an era. Balanchine spent the early 1930s working across Europe with companies and impresarios, continuing to refine his craft. He briefly led the short-lived Les Ballets 1933 with Boris Kochno, where collaborations linked him to broader theatrical currents and new patrons.

The American Project and the School of American Ballet
The decisive turn came when the American arts patron Lincoln Kirstein invited Balanchine to the United States in 1933 to help create a new ballet culture. Their first endeavor, the School of American Ballet (founded in 1934), became his laboratory. Teaching, coaching, and choreographing, he and Kirstein sought a distinctly American ballet: fast, direct, musically lucid, and open to modern life. Serenade (1934), the first ballet he made in America, doubled as a pedagogical work and manifesto, turning rehearsal incident into stage action and academic exercise into poetry.

Through the 1930s Balanchine and Kirstein organized performing troupes associated with the Metropolitan Opera and separate touring initiatives, laying a foundation of repertory and training even as institutional stability remained elusive. The Depression-era cultural climate pushed him to diversify his work, and he embraced it.

Broadway, Film, and Popular Collaborations
In the mid- and late 1930s Balanchine brought ballet into Broadway and Hollywood. He collaborated with Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart on On Your Toes (1936), notably integrating classical technique into the theater idiom with Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. His theatrical clarity, wit, and rhythmic drive translated seamlessly to the popular stage. In Hollywood he choreographed for The Goldwyn Follies (1938), where Vera Zorina, whom he married that same period, danced roles that exhibited his sculptural eye and cinematic pacing. These ventures broadened American audiences' exposure to ballet without diluting his core aesthetic commitments.

Founding New York City Ballet
After World War II Balanchine and Kirstein established Ballet Society (1946), a subscription-only enterprise devoted to new work. In 1948, following a performance that drew the interest of City Center, Ballet Society became the New York City Ballet (NYCB). From its founding through his death, Balanchine served as ballet master and artistic director, building a permanent company and a canon. Orpheus (1948) with Stravinsky signaled the company's orientation: modern music, pristine form, and a repertory unafraid of abstraction.

He attracted and cultivated extraordinary artists. Jerome Robbins joined as associate choreographer, creating a fruitful, sometimes tension-filled dialogue between two powerful creative minds that enriched the repertory. The costume designer Barbara Karinska became a vital collaborator, her craftsmanship giving physical life to the sleek, modern classicism he imagined. Dancers such as Maria Tallchief, Tanaquil Le Clercq, Diana Adams, Allegra Kent, Violette Verdy, Patricia McBride, Edward Villella, and later Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins carried his style with speed, precision, and musical bite.

Style, Method, and Musicality
Balanchine reshaped classical technique into a neoclassical language: elongated lines, open epaulement, off-balance speed, and exacting musical phrasing. He famously insisted that the music dictated the steps. Composers were partners, none more important than Stravinsky. Their collaboration spanned decades, from Apollo to the razor-edged Agon (1957), and culminated in the 1972 Stravinsky Festival, during which he unveiled a cluster of works, including Symphony in Three Movements and Duo Concertant, that affirmed the company's musical daring. He also mined Bach, Tchaikovsky, Bizet, and Webern, producing signature ballets such as The Four Temperaments (1946), Symphony in C (1947, after Bizet), and Episodes (1959), the last a joint venture with modern dance pioneer Martha Graham that placed Paul Taylor, then a young modern dancer, on a ballet stage and a City Ballet dancer within Graham's vocabulary.

Even in narrative works like The Nutcracker (his 1954 staging that helped make the ballet an American holiday tradition) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1962), form and music remain the engine. He recast virtuosity as architecture, building phrases like counterpoint, and using ensemble geometry to reveal a score's architecture with a clarity that made the stage feel symphonic.

Muses, Partnerships, and Personal Life
Balanchine's personal life intertwined with his art. His marriages to Tamara Geva, Vera Zorina, Maria Tallchief, and Tanaquil Le Clercq coincided with periods of intense creative output and the forging of new stylistic chapters. Tallchief, a formidable classical technician, originated leading roles that fused bravura with musical refinement. Le Clercq, whose long limbs and fearless speed epitomized his ideal, inspired ballets until polio abruptly ended her performing career in 1956, a loss that profoundly affected him and the company. In the 1960s, Suzanne Farrell emerged as a preeminent muse; ballets like Don Quixote (1965) at NYCB and the crystalline Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux (1960) reflected the luminous line and freedom he found in her dancing. Their relationship, personal and professional, was complex, and her departure and eventual return to the company shaped repertory cycles and casting patterns.

Outside his marriages and muses, his circle included collaborators who anchored the institution: Lincoln Kirstein's administrative vision and advocacy; Jerome Robbins's parallel creativity; Karinska's atelier; and coaches and ballet masters who sustained continuity at the School of American Ballet and NYCB.

American Ballet, Beyond New York
While NYCB was his home, Balanchine's influence extended across companies. He crafted Theme and Variations (1947) for Ballet Theatre (later American Ballet Theatre), a homage to Petipa filtered through his own clarity, created for Alicia Alonso and Igor Youskevitch. He staged and reimagined classics such as Swan Lake (notably Act II) and Coppelia (with Alexandra Danilova), balancing respect for tradition with sharp editorial choices. He coached dancers internationally and set works on companies from Paris to Copenhagen, seeding his style across continents.

Later Years, Institutions, and Legacy
In 1964 NYCB moved into its new home at Lincoln Center, the New York State Theater, where Balanchine's repertory could unfold on a stage calibrated to his sense of space and proportion. Jewels (1967), a full-evening, plotless triptych often called the first abstract three-act ballet, showcased his curatorial ear: Fauré for French perfume, Stravinsky for modernist snap, and Tchaikovsky for imperial sweep. The 1970s brought renewed bursts of creativity, repertory festivals, and a generation of dancers who would become teachers and directors in their own right.

He became a United States citizen in 1939 and spent the majority of his life building American institutions. Teaching remained central; the School of American Ballet supplied a steady stream of dancers conversant in his speed and musicality. He granted his ballets carefully and cultivated a culture of exact transmission, insisting on stylistic clarity rather than decorative effect. His brother Andria (Andrei) Balanchivadze pursued a parallel career as a composer in Georgia, a familial echo of the musical seriousness that defined George's approach to dance.

Death and Enduring Influence
George Balanchine died in New York City on April 30, 1983. He had suffered from a neurological illness identified as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which progressively curtailed his activity in his final years. By then he had transformed the landscape of ballet: an art once tethered to narrative spectacle became, in his hands, an art of pure musical architecture and human velocity. The repertory he created for New York City Ballet, the pedagogical pipeline of the School of American Ballet, and the choreographers and dancers he mentored ensured that his ideas continued to evolve after his passing.

His legacy lives not only in titles like Apollo, Serenade, Symphony in C, The Four Temperaments, Agon, Jewels, and the enduring Nutcracker, but also in a way of hearing music with the body. The collaborators who shaped his journey, Diaghilev and Stravinsky at the outset; Lincoln Kirstein and Karinska in building institutions; Jerome Robbins as creative interlocutor; and dancers from Maria Tallchief and Tanaquil Le Clercq to Suzanne Farrell and Edward Villella, form the constellation around which his achievement can be read. Across stages worldwide, the speed, clarity, and musical logic he insisted upon still challenge and inspire, marking George Balanchine as a defining choreographic intelligence of the twentieth century.

Our collection contains 6 quotes who is written by George, under the main topics: Art - Teaching.

Other people realated to George: Mikhail Baryshnikov (Dancer), Suzanne Farrell (Dancer), Clive Barnes (Journalist), Chita Rivera (Actress), Paul Hindemith (Musician), Rudolf Nureyev (Dancer), Richard Rodgers (Composer)