638
PARTISAN REVIEW
in 1921), but this is the first time any modern company has sought to
recreate the original production in its entirety.
The Kirov's
Sleeping Beauty
is as authentic a version as we are likely to
see, and though the pace is at times painfully slow (the running time is just
under four hours), it is still possible for today's audiences to enter fully into
Petipa's now-remote imaginative world. For my part, I found the experi–
ence both aesthetically convincing and deeply moving-yet it never
occurred to me for a moment to suppose that anyone in his right mind
would want to make a modern ballet along the same lines, any more than
he would want to write an opera like
Tristan und Isolde,
a novel like
Bleak
House,
or a symphony like the Brahms C Minor. As good as, yes, but just
like? Such a narrow ambition contrasts sharply with the intentions of the
neoclassical modernists (including Igor Stravinsky, Balanchine's mentor),
who sought not to imitate but to recreate imaginatively and thereby revi–
talize the forms of the past. This being the opposite of what most
contemporary choreographers who make full-evening ballets are trying to
do, it stands to reason that their efforts should have proved so consistently
unsuccessful.
Does this mean the story ballet is dead? Not necessarily. Balanchine
himself offered an alternative to the nineteenth-century model in his 1962
dance version of
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
set to the music of
Mendelssohn. At first glance,
Midsummer
may look like a pastiche ballet
transformed by the hand of genius, but a closer look reveals that
Balanchine has radically rethought the conventional story-ballet structure.
Midsummer
is cast in two compact acts, the first of which contains most of
Shakespeare's plot; the main narrative sequences are accompanied not by
short musical numbers but by three symphonic overtures lasting about ten
minutes each, thereby creating a powerful forward momentum. The second–
act divertissement (whose pas de deux is in E major, the same key as the
first-act overture) is similarly followed by an extended orchestral episode
that returns us to the enchanted forest (and the home key of E major), giv–
ing the ballet a structural unity too often missing from nineteenth-century
ballets, most of which seem to have been thrown together without appar–
ent regard for the niceties of musico-theatrical archi tecture.
Unlike
The Sleeping Beauty,
which is more like a pageant than a play,
A
Midsummer Night's Dream
is a true dance drama. We watch it not to savor
individual snippets of choreography-wonderful though they are, especially
Oberon's virtuoso variation-but to be swept up in the unfolding action.
The result is a sublimely cornic poem of reconciliation that is worthy of
direct comparison with
The Marriage of Figaro,
though no one ever thinks
to make such a comparison; indeed, I get the distinct impression that
Midsummer
is taken for granted by New York balletomanes, who faithfully
