12. LITTLE GEORGI
Georgi Balanchivadze, age five (R. Charles, St. Petersburg)
So who was George Balanchine? A poet of the body. But who was he really? I cannot tell you this; no one can. Nevertheless…a bit of history is in order. It won’t, however, solve the mystery of how and why a very great artist comes to exist. And, like the history of Serenade itself, the story of Balanchine’s early life in Russia is similarly apocryphal, dramatic, romantic, and tragic; and, as to hard facts, all but impossible to verify on many counts given the paucity of surviving records from before the Bolshevik Revolution. When Balanchine fled the land of his birth at age twenty, a door closed.
Over the decades, his biographers have told similar stories with slightly differing details about his childhood, and, to further confuse matters, Balanchine himself told varying versions—he was not above embellishing a good story. And he had no interest in writing his memoirs. When asked about his life, his loves, he said simply: “It’s all in the programs.” And there much of it remains, laid bare inside the storyless ballets and the ballerinas he cast in them.
What is clear is that the dramas of his young life were so extreme as to merit a tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann. From riches to rags: from playing four-handed piano with his mother and being a student dancer in the lavish court of Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, to, overnight, all-but-orphaned, enduring hunger, illness, and brutal cold. While his health was forever marked, his spirit, his purpose, emerged seemingly unbroken, if not fortified. Through it all, the theater—its allure, its dreams, its glory—remained the boy’s cathedral of worship, the pageantry of reverence his beau ideal.
Georgi Melitonovich Balanchivadze’s favorite game as a little boy was not to play a fireman or policeman or soldier or spy. It was to play a bishop. He would close the door to his room, enrobe himself, and stack a few chairs on top of one another to create an altar, and he would bless objects and conduct High Mass before his phantom flock.[*1] He chose his profession early and never wavered. Signposts of a decided destiny abound in Balanchine’s life. An acrostic he wrote as a child suggests his own perception:
Fate smiles on me.
I am Ba
My destiny in life is fixed.
I am Lan.
I see the keys to success.
I am Chi.
I will not turn back now.
I am Vad.
In spite of storm or tempest.
I am Ze.
When a talent for a certain profession is apparent in one so young and then manifests vastly, as it did with Mozart, it is clear that it was, somehow, ordained from birth. The fecundity of the artists’ outpourings—in depth, generosity, variety, radiance—requires this explanation. It is as if these supernaturally great artists learned the mechanics of their craft like their peers, but their output incontestably dwarfs other able, even excellent, practitioners—as if they were conduits, born prefilled with their visions of as yet unknown beauty, and in their human form deliver them to the world during their short time here, allowing us to wake up, to hear, to see.
Balanchine was still conducting his services six decades later, with the theater, in our secular times, as his church, us dancers as his disciples, and you, the audience, as his congregation. His favorite subjects at school were arithmetic, religion, and music—the very three interests for a man destined to physicalize spirit into three dimensions through rhythm and harmonic composition. “The music passes through him,” said Martha Graham, “and in the same natural yet marvelous way that a prism refracts light, he refracts music into dance.”
Balanchine was born on January 22, 1904,[*2] in the beautiful city founded by Tsar Peter the Great in 1703 on the shores of the Neva River in northern Russia, not far from what is now Finland. St. Petersburg is that rare city that rose almost at once and under the direction of a single architect appointed by the tsar in 1716. Jean-Baptiste Alexandre le Blond was French and given the title of “Architect-General” of the Romanov dynasty. The northernmost large city in the world, St. Petersburg was the capital of Russia for almost two hundred years, from 1732 to 1918. Balanchine was born near its close, making him a lively relic of the imperial tsarist regime, an absolute monarchy that flaunted fairy-tale extravagance, opulence, and spectacle.
“I am often asked,” said Balanchine later in life, “ ‘What is your nationality, Russian or Georgian?’ and I sometimes think, by blood I am Georgian, by culture Russian, but by nationality Petersburgian.”
Meliton Balanchivadze, Balanchine’s father, was a Georgian composer who had studied with Rimsky-Korsakov at the prestigious St. Petersburg Conservatory. He was a singer of Georgian folk songs and a composer of operas—called the “Georgian Glinka.” He was also a committed bon vivant, benign rascal, and ready wit.
Balanchine’s mother, Maria Nikolaevna, eleven years younger than his father, was Russian born, but little more is known of her origins. She was most likely illegitimate, of unclear parentage. It has been suggested that her father may have been German, from a distinguished family—the von Almedingens—and that her mother may have been Jewish. It has been said that she met Balanchivadze as his housekeeper, as his landlady’s daughter, or perhaps as his bank teller. But none of this conjecture has been verified, though one hopes a future biographer can settle the matter. Balanchine’s mother remains barely more than a vision, as seen in one photograph, dressed in white, serene, elegant, and beautiful. Her aristocratic profile is not unlike Balanchine’s, though softer, less articulated.
Balanchine was the most reserved of her three children—his younger brother, Andrei, described him as “closed in, and dry.” “Everyone wants to be the favorite child in a family,” Balanchine said of himself, “but not everyone has the luck.” Due to the early loss of his mother—he never saw her again after age fourteen, though there was intermittent correspondence in the years after—she, unavoidably, emerges as the original archetype for the most persistent, central, and beloved of Balanchine muses: the woman ever unknown, ever out of reach, and therefore most desired. Even if one is not charmed by Freud, Balanchine’s mostly missing mother inevitably obtains an almost mythical place when considering her son’s ensuing love of woman, and the towering body of work, the great gallery of portraits—the most significant in all dance history—that resulted from his profound, searching-for-but-never-possessed love.
What is known is that Maria was not very well educated, was religious—Russian Orthodox—played the piano, loved music and theater, and was not married to Meliton Balanchivadze when her four children (Nina, a girl born in 1900, died) were born during the first six years of the new century. There are three existing christening documents that record each of her surviving babies—Tamara, Georgi, and Andrei—as a child of “the unmarried Maria Nikolaevna Vasilieva.” Balanchine, like his mother, appears to have been illegitimate—though it also appears that he never knew this.
Balanchivadze had a wife and two children he had left—perhaps abandoned—at age twenty-seven, in 1889 in Georgia, in order to study music at the famed conservatory in St. Petersburg. His Georgian son, Balanchine’s older half brother, was, curiously, named Apollon, the name of Balanchine’s first masterpiece in 1928. There are many such prophetic connections in Balanchine’s life.
Sometime after 1905, Meliton and Maria seem to have married—but was he divorced? a bigamist?—and in 1906, when Georgi was two, Balanchivadze legally recognized his three children with her. Along the way, various certificates—as those from the Imperial Theatre School—were likely forged to record their children as legitimately born.
A key event determining Balanchine’s childhood came in the unlikely form of a lottery ticket. In 1901, three years before his birth, his mother held a winning ticket that amounted to two hundred thousand gold rubles—the equivalent of several million dollars today. The couple was rich overnight, and for the first seven years of Balanchine’s life, the family resided in various enormous apartments—one had twelve rooms—in St. Petersburg, while also building a stately country dacha in what is now Finland, three hours by train from St. Petersburg.
The household featured servants, nursemaids, and tutors, with lavish feasts accompanied by costumed entertainments, and much merriment. Derailed from his musical destiny by the fast fortune, Meliton dallied in various speculative ventures, most unsuccessful, from wine importing and purchasing land and a roof-tiling factory, to investment in Georgian restaurants.
By 1911, when Georgi was seven, the fortune was all but gone, the debtors came calling, and his father disappeared for a while, either to debtor’s prison (Balanchine’s version) or house arrest elsewhere, while his family gave up their St. Petersburg abode and moved to the dacha to await his eventual return.
Whatever his parental bloodlines were, Balanchine was Russian Orthodox through and through. Balanchine’s paternal grandfather, Amiran Balanchivadze, was a priest in Georgia, and the young boy took religion to heart. When he was about six years old, he was taken to the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg to witness the symbolic burial and resurrection ceremony of the archbishop of Tbilisi as he became a monk. Before the altar, the archbishop lay facedown on the ground, arms spread to the side, covered with a giant black shroud: the secular man interred, the holy man born. This was the great theater of Russian Orthodoxy. Balanchine never forgot and would re-create this haunting transposition seventy-five years later, in one of his final works, to the last movement of Tschaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony.
Balanchine’s parents foresaw a career in the military for him, like one of his uncles and his half brother, Apollon, and took him in 1913 to apply at the prestigious Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg. The academy was full and suggested he wait and reapply the following year. That same year his older sister, Tamara, was taken to audition, for the second time, at the Imperial Theatre School. Both academies, military and dancing, were fully subsidized, not by the government but as part of the tsar’s household. On this occasion, a school official saw the girl’s quiet, proud little brother, likely lingering in a hallway, and suggested he audition too. Why not? How many male dancers began because of a dancing sister?
Tamara was again refused, but, after the two-day audition, Georgi was accepted. Founded in 1738 by Anna Ivanovna, empress of Russia, during her ten-year rule, the school, as an offshoot of the Cadet Corps, was a regimented boarding academy where the carefully chosen students wore elegant, military-like uniforms and were taught Russian, French, arithmetic, religion, and dance under both spartan (cold baths each morning) and imperial (gold-trimmed coaches) conditions in preparation for a career on the stage.
Georgi was nine years old, didn’t like to dance, had never been to a school (the Balanchivadze children had tutors at home), and was, on the very same day as his acceptance, abruptly left by his mother, against his will, to become the school’s youngest boarder. He “felt like a dog that had just been taken out and abandoned,” he told his first biographer. Traumatized by this sudden separation, he immediately ran away from the school, taking refuge with an aunt who lived in St. Petersburg. But she promptly returned the little boy, and within a year he had fallen down the rabbit hole that is the theater, the ballet, that world that is better than the world, a place defined by a stage, an orchestra pit, a proscenium, and the great curtain that reveals and conceals. And those lustrous creatures who drifted about on their toe tips.
His first glimpse of this magic kingdom was from the stage of the sumptuous, glittering, gold, white, and blue Maryinsky Theatre when, during his second year at the school, he was chosen to play a role in Act III of The Sleeping Beauty. “I was Cupid, a tiny Cupid,” he said. “I was set down on a golden cage. And suddenly everything opened!” An elaborate production, it is famous to this day for its two-hundred-member cast, multicolored lighting, real foliage, fountains cascading real water, live horses, and multiple moving, rising, descending, and turning stages all nestled inside the warm splendor of Tschaikovsky’s ravishing score.
There was one more way that the busy students would have peeks, literally, of the profession they were training for. Though forbidden, one by one, they would take turns spying through a keyhole on the great ballerinas Tamara Karsavina and Mathilda Kschesinskaya as they rehearsed. They also would catch glimpses of these enchanting women as they departed the building swathed in their perfume and furs, like Hollywood divas.
Cupid in a golden cage onstage, but offstage Georgi was given the nickname of Rat because of the occasional tic, a sniff, that he had all his life, as if he were wiggling his whiskers, appraising the cheese. This sniff became an all-important symbol to his dancers, taking on over time the impact of his whole being, as he would observe with such speed and acuteness as to redefine a dancer’s hopes in seconds. One sniff and he knew you better than you knew yourself.
In school, Balanchivadze memorized Pushkin, Lermontov, Griboyedov, and Mayakovsky and learned ballroom dancing, fencing, pantomime, and piano alongside ballet. And he played the piano better than anyone else. At night, in the dormitory, under the covers, he devoured detective stories featuring Sherlock Holmes, Nick Carter, and Nat Pinkerton, and the novels of Jules Verne. He loved the movies, in particular films from the German UFA studios with Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss.
On his deathbed, Balanchine spoke of his years at the school with the wonder attending a lost world:
This was a court school! We had special uniforms—light blue, very handsome, silver lyres on our collars and caps—and we were driven around in carriages. Two men in livery sat on the coachbox! Like Cinderella!…We were all the Tsar’s dependents. We had servants and lackeys at the school: all handsome men in uniform, buttoned from top to bottom. We got up, washed, dressed, and took off. We didn’t make the beds we left everything. The servants took care of it…We were presented to Nicholas II, son of Alexander III, Tschaikovsky’s patron…The Tsar’s box at the Maryinsky Theatre is on the side (not in the center) on the right. It had a separate entrance, a separate foyer, with a large private driveway. When you come in it’s like a colossal apartment: chandeliers, the walls covered in light blue. The Emperor sat there with his whole family—Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, the heir, his daughters—and we would be lined up by size and presented…The Tsar was not tall. The Tsaritsa was a very tall, beautiful woman…The grand princesses, Nicholas’s daughters, were also beauties. The Tsar had protruding light-colored eyes, and he rolled his R’s. If he said, “Well, how are you?” we were supposed to click our heels and reply, “Highly pleased, Your Imperial Majesty.”
This memorable event took place on the tsar’s name day of December 6 in 1916, when Georgi was twelve years old. He was described by a fellow student at this time as “very thin, pale—almost transparent—with black smooth hair, wide-apart eyes, and a generous mouth.” Eleven days later Rasputin was brutally murdered: the regime-changing revolution had begun. While the Theatre School had continued cocooned and curiously undisturbed through the first years of World War I (but for sugar rations one day a week), when the Bolshevik Revolution broke out three months later, in early March 1917, everything changed. The protected, opulent world of the tsar’s rule crumbled forever.
The school closed, and the Balanchivadze family dispersed. Georgi went to live nearby with his aunt and brother and was soon joined by his mother, who worked outside the city in a war hospital. His father escaped to his native Georgia, while his sister stayed with an uncle in Kasimov, over six hundred miles away. A cholera epidemic raged, and pneumonia was prevalent. By early 1918 most of the Balanchivadze family had trickled back to Tbilisi, but Georgi was left in St. Petersburg (now renamed Petrograd) with his mother. Though mother and son received exit visas that October to escape to Georgia, they did not go. There is evidence that his mother was still in Petrograd three years later, though Georgi did not live with her.
There was no money and no food. Georgi went to work at odd jobs as a messenger, as a saddler’s assistant, and playing the piano wearing gloves in unheated silent-movie theaters. He watched horses drop dead in the streets from starvation and people leap on the carcasses with knives to carve out their dinner. Looters were shot, and cats were killed and eaten and became scarce. “The worst part,” Balanchine said, “was being hungry.” The dancers performed anything, anywhere, for survival: “We did a Hindu dance at the circus,” Balanchine recalled, “and for every performance we got a loaf of bread.” Typhus, lice, and boils proliferated with the famine and brutal cold, weakening Balanchine’s constitution for the rest of his life.
The school reopened in the fall of 1919 once Lenin had been convinced that ballet and opera were not inherently “decadent.” The ushers at the theater were stripped of their uniforms with the tsarist epaulets. The audience at the Maryinsky changed too. “We had soldiers and sailors come,” said Balanchine. “They smoked in the theatre, ate sunflower seeds, tapped their heavy boots in time to the music. They sat on the railings of the boxes, legs dangling…water froze in the pipes and they burst. Ice floated in the sinks. The corps de ballet wore long-sleeved T-shirts under their costumes. But what could the poor prima dancers do? They got pneumonia, one after the other.”
Around this time, an ambitious young man of sixteen named Yuri Slonimsky went to the theater and came to know the teenage Balanchivadze:
Balanchine possessed an astonishing ability to win people’s favor, to inspire sympathy…This was due to his sincerity, his modesty, and above all, his kindness. I single out this final trait; it was one of the primary determinants of his behavior. He responded eagerly to any need and offered help without ostentation…Balanchine was happy for the opportunity to render any service.
Zinaida Serebryakova’s painting of Georgi Balanchivadze in 1922, age eighteen
The stage door to the theater was a sacred, heavily guarded portal marked by a sign reading “Interdict” (“Forbidden”), but in one of his earliest choreographic forays, Balanchine, already the leader of his student peers, arranged for a group of them to surround his new friend Slonimsky “in a dense mass” and directed them to whirl in a tight turning cluster past the guards, bringing the concealed boy into the “holy of holies,” the bustling, forbidden backstage area of the Maryinsky Theatre. “I trembled with happy excitement before an unfolding new world,” wrote Slonimsky. “I found in one instant the enchanted world which would possess me for the rest of my long life.” Slonimsky, who became a much-respected critic of Russian ballet and theater, remembered the boy who had spirited him across “the Rubicon” as being a “sorcerer’s apprentice.”
Balanchivadze graduated from the school with honors in 1921 and was offered a place in the corps de ballet at the Maryinsky Theatre. His graduation performance, on April 4, 1921, was attended by, among others, Agrippina Vaganova and Pavel Gerdt, two of the still-legendary great ballet teachers in the art’s history. It was noted that the young Balanchivadze was an “especially reliable partner.” The previous year he had also enrolled in the Petrograd Conservatory, where he studied music for three years, thus taking on a huge workload as both a professional dancer and a musician.
Balanchivadze had made his first dance at age sixteen, while still at the school. A four-minute pas de deux titled La Nuit set to lush, romantic music by Anton Rubinstein, it was described by Alexandra Danilova as a “sexy number” where “the boy conquered the girl, lifted her in arabesque and held her with a straight arm overhead, then carried her off into the wings—so, she was HIS!” The dance caused a small furor for its overt eroticism, with the female dancer wearing a Greek-like tunic, not a tight tutu, her loose hair held by a single ribbon, and legs and lifts with “tender transitions” extending in unexpected directions. There was talk of dismissing young Balanchivadze from the school, and he was “reproached for indecency”—though the ballet was performed for decades in Russia, long after Balanchine had departed.
There it was in his first dance, while he was just a teenager: his life’s devotion declared to yearning, soaring music, a romantic encounter between a boy and girl, entwined limbs, extended legs—though this outcome of successful male conquest in Balanchine’s oeuvre was short-lived. Soon, and for the rest of his life, it was the man who was conquered, ever pursuing the impossible beloved.
Within a year of graduating and becoming a member of the Maryinsky, Balanchivadze organized a small troupe of about fifteen dancers, his first company, his “accidental brain child,” as one critic noted. They called themselves the “Young Ballet”—and young they were: ages sixteen to eighteen. The group met in their spare time, sewed their own costumes, rehearsed late into the night, and performed for free. He titled the first program with astonishing nerve bordering on impudence that now looks like premonition: “The Evolution of Ballet: from Petipa through Fokine to Balanchivadze.” All the dances were choreographed by Balanchivadze and set to Ravel, Chopin, and even a musical composition of his own called “Extase”—“Ecstasy.”
In the course of its year or so in existence, the group premiered about fourteen pieces by the ambitious young choreographer, whose lifelong credo—veneration for tradition while being fiercely progressive—was already evident: conservative and radical in equal doses. “This evening has demonstrated that slowly and painfully,” wrote one critic, “as with all living things, ballet is being reborn”; “Balanchine is bold and insolent,” wrote another, “but in his insolence one can see genuine creativity and beauty. Although in classical work he does misuse poses, he combines them in such an interesting way and creates such beautiful if unexpected transitions that one can grudgingly excuse this defect.”
Balanchivadze was extraordinarily busy in 1923 with multiple jobs: in addition to the Young Ballet, at the start of the 1923–24 season, he was named balletmaster of the Maly Opera Theatre, where he made three new works while also performing in Tannhäuser, Prince Igor, Swan Lake, and Le Corsaire at the Maryinsky, as well as making a pièce d’occasion for the great ballerina Elizaveta Gerdt, at her request, for a benefit performance, and choreographing a program for a St. Petersburg cabaret called the Carousel. And he was still playing piano for classes at the school for three hours a day and studying music at the conservatory. He said yes to all, a multitude of apprenticeships. The one thing he did less and less of was dance himself.
The Young Ballet became the talk of St. Petersburg, and soon the name of Balanchivadze became known. In December, he appeared on the cover of Teatp (Theatre) magazine in an astonishing photo, looking like a mélange of Chopin and Lord Byron. He was nineteen years old and clearly putting some effort into cultivating a romantic, brooding countenance: his dark hair hanging long and straight over his forehead and down one side of his pale face, his dark eyes enhanced by dark shadow, his fingernails painted, he wore a black jacket and a cameo bracelet. “His whole presence projected the confidence of a leader,” said one friend, “with his aquiline features, and Byronic hair, he seemed a combination of poet and general.” He remained an elegant and idiosyncratic dresser to the end—though he gave up the eye shadow and shining nails sooner than later.
The previous year, in October 1922, he married the beautiful, educated Tamara Gevergeyeva, a student attending an evening program of classes at the ballet school. The bride and groom were, respectively, seventeen and eighteen years old. The bride’s father, Levky Ivanovich Gervergeyev, was a rich and cultured businessman who owned a brocade mill that made vestments for the clergy. The family lived in a twenty-five-room mansion with a vast library of first editions of rare books and an impressive art collection. Tamara (later known as Tamara Geva), with fair hair, blue eyes, and high cheekbones, became the first of Balanchine’s wives.
A Byronic Balanchivadze, age nineteen, as he appeared on the cover of Teatp magazine, December 11, 1923
On April 4, 1924, five dancers of the Young Ballet—now calling themselves the “Principal Dancers of the Soviet State Ballet”—applied for permission from the government to do a concert tour in Europe and managed to convince the commissars that their tour would be good propaganda. Just prior to their departure, on June 16, one of their group, a feisty young dancer named Lidia Ivanova, mysteriously drowned in a boating accident while with some admiring fans. Her death, never resolved, was suspected by most, including Balanchivadze, to have been a setup, a premeditated murder—she had overheard something dangerous while socializing with Communist officials. With suspicious timing, the troupe’s exit visas—minus one—arrived the day after Ivanova’s death.
On July 4, the small, grief-stricken group, which included Tamara, dancers Alexandra Danilova and Nicholas Efimov, manager Vladimir Dimitriev, conductor Vladimir Dranishnikov, and musicians, set sail on a German ship. They arrived in the West four days later with Balanchivadze as their leader—and no scheduled performances. Once they reached Berlin, they received a telegram from Moscow instructing them to return immediately, and while the conductor and singers obeyed the order, the dancers did not. “We paid no attention to that telegram, as simple as that,” said Balanchine, although he also made clear later that this was no dramatic leap to freedom due to “moral principle” or a stand against censorship—it was because they needed to find work.
They quickly hustled up some concert dates at spas in the Rhineland and a few gigs in London. During the tour, a telegram arrived with money from Serge Diaghilev. They had been summoned by the formidable Russian impresario—whose dictum was “Étonne-moi!” (“Astonish me!”)—to audition for the Ballets Russes, the company that had taken Paris by storm in 1909 and changed the face of Western dance forever.
Safely ensconced in Europe just days before his twenty-first birthday, Balanchivadze, who had lived through fourteen years in the plush world of Russia’s last tsar and seven years of poverty and privation under the Bolsheviks, and already had thirty-five works to his name, became Diaghilev’s last choreographer, launching his career into the West.