George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker (Eminent Lives Series)

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. One would be hard-pressed to find a better match for Balanchine for this entry in the Eminent Lives series than Gottlieb, the distinguished editor and dance critic who for years was on the board of directors of the New York City Ballet. Although he knew Balanchine, Gottlieb is quick to point out it was not a close relationship: "To me... he was a god, and I saw my role as being some kind of messenger of the gods." But Gottlieb captures both the divine and human, offering an elegant, sharp and sophisticated take on the choreographer's life. In many instances he elaborates on points made in Bernard Taper's seminal biography, Balanchine. And he adds personal moments, such as Balanchine's comment regarding his choice of successor at the New York City Ballet: "Balanchine made that very clear to me as we were standing in the wings together.... 'It has to be Peter [Martins].... He knows what a ballerina needs.' " This loving tribute captures Balanchine's legacy: his energy, confidence, lack of pretension and, most important, his joy in creation. B&w photos. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Born in 1904, George Balanchine was not only the greatest choreographer of the 20th century; many would call him the greatest of all time. During his life, Mr. B was compared less to other artists in dance than to geniuses in all fields -- to Mozart for the beating heart of his classicism, and to Shakespeare for the reach of his lyricism; to Matisse for his delighted eye, and to Stravinsky for a neoclassicism that laid the stress on energy; to Picasso for his ease in abstraction, and to Ingmar Bergman for the gifted women with whom he worked, muses he often loved and sometimes married. The range, scale and poetic depth of Balanchine's art -- 425 ballets, beginning with student pieces in St. Petersburg, Russia, and ending in a glorious 35-year prime with the company he created in 1948, the New York City Ballet -- are pretty much unparalleled in the theater. And so in this, the centennial year of Balanchine's birth, the world has taken note with celebratory performances, museum exhibitions, restored archival film footage, international symposia and, of course, the publication of new books.The first two Balanchine books out of the gate, slim volumes both, were written for newcomers, for those who have heard the name Balanchine and sensed its cultural importance but who may not be ready for the granddaddy of Balanchine biographies, Bernard Taper's superb 458-page Balanchine. Indeed, one of these books, All in the Dances, was written by critic Terry Teachout, who only recently came under the spell himself. (Disclosure: Teachout was an occasional contributor to Stagebill when I was editor in chief in the early '90s.) Teachout saw his first Balanchine ballet in 1987, four years after Balanchine's death. It was the phenomenal "Concerto Barocco," a masterpiece choreographed to Bach, and as Teachout writes in his book, "I asked myself, Why hasn't anybody ever told me about this? And what kind of man made it?" Teachout sets out to answer that second question.It's not a bad angle: Ask a fresh convert to Balanchine for a fresh take on the master's art. Unfortunately, Teachout has no fresh take. In fact, in his preface, he writes that the book "makes no pretense of thoroughness or originality." Nothing original?! Having confessed this, he yet takes a know-it-all tone. All in the Dances is a lumpily chronological, strangely argumentative hike through Balanchine's life, with quotes and stories recycled from older books of first-hand reporting. Teachout, who recently wrote a book on H.L. Mencken (another critic who likes to lay down the law), is trying to nail down Balanchine's greatness for a new audience. Problem is, it's hard not to sound ham-fisted when you're arguing something no one disputes.And then there are the cheap shots at the art of ballet pre-Balanchine. According to Teachout, the classic story ballets are "dumb show . . . mere pantomime," Diaghilev's visionary "Ballets Russes" is "fizzy displays of chic," Fokine's gossamer "Les Sylphides" is a "slow-moving succession of pretty poses." You don't make Balanchine bigger by pronouncing everyone else small. Mr. B was huge, no matter how great the talent around him, and there was a whole lot of dance talent in the 20th century. Teachout's puffed-up performance is decidedly un-Balanchinian.Robert Gottlieb's book is the one to buy. To begin with, George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker doesn't present Balanchine as an either/or proposition -- i.e., to honor Mr. B you have to disparage "Les Sylphides." Gottlieb writes in his introduction that Balanchine "carried within him all of ballet, past and present, and was constantly redefining its future. Looking backward and looking forward were not separate matters for him; he summed up everything even as he was reinventing everything." Well said. Balanchine once referred to himself as "a cloud in trousers" -- a reference to Vladimir Mayakovsky's famous poem -- and he did seem to float above mere mortals, enjoying a sort of unbound poetic travel, a freedom in time and space.The Ballet Maker is the latest in the Eminent Lives series, and Gottlieb is just right for it. A former editor in chief at both Knopf and the New Yorker, he has edited dance books and dance criticism. More important, Gottlieb saw his first performance of a Balanchine ballet in 1948, just as the brilliant little Ballet Society -- brainchild of Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein -- evolved into the landmark New York City Ballet. A member of the intellectual and artistic "society" that sprung up around the company -- an erudite coterie of fans that added to NYCB's New York-centric energy -- Gottlieb watched it all unfold. This personal view lends an elegance to his book, a better storytelling flow, and lots of inside tidbits. Eventually Gottlieb joined the board of NYCB and helped out by programming the ballet seasons, which allowed him an even closer look at Balanchine on the job and after hours. "He was always calm, always courteous, always realistic, and always impersonal. . . . To me, too, he was a god, and I saw my role as being some kind of messenger of the gods." The Ballet Maker is a graceful little book, a twirl into the world of George Balanchine. Reviewed by Laura Jacobs Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Gottlieb has held several prestigious editor-in-chief positions, but he also helped run the New York City Ballet, and his insider's view infuses his involving, meticulous biography with expertise and abiding respect. Gottlieb vividly recounts how a curious twist of fate landed nine-year-old Balanchine not in the Imperial Naval Academy as intended but, rather, in the Imperial School of Ballet and Theater in St. Petersburg, where his innate abilities were quickly noted. The prodigy soon escaped Soviet oppression and near starvation, eventually securing a ticket to America, thanks to the temperamental visionary Lincoln Kirstein, with whom Balanchine founded the now-legendary New York City Ballet. Gottlieb eloquently characterizes Balanchine's "swift invention," supreme confidence, and joy in creation and incisively analyzes his fruitful collaboration with Stravinsky and his serial infatuations with the gifted, beautiful dancers who served as his muses and became his wives. Delving even deeper, Gottlieb also reveals the unhealed physical and psychic wounds Balanchine sustained in his youth, which became the source of both his preternatural creativity and his epic struggles. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description

Balanchine's life story is a fascinating journey -- from his near-accidental enrollment, at the age of nine, in St. Petersburg's Imperial School of Ballet, through the deprivation and hunger of Bolshevik Russia, to Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and finally, in 1933, to the United States and eventually to the New York City Ballet, to which his reputation is forever tied. As his fame spread around the world, Balanchine's ideas revolutionized ballet, extending the vocabulary of classical dance both through his teaching and through a series of great works, from his crucial collaboration with Stravinsky to his restagings of nineteenth-century classics, including the immensely popular Nutcracker.

Even as he was championing classical ballet during the thirties and forties, Balanchine was expanding the possibilities of dance on Broadway, choreographing a series of major musicals (four Rodgers and Hart shows, including On Your Toes, with its famous "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue"). Meanwhile in Hollywood, beginning with The Goldwyn Follies, he was successfully exploring the possibilities of filmed dance.

His personal life was as highly charged as his professional life, involving five dancer-wives, including Broadway stars Tamara Geva (On Your Toes) and Vera Zorina (I Married an Angel) and three great ballerinas, most notably Maria Tallchief.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Balanchine's life story is a fascinating journey—from his near-accidental enrollment, at the age of nine, in St. Petersburg's Imperial School of Ballet, through the deprivation and hunger of Bolshevik Russia, to Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and finally, in 1933, to the United States and eventually to the New York City Ballet, to which his reputation is forever tied. As his fame spread around the world, Balanchine's ideas revolutionized ballet, extending the vocabulary of classical dance both through his teaching and through a series of great works, from his crucial collaboration with Stravinsky to his restagings of nineteenth-century classics, including the immensely popular Nutcracker.

Even as he was championing classical ballet during the thirties and forties, Balanchine was expanding the possibilities of dance on Broadway, choreographing a series of major musicals (four Rodgers and Hart shows, including On Your Toes, with its famous "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue"). Meanwhile in Hollywood, beginning with The Goldwyn Follies, he was successfully exploring the possibilities of filmed dance.

His personal life was as highly charged as his professional life, involving five dancer-wives, including Broadway stars Tamara Geva (On Your Toes) and Vera Zorina (I Married an Angel) and three great ballerinas, most notably Maria Tallchief.

In this loving biography, Robert Gottlieb chronicles the life and achievements of ballet's foremost choreographer. Drawing on his own involvement with the New York City Ballet and his relationships with Balanchine, Lincoln Kirstein (who brought Balanchine to America), and many of Balanchine's leadingcolleagues, Gottlieb has produced a compelling portrait of a vital man, one of the creative masters of the twentieth century.

About the Author:

Robert Gottlieb has been editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker. Books he has edited during his almost fifty years in publishing range from Catch-22 to My Life by Bill Clinton, and include, in the dance field, books by Margot Fonteyn, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Natalia Makarova, Paul Taylor, and Lincoln Kirstein. For many years he was associated with New York City Ballet as a member of the board of directors and as an unofficial part of management. Currently he writes literary criticism for the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker, and is the dance critic for the New York Observer.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jennifer Dunning - The New York Times

Mr. Gottlieb is at his best when he writes about Balanchine at work, as in his description of the creation of "Concerto Barocco." Balanchine the artist comes suddenly and immediately alive in Mr. Gottlieb's graceful description of the making of that seminal Balanchine classic in 1941. A member of the original cast, he writes, remembers that there was a movement in the adagio that Balanchine called "the Harlem strut." "There was a lot of kidding around in the rehearsals," he quotes that cast member, Fred Danieli, as saying. "We did that strut as a joke, and Balanchine liked it and kept it in."

The New Yorker

Balanchine’s reputation as a choreographer is so immense that his personality can be eclipsed, at least for those who never knew him. Gottlieb, an ardent fan since 1948, did come to know him a bit while serving on the board of New York City Ballet. In this brief yet energetic biography, he moves briskly through an extraordinarily eventful life. The early chapters detail Balanchine’s fine musical education in Russia (piano, harmony, counterpoint), his dancing (curtailed by an injury when he was in his twenties), and his many false starts as he tried to gain a foot-hold in the West. A colleague of the period recalled performances in an insane asylum and a beer garden (“We followed a dog act”). Once in the States, Balanchine embraced every aspect of his new home, working on Broadway and in Hollywood, wearing bolo ties, and—in such works as “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue”—adapting the vocabulary of classical dance to the rhythms of America.

Publishers Weekly

One would be hard-pressed to find a better match for Balanchine for this entry in the Eminent Lives series than Gottlieb, the distinguished editor and dance critic who for years was on the board of directors of the New York City Ballet. Although he knew Balanchine, Gottlieb is quick to point out it was not a close relationship: "To me... he was a god, and I saw my role as being some kind of messenger of the gods." But Gottlieb captures both the divine and human, offering an elegant, sharp and sophisticated take on the choreographer's life. In many instances he elaborates on points made in Bernard Taper's seminal biography, Balanchine. And he adds personal moments, such as Balanchine's comment regarding his choice of successor at the New York City Ballet: "Balanchine made that very clear to me as we were standing in the wings together.... `It has to be Peter [Martins].... He knows what a ballerina needs.' " This loving tribute captures Balanchine's legacy: his energy, confidence, lack of pretension and, most important, his joy in creation. B&w photos. (Nov. 1) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

This new work about Balanchine is like a ballet by the master himself-it goes right to the heart of things. At first one is surprised by its brevity. But Gottlieb, once editor in chief of Knopf, Simon & Schuster, and The New Yorker and for many years intimately connected to the New York City Ballet, offers an informed study that is at once concise and nuanced. Gottlieb covers all the basics, from Balanchine's early training with the Maryinsky, to his first choreographic efforts while on the run throughout Europe, to Lincoln Kirstein's fabled intervention and Balanchine's arrival and eventual triumph in America. The result is a nicely compressed introduction for newcomers that still offers insights to Balanchine fanatics; Gottlieb often relates accepted versions of events (Balanchine could ignore or embroider the facts), then does his research and surmises what really happened. Those wanting more discussion of the ballets themselves might try Robert Garis's Following Balanchine or Terry Teachout's new work (see below), but this is an eminent summation of what was indeed an "eminent life." For all dance collections and any general collection needing updated coverage on Balanchine. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/04.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews