Ballet at its Most Structurally Sophisticated

Ever since my disappointment that the “Digital Spring Season” of the New York City Ballet (NYCB) accounted for George Balanchine’s “The Four Temperaments” by performing only the “Phlegmatic” movement, I have been craving to account for this ballet in its entirety. A month and a half later I have finally found the opportunity to do so. Now my problem is one of offering a viable report without devolving into excessive enthusiasm. Thus, I would like to begin by setting context with an old joke I picked up in my student days:

An elementary school teacher decided that it was time for her pupils to try writing book reports. Each pupil was given different book. The assignment was to read the book and then write a paper that summarized the pupil’s thoughts about the book. One pupil handed in a sheet of paper on which only a single sentence was written:

This book told me more about penguins than I would ever want to know.

The joke actually has a parallel in higher mathematics. During my studies as a mathematics major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it seems as if every bookshelf I encountered had a copy of the Princeton University Press monograph Symmetry by Hermann Weyl. I thought it might be a fun read, particularly since it had a gallery of photographs illustrating different types of symmetry. Instead, it was a deep dive into Weyl’s specialty, abstract group theory; and it turned out to be one of the most challenging volumes I ever encountered. It did not take me long to avoid feeling that Weyl was telling me more about symmetry than I would ever want to know!

My guess is that Balanchine never heard of either Weyl or group theory as a branch of mathematics. Since “The Four Temperaments” was created in 1946, he certainly did not know about Weyl’s book, which was not published until 1952. Nevertheless, one might say that, in creating “The Four Temperaments,” Balanchine took his own deep dive into the many varieties of symmetry. Furthermore, the music he commissioned from Paul Hindemith, consisting of a theme and four variations for piano and string orchestra, served up its own elaborately interwoven structures and reflections.

Indeed, the structures in Balanchine’s choreography are best appreciated by first recognizing the musical structures that Hindemith provided him. To call this simply a “Theme and Four Variations” (which appears on the title page of the score) is to ignore how much more there is to the music’s structure. The theme itself is in three sections, each with its own distinctive melodic content. The first section is played by the strings, the second taken as a piano solo, and the third bringing together the full ensemble. That tripartite structure is then reflected in each of the “temperaments” variations: melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, and choleric.

This symmetry of structure within structure is then reflected in the resources Balanchine assigns to the individual elements. Each of the three sections of the theme features duo work by a female and a male dancer. The second of the temperaments (sanguine) features a similar coupling. The other three involve solos, male for melancholic and phlegmatic and female for choleric. These solo and duo performances are then embedded into a wide variety of different approaches to establishing context with different combinations of corps dancers.

Readers may now see why I chose to begin with that penguin anecdote. I suspect that, by this time, many readers may feel that, in “The Four Temperaments,” Balanchine served up more thoughts about choreography and structure than one might ever want to know. Nevertheless, I encourage all those that have read this far to check out John Clifford’s YouTube upload of a 1964 Canadian film of NYCB performing “The Four Temperaments.” If there is any shortcoming in this film, it is the absence of cues that let the reader know which temperament the viewer is seeing at what time.

The only text Clifford provides accounts for the solo dancers for each of the three sections of the theme and each of the temperaments themselves. It would have been helpful if he had put in the time-stamp for each of those seven divisions. (If he ever reads this, perhaps he will take the trouble to update his site.) However, the contrasts that separate both the theme sections and those temperaments have been very well defined in Balanchine’s choreography. The only thing missing in Clifford’s summary is citation of the coda for the entire ballet, in which pretty much all of the choreographic motifs are brought together on the stage at the same time, providing a visual impression not unlike a view of the interconnections of the gears and springs in a pocket watch.

Beginning of the coda of “The Four Temperaments” (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Nevertheless, I should conclude by making it clear that this is no mere “choreographic machine.” All the soloists that have been named by Clifford bring a compellingly rich sense of humanity to Balanchine’s choreography. There is as much sense of a “human drama” unfolding in “The Four Temperaments” as there is in the poignancy of “Serenade.” Indeed, any viewer interested enough to revisit this video from time to time may well discover that, with each viewing, (s)he is more inclined to feel both wonderment and a lump in the throat during the ballet’s extraordinary coda.