Brahms and the Ballet

At the beginning of this month, much to my surprise, I received, as a gift, a copy of John Clifford's memoir Balanchine's Apprentice: From Hollywood to New York and Back. As I write this, I am about halfway through the book; and I am already accumulating notes to prepare for writing about it in its entirety. However, I wanted to reflect on my one experience thus far in which my opinion contrasted sharply with Clifford's.

This concerns the ballet that George Balanchine created entitled "Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet." While Clifford bubbles with enthusiasm over specific dancers, particularly those in the original cast, that performed this ballet, on the one occasion when I saw this ballet performed in the New York State Theater, there was little about the choreography or its execution that left much of an impression. Furthermore, last year when I was depending on streaming to write about performances, I happened to encounter two different programs, in June and October, respectively, that presented excerpts; and both of those video streams left me as cold as I had recalled my first encounter to be.

What strikes me the most is a sense that Brahms' music was not particularly suitable for dancing. Indeed, Brahms seemed aware of this shortcoming. There is an anecdote that, on one particular social occasion, a woman offered Brahms her fan and asked him to autograph it. Instead, he jotted down the opening measures of the "Blue Danube" waltz, underneath which, he wrote, "Not, alas, by Johannes Brahms!"

In all fairness, there is not much by way of dance rhetoric in Brahms' Opus 25 piano quartet in G minor; and Schoenberg's orchestration did little to enhance that rhetoric. (Only the fourth movements has the potential to lend itself to dance.) On the other hand, Balanchine had previously created choreography for both of the Brahms Liebeslieder Walzer collections. Indeed, New York City Ballet had been performing that choreography for many years before Jerome Robbins' "Dances at a Gathering" made it fashionable to dance with a piano on stage. (Those that know Brahms' music can guess that, for Balanchine's ballet, there were two pianists on the stage sharing a single keyboard and performing with four vocal soloists.)

Fortunately, I just found the YouTube Web page for Balanchine's more successful encounter with Brahms; and, given how quiet things are for the rest of the year, I should have no trouble watching this film and documenting my impressions.