Brahms, Waltzes, and Balanchine

As promised yesterday, I used this morning to view the YouTube video of George Balanchine’s two-act ballet Liebeslieder Walzer (love-song waltzes). The video itself was created from a 1973 German film; and, like many other video accounts of Balanchine’s choreography, it was uploaded to YouTube by John Clifford. Clifford included the following cautionary sentence on the Web page:

Some in the very beginning is missing and a few brief moments are off the music.

Sadly, the quality of the video itself leaves much to be desired. Watching it will require more than a little patience, but one can still learn much about the choreography that was created.

Balanchine’s title was drawn directly from the music he selected. Unless I am mistaken, this was his first effort in working with the music of Johannes Brahms. The title of the ballet was taken from two collections of waltzes that Brahms’ scored for piano four hands and four vocalists, soprano, contralto, tenor, and baritone. The title of Opus 52 was Liebeslieder Waltzes, and it was followed by the Opus 65 Neue Liebeslieder (new love songs). As I observed yesterday, all the musicians shared the stage with four couples of dancers. In the film that Clifford uploaded, those couples were Violette Verdy and Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, Karin von Aroldingen (who now holds the rights to this ballet) and Peter Martins, Kay Mazzo and Conrad Ludlow, and Patricia McBride and Frank Ohman. The pianists were Dianne Chilgren and Gordon Boelzner, and the vocalists were unidentified.

Yesterday’s article cited Brahms’ (probably humorous) regret at not having composed the “Blue Danube” waltz. The fact is that Brahms had a great interest in waltzes, and Opus 52 was preceded by an earlier four-hand piano collection, the Opus 39 set of sixteen waltzes. In this set one encounters some highly imaginative rhythms that seem to be poking fun at the traditional three-beats-to-the-measure pattern. Furthermore, the last of the waltzes takes an ambiguous approach to not only the rhythm but also the thematic material.

In both Opus 52 and Opus 65 Brahms continues to take occasional jabs at tradition with his not-really-a-waltz architectures. Balanchine seems to have been keenly aware of what Brahms was doing in these compositions. While the choreography serves up a fair share of familiar “waltz idioms,” Balanchine, too, finds ways to depart from those idioms. As a result, neither the music nor the choreography ever leaves the listener/viewer discontented with a “one damned thing after another” performance.

At this point I should make a confession, which is that I have never followed a text sheet for these songs, either at a recital or while listening to a recording. It goes without saying that, when I saw this ballet at the New York State Theater, the texts were not included in the program book. After all, we were supposed to be looking at the stage! The technology for projected titles had not yet found its way into performance venues; but I suspect that even they would distract from the rich diversity one encounters in both Brahms’ music and Balanchine’s choreography.

The fact is that the music easily comes across as a highly imaginative pair of studies in miniaturist rhetoric. Balanchine seems to have clearly understood that structural foundation. While there were several episodes in the ballet in which a “theme” would progress across a few successive waltzes, more often than not, the choreography would confine itself to a single waltz. The result was a bit like the impact of a haiku that captures an isolated moment; and, in the overall flow of the choreography, such a moment might escape the inattentive viewer.

The entire ballet is about 45 minutes in duration. Unless I am mistaken, when I saw it at the New York State Theater there was an intermission between Opus 52 and Opus 65. That would have been a wise programming decision. Even the most attentive listener/viewer needs a break around the half-way mark! Taken as a whole, the ballet ventures into content that Balanchine rarely (if ever) explored in any of his other creations. By all rights it deserves a better video document than the flawed German account, which currently seems to be the only option.