George Balanchine According to John Clifford

John Clifford on the cover of his book about George Balanchine (from the book’s Amazon.com Web page)

For several years I have taken a rather detached approach to the “holiday spirit;” and, as a result, I was more than a little surprised last month to find myself presented with the gift of a copy of John Clifford’s recent memoir, Balanchine’s Apprentice: From Hollywood to New York and Back. The choreography of George Balanchine played a major role in my personal development in observing performance and accounting for my observations through writing. My very first gig as a critic involved writing about ballet and modern dance at a time when my primary effort involved writing my doctoral dissertation. Indeed, it was through my work for Boston After Dark that I cultivated the ability to sit down and convert my thoughts into text with minimal agonizing over establishing my thoughts and then finding the right words for them. With that background, writing a thesis was a piece of cake!

Around fifteen years ago, I realized that, following a “lifetime career” in information technology after I had achieved my doctoral degree, going back to that “gig as a critic” was just the right “fit” for a retirement activity. Initially I focused on concert performances, taking advantage of the fact that the San Francisco Conservatory of Music was located only a few blocks to the south of where I was living. However, since my wife and I were San Francisco Opera subscribers, it did not take long for opera to be added to my writing topics. On the other hand, I had distanced myself from the dance for some time. As a result, the first time I covered a ballet with “press credentials” took place on the evening of March 6, 2020, when San Francisco Ballet began its run of performances of George Balanchine’s choreographed interpretation of William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Ironically, it was during the intermission for that performance that we all learned that, in order to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus (coronavirus), Mayor London N. Breed had ordered that all public performances, events, and gatherings at the San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center would be cancelled. The initial duration of cancellation was only about two weeks; but this turned out to be only the camel’s nose under the tent. As a result, a performance by The Living Earth Show on the evening of March 7 marked the last time I would be part of a “physical” audience for over a year’s time.

Those that have been following this site since lockdown conditions were imposed know that I became pretty industrious in turning to streaming as an alternative for concert experiences. As a result of this change in my work practices, I found myself watching more ballet and modern dance performances. That included checking out video streams provided by the New York City Ballet (NYCB). When I found myself disappointed by “contemporary” performances of the choreography, I turned to YouTube to watch films of Balanchine dances whose performances had been supervised by the choreographer himself. Most of the content that became subject matter for my writing involved black-and-white films that had been uploaded to YouTube by Clifford.

I knew who Clifford was from my own past NYCB experiences. However, I knew relatively little about his overall career. Indeed, I did not give his career much thought, since my primary focus was on his ingenuity in using YouTube to provide a valuable historical record of Balanchine’s achievements. In that context I did not waste any time in getting to know more about him by reading his memoir.

Balanchine’s Apprentice is an unabashedly personal account of what it was like to work with Balanchine, chronicles by Clifford from his first encounter with NYCB through the School of American Ballet (SAB) in 1966 until his departure in 1974, when he left to found the Los Angeles Ballet. Ironically, Clifford’s arrival in New York occurred around the same time that I had begun to start watching ballet, first with the Pennsylvania Ballet (now the Philadelphia Ballet), followed by the Boston Ballet and eventually with my first NYCB subscription. Thus, more often than not, reading Clifford’s account of performing Balanchine works almost always resonated with old memories of my encounters with those same creations.

To be fair, however, in writing about Balanchine’s creations, Clifford engages a generous amount of fanboy rhetoric. I cannot really criticize him on that score. As a performer, he is virtually obliged to put a positive spin on what he is doing. (Edwin Denby once wrote a hysterically funny essay about negative spin and how dancers from different countries express it in different ways.) From my vantage point, on the other hand, what matters most is the ability to deliver a description convincing enough that the reader can make up his/her own mind as to whether the attitude is positive or negative.

In that context I feel a need to note that my only real difference of opinion involves the ballet “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet.” The title refers to the fact that the music is Arnold Schoenberg’s orchestral realization of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 25 (first) piano quartet in G minor. This music tends to make more demands than many listeners would prefer to confront. There is a wide diversity of rhetorical stances that Brahms takes over the course of his four movements, and Schoenberg’s version extends that diversity to an even wider scope. My guess is that Balanchine never really “got” any of that rhetoric, perhaps because he usually approached every ballet he made with a piano reduction (which he himself prepared) of the music he had selected. As a result, if you think of looking at the music through a hole in the wall, then Schoenberg makes the hole wider, while Balanchine makes it smaller!

To be fair, Brahms himself had little to do with dancing. That genre is probably best associated with his “Hungarian” dances, which make for some of the composer’s most good-natured music in both the orchestral and four-hand piano versions. On the other hand the Opus 39 collection of sixteen waltzes (in both two-hand and four-hand versions) can almost be taken as “belly laugh” music, given the number of rhythmic patterns that tend to obscure the underlying three-beats-to-a-measure. Opus 25, on the other hand, is permeated with clearly-defined rhythmic patterns; but none of those patterns lend themselves to choreography, whether they are played by a piano quartet or a full orchestra.

That said, Balanchine did create a ballet that served Brahms far better than “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet.” This was the two-act ballet Liebeslieder Walzer. The source for this ballet was the Opus 52 and Opus 65 sets of waltzes scored for four hands on one keyboard and soprano, contralto, tenor, and baritone vocal soloists. This is one of the ballets that was captured on film in Germany in 1973.

Clifford writes about the entire film-making experience; and it was clear that he felt it did not do justice to Balanchine. Nevertheless, he uploaded the Liebeslieder Waltzer film to his YouTube channel. While I appreciate Clifford’s disappointment with the film-making technique, I would still argue that the film makes the case that Balanchine was much more sensitive to how Brahms approached the waltz genre in his Opus 52 and Opus 65 collections than he was to the rhetorical foundations of the Opus 25 piano quartet.

Fortunately, Brahms is my only source of quibbling with Clifford’s book. Some may argue that Clifford did not write enough about his time in Los Angeles after he left NYCB. However, the title makes it clear that this book is more about Balanchine than about Clifford. Writing about the difficulties of forming and managing his own company in Los Angeles could easily have led to a barrage of complaints and injustices, which would have distracted the reader from the rich study of Balanchine’s work and personality that one encounters in the chapters situated in New York.