La Nuit (Romance) | Balanchine

1. La Nuit (Romance) 1920

Anton Rubinstein (Romance in E-flat, Op. 44, no. I, for voice and piano, danced to piano and violin)

George Balanchine

1920?, concert at Theater (Ballet) School, Petrograd

Olga Mungalova, George Balanchine

Performance Type

Ballet

See Also

Note

Balanchine remembered this as the first work he choreographed, although the date of its premiere has not been established. Mikhail Mikhailov, a contemporary of Balanchine’s at the official ballet school in St. Petersburg/Petrograd, suggests in My Life in Ballet that it may have been created as early as 1917-18. Mungalova’s unpublished memoirs describe her performance of this dance with Balanchine at the ballet school in the summer of 1920. She danced it with Pëtr Gusev at the school graduation performance of 1920 or 1921. As Romance, the ballet was presented on June 1, 1923, at the first performance of the Young Ballet, the company created by Balanchine, Gusev, Vladimir Dimitriev, Boris Erbshtein, and Yuri Slonimsky; it was also in the repertory of the Principal Dancers of the Russian State Ballet, the small troupe led by Balanchine and Dimitriev on tour in Germany during the summer of 1924. The work was performed for many years in the Soviet Union after Balanchine’s departure. Gusev, Alexandra Danilova, and Vera Kostrovitskaya (two other members of the Young Ballet) have noted that La Nuit was unusual for the times; Kostrovitskaya called it a ‘lyrical duet of restrained passion–half poses, half arabesques . . . with tender passages of adagio,’ while Gusev and Danilova both remarked on its ‘sexy nature’ and Gusev called it a ‘direct imitation of the early Goleizovsky.’ The woman’s costume was also unusual: a tunic (not customarily worn with toe shoes) and loose hair tied with a ribbon (Slonimsky, pp. 63, 67; Danilova, p. 44).

Source Notes

Full documentation of Balanchine’s activities before he left the Soviet Union in 1924 is not possible. Printed programs of official performances at the Maryinsky Theater and Imperial Theater School in St. Petersburg exist, but none have been found for the performances given by the Young Ballet; a single poster announcing the opening concert is in the Museum of the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet. (The Maryinsky Theater was known as the State Maryinsky Theater between 1918 and 1920 and from 1920 to 1935 as the Petrograd/Leningrad State Academic Theater for Opera and Ballet. It was then called the Kirov Theater until 1991 when it again became the Maryinsky. The Imperial Theater School was renamed the Petrograd Theater School in 1918. Today it is the Vaganova School of Russian Ballet.) Research was carried out in Russia by Elizabeth Souritz (Moscow Institute of the History of the Arts) and the late Vera Krasovskaya (St. Petersburg, State Academy of Theater Art) and by Gunhild Schüller of the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, University of Vienna, who visited Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1981. Major printed resources consulted were the newspapers Krasnaya gazeta and Zhizn iskusstva, the periodicals Teatr and Teatr i iskusstvo, and the weeklies of the Petrograd/Leningrad State Academic Theaters (Ezhenedel’nik petrogradskikh gosudarstvenniykh akademicheskikh teatrov; Ezhenedel’nik teatrov v Leningrade). Records 1-35 are based on the research of Souritz, Krasovskaya, and Schüller, on interviews conducted with Pëtr Gusev in St. Petersburg (Poel Karp, 1980) and with Balanchine, Alexandra Danilova, and Tamara Geva in New York (Nancy Reynolds and Gunhild Schüller, 1979-81), and on material from publications cited in full in the BIBLIOGRAPHY: Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets, Alexandra Danilova’s Choura, Tamara Geva’s Split Seconds, I Remember Balanchine (Francis Mason, ed., containing Yuri Slonimsky’s essay ‘Balanchine: The Early Years’ and the recollections of Geva, Danilova, and Stukolkina), the Maryinsky Theater’s exhibition catalogue Vek Balanchina – The Balanchine Century, 1904-2004, Mikhail Mikhailov’s My Life in Ballet, Natalia Roslavleva’s Era of the Russian Ballet, Bernard Taper’s Balanchine: A Biography, Robert Tracy’s Balanchine’s Ballerinas, and A.E. Twysden’s Alexandra Danilova.