A Tribute to Terry, A Tribute to Balanchine

Dancers from New York City Ballet in a 2012 performance of Balanchine’s “Liebslieder Walzer,” one of Terry’s favorites.

When my friend Terry Teachout passed away suddenly this past January, I didn’t have the wherewithal to write about it—even though Terry had provided a world-class example of arts blogging for nearly two decades and was one of my first supporters when I started a blog in 2007. As so many other people have said before me, he was an unfailingly generous friend and keen culture maven; there wasn’t anyone else like him and I still sometimes have trouble believing he’s gone. I know this post is many months too late and doesn’t do him justice—it’s ostensibly a review of Terry’s Balanchine biography, after all, not a full-throated obituary reminiscence of Terry—but take it, at least, as proof that he is not forgotten.

All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine by Terry Teachout
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s hard to know how to review a book by a dear friend who died suddenly earlier this year, which you didn’t get around to reading till after his death. I was always aware that George Balanchine was one of the artists in Terry Teachout’s personal pantheon, but, not being familiar with Balanchine’s work and not sure whether a short biography was the best way to appreciate a choreographer, I never picked up All in the Dances. Then Terry died, and a few months later I happened to read a few other nonfiction books about ballet, and it suddenly seemed absurd that I hadn’t read his.

And in some ways, reading this book was like having my old friend back again. The style and voice are what I recognize from his theater reviews and prolific arts blogging on About Last Night. On a sentence-by-sentence level, it’s easy to read, conversational, journalistic. On a deeper level, it is animated by an uncompromising adherence to high artistic standards and the cultural pantheon. (Readers who have a low tolerance for pronouncements like “When I assure [my friends] that Balanchine was every bit as important as, say, Matisse, they look at me as though I’d tried to tell them that Raymond Chandler was as important as Proust” might want to skip this one.)

That’s why Terry so revered Balanchine: he was a truly innovative genius, making modernist ballets that, while not telling what we traditionally think of as stories, manage to evoke complex emotions in the viewer. All in the Dances is less valuable for its timeline of Balanchine’s life (you can get that from Wikipedia) than for Terry’s descriptions and assessments of his most important ballets. For instance, on Serenade: “Though the soloists each have their moments of glory, what one remembers above all is the unceasing sweep of the corps, swirling atop Tchaikovsky’s music like a flock of doves. It’s as if the soul of a nineteenth-century story ballet had somehow been lifted out of its rigid framework of plot and given a life of its own.”

There are a few passages where I squinted at the page and wished that Terry was still around so that I could quibble with him about them in person. (Terry may have been known as a conservative critic, but he was a very open-minded man and never minded having intelligent disputes with his younger, more liberal friends.) Early on, he writes that Balanchine “led a life outwardly uneventful, at least by the standards of the best-seller list.” But, I mean, the man was married four times to four different ballerinas, and later on we get the sentence “Well into middle age Balanchine hungered, in Allegra Kent’s tart phrase, to add more Lolitas to his ballerina gallery.” If this isn’t the stuff of the best-seller list—sex, lust, power, all in a heightened artistic milieu—I don’t know what is!

Of course, this book came out nearly twenty years ago, and I do think there is room for a reconsideration of Balanchine’s personal life and attitude toward women in light of #MeToo and such. I don’t think Terry would’ve been the right person to write that book, nor would he have wanted to. On the other hand, I don’t think we will ever get a more accessible yet intelligent, lucid yet impassioned consideration of Balanchine’s major works. The ballet troupe in my town is a “Balanchine company” and now I am starting to have some idea of what I’ve missed out on for the last decade-plus. I’ll have to attend next time they do a Balanchine program. I’ll have to attend, and mourn my friend, and thank him.