Product Description

Part of the Eminent Lives Series, this biography, written by the gifted author Robert Gottlieb, will describe the life of the dynamic George Balanchine, the foremost contemporary choreographer in ballet. Timed to coincide with the 2004 centenary of the artist's birth.

The life and achievement of the great choreographer who both summed up everything that proceeded him in ballet, and extended the art form into radical yet inevitable new paths. Leaving Revolutionary Russia in 1924 (he was 20), he joined Serge Diaghilev's famous Ballets Russes, where he created his first enduring masterpiece, Apollo, cementing his lifelong collaboration with Stravinsky.

In 1933 he arrived in America to found a school and a company, but the company as we know it – The New York City Ballet – didn't emerge until 1948. Meanwhile, he made ballets wherever opportunity allowed, while choreographing Broadway shows (four for Rodgers and Hart), movies (The Goldwyn Follies), even the circus – a ballet for elephants with a score by Stravinsky. By the time of his death, in 1983, he had been recognized as a member of the triad of the greatest modern masters, alongside Picasso and Stravinsky.

Balanchine was married many times, always to outstanding ballerinas, but his truest muse always remained Terpsichore, the Muse of Dance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #533900 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-13
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .66 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. One would be hard-pressed to find a better match for Balanchine for this entry in the Eminent Lives series than Gottlieb, the distinguished editor and dance critic who for years was on the board of directors of the New York City Ballet. Although he knew Balanchine, Gottlieb is quick to point out it was not a close relationship: "To me... he was a god, and I saw my role as being some kind of messenger of the gods." But Gottlieb captures both the divine and human, offering an elegant, sharp and sophisticated take on the choreographer's life. In many instances he elaborates on points made in Bernard Taper's seminal biography, Balanchine. And he adds personal moments, such as Balanchine's comment regarding his choice of successor at the New York City Ballet: "Balanchine made that very clear to me as we were standing in the wings together.... 'It has to be Peter [Martins].... He knows what a ballerina needs.' " This loving tribute captures Balanchine's legacy: his energy, confidence, lack of pretension and, most important, his joy in creation. B&w photos.
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From Booklist
Gottlieb has held several prestigious editor-in-chief positions, but he also helped run the New York City Ballet, and his insider's view infuses his involving, meticulous biography with expertise and abiding respect. Gottlieb vividly recounts how a curious twist of fate landed nine-year-old Balanchine not in the Imperial Naval Academy as intended but, rather, in the Imperial School of Ballet and Theater in St. Petersburg, where his innate abilities were quickly noted. The prodigy soon escaped Soviet oppression and near starvation, eventually securing a ticket to America, thanks to the temperamental visionary Lincoln Kirstein, with whom Balanchine founded the now-legendary New York City Ballet. Gottlieb eloquently characterizes Balanchine's "swift invention," supreme confidence, and joy in creation and incisively analyzes his fruitful collaboration with Stravinsky and his serial infatuations with the gifted, beautiful dancers who served as his muses and became his wives. Delving even deeper, Gottlieb also reveals the unhealed physical and psychic wounds Balanchine sustained in his youth, which became the source of both his preternatural creativity and his epic struggles. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

The former editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker, Robert Gottlieb was on the board of directors of the New York City Ballet for many years. He writes literary criticism for the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker, and is the dance critic for the New York Observer.