Mr. B
George Balanchine's 20th Century
(Sprache: Englisch)
"The New York Times called him "the Shakespeare of dancing." He appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Arguably the greatest choreographer who ever lived, George Balanchine was one of the cultural titans of the twentieth century. His radical approach to...
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"The New York Times called him "the Shakespeare of dancing." He appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Arguably the greatest choreographer who ever lived, George Balanchine was one of the cultural titans of the twentieth century. His radical approach to choreography reinvented the art of dance and his richly imaginative ballets made him a legend. Yet, Balanchine's life was as dramatic as his art, coinciding with some of the biggest historical events of his time. Born in Russia under the last Czar, Balanchine experienced the upheavals of World War I, the Russian Revolution, World War II, exile, and the Cold War. He co-founded the New York City Ballet and revolutionized dance in America, pressing it to the forefront of modernism and making it serious and popular art. A man of many muses, Balanchine was married five times and consumed by other loves in between. Both the passions that animated him and the difficulties of his life--personal losses, bouts of ill health, and dark moods of despair--resonate in his more than 100 ballets, which speak of love, loss, mortality, and the transformative power of art. Nearly forty years after his death the full scale of Balanchine's achievement remains unexplored. Jennifer Homans, who studied with Balanchine and has had unprecedented access to his papers and many of those who knew him, has researched every facet of Balanchine's life and times. As much a biography as a vast history of the twentieth century through the lens of one of its greatest artists, Mr. B is the definitive biography by ballet's definitive writer"--
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Chapter 1Happy Families
When Georgi was born one cold January day in 1904, he was his mother s first illegitimate son. It was official: he was number 160 on the list of newborns at the Church of the Nativity on the Sands in St. Petersburg, where Maria Nikolaevna Vasil eva had dutifully registered his arrival. On this critical document establishing Balanchine s existence in the eyes of God and the Russian state, his father was absent, and his mother, the authorities noted in a neat hand, was Orthodox but unwed. The problem was not only that Balanchine came into the world in a half-fallen bastard state, somehow discredited from the start; it was also that without a father, Georgi had no patronymic, and without a patronymic his entire genealogy was in doubt. Who was he, even?
His older sister, Tamara, born two years earlier, was illegitimate too. Ditto his brother, Andrei, who came a year after Georgi, in 1905. On Tamara s document, ILLEGITIMATE was even scrawled like a scarlet letter in bold capitals under her name. Had Maria s children been born in Western Europe, they might have held some rights through their mother, but this was Russia, and children automatically took the legal status of their father. The sad fact was that without a paterfamilias none of them had any legal standing at all. They hardly existed. There was only one way back into the social and political fold: in special cases, usually with influence and money changing hands, a child might be legitimized ex post facto by imperial consent and the word of the czar himself.
A cramped note in new ink amending Tamara s, Georgi s, and Andrei s birth documents tells us that this is exactly what happened. On March 18, 1906, the district court legitimized the birth of each of Maria s three children, and on September 23, the Church recognized this change in status too. It was all verified, for anyone who cared to look, in document no. 13025. When Georgi was later asked for his birth
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certificate, he was able to present an official dictum Birth Certificate no. 5055 grandly stating that by imperial decree at the St. Petersburg County Court of the Seventh District and acting on a decision from March 18, 1906, it was hereby affirmed that Georgi Melitonovich Balanchivadze had in fact been born to legally wedded parents, both of the Orthodox Christian faith and both married for the first time. His father, it was proclaimed, was the Hereditary Honorable Citizen Meliton Antonovich Balanchivadze. Stamps, signatures, office duties paid.
This administrative sleight of hand may have normalized Balanchine s birth, but it did nothing to change the facts. If Georgi s parents ever did formally marry no record has been found it was not, at least in Meliton s case, for the first time. When Georgi and his siblings were born, Meliton had a whole other family: a wife and two children back in his native Georgia. Many years later, Balanchine would wistfully tell his first biographer that this unnamed and faceless first wife, whom he never met, had died and that his father had been a widower but she hadn t, and he wasn t.
The matter was serious, if not unusual. There were growing numbers of illegitimate children in St. Petersburg in these years, as peasant women, scarves wrapped tightly around their heads and carrying their belongings, fled their villages for new opportunities in nearby urban centers. Marital traditions loosened their hold on these and other urban mothers townswomen, craftswomen, women filling jobs in businesses and factories, Georgi s mother perhaps among them, who found themselves at once independent and vulnerable in new ways. Official shelters, called angel factories, even paid two rubles per head for abandoned babies in an effort to absorb the incr
This administrative sleight of hand may have normalized Balanchine s birth, but it did nothing to change the facts. If Georgi s parents ever did formally marry no record has been found it was not, at least in Meliton s case, for the first time. When Georgi and his siblings were born, Meliton had a whole other family: a wife and two children back in his native Georgia. Many years later, Balanchine would wistfully tell his first biographer that this unnamed and faceless first wife, whom he never met, had died and that his father had been a widower but she hadn t, and he wasn t.
The matter was serious, if not unusual. There were growing numbers of illegitimate children in St. Petersburg in these years, as peasant women, scarves wrapped tightly around their heads and carrying their belongings, fled their villages for new opportunities in nearby urban centers. Marital traditions loosened their hold on these and other urban mothers townswomen, craftswomen, women filling jobs in businesses and factories, Georgi s mother perhaps among them, who found themselves at once independent and vulnerable in new ways. Official shelters, called angel factories, even paid two rubles per head for abandoned babies in an effort to absorb the incr
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Autoren-Porträt von Jennifer Homans
Jennifer Homans
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Jennifer Homans
- 2022, 784 Seiten, 2 farbige Abbildungen, Maße: 16,3 x 24 cm, Gebunden, Englisch
- Verlag: Random House
- ISBN-10: 0812994302
- ISBN-13: 9780812994308
- Erscheinungsdatum: 15.11.2022
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
It was one of the highlights of my life to know George Balanchine personally and professionally. I truly loved this man, but he certainly wasn t perfect. Jennifer Homans's meticulously researched Mr. B gives us an artist who is as complicated, and even flawed, as he was groundbreaking and brilliant. It is a fascinating read about a true genius and his unrelenting thirst for beauty in art and in life. Mikhail BaryshnikovA truly great work that changes everything, Mr. B has, in addition to superlative history and reporting, some of the most beautiful writing I have ever read felt about an art form that s notoriously difficult to capture. Hilton Als
A magisterial biography . . . sensitive, stately, and often thrilling . . . serious act of cultural retrieval. New York Times
A riveting portrait of a genius whose life spanned the 20th century. Wall Street Journal
Gorgeous . . . Balanchine may have been a genius on an Olympian scale, but in Mr. B he s relentlessly, alluringly human. Oprah Daily
[A] gorgeous biography. People
Monumental. The New York Review of Books
An intricate, meticulously researched biography of the revered and controversial dance icon . . . the definitive account. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Jennifer Homans has not only resurrected George Balanchine, she has restored the Russia that disappeared out from behind him. The result is lyrical and commanding, among the most electrifying pas de deux you re likely to find on the biography shelf. Stacy Schiff
This isn t dutiful biography, this is literature as vibrant and alive as Balanchine s art. Gary Shteyngart
[R]evelatory . . . Homans, an ex-ballerina who trained at Balanchine s School of American Ballet, knows this world well. Publishers Weekly (starred review)
An extraordinary biography by one of America s most prominent
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dance writers . . . Lit Hub
A masterful rendition of Europe s twentieth-century cultural history. It s a magnificent achievement. Jan T. Gross
Captures the full complexity of Balanchine s life and art, placing both in a historical context that makes for a riveting narrative. [A] masterpiece. Amanda Vaill
With unique expertise in ballet . . . Homans shows rare insider understanding of Balanchine s inexhaustible creativity a magnificent and enthralling biography. Marina Warner
Brilliant . . . Homans brings a keen historian s mind and a dancer s physical knowledge to her unflinching account of Balanchine s life. Heather Watts, former principal dancer, New York City Ballet
Awe-inspiring. The evocative writing and research that is as deep as it is meticulous make me feel like I am right there with Balanchine. Merrill Ashley, former principal dancer, New York City Ballet
A masterful rendition of Europe s twentieth-century cultural history. It s a magnificent achievement. Jan T. Gross
Captures the full complexity of Balanchine s life and art, placing both in a historical context that makes for a riveting narrative. [A] masterpiece. Amanda Vaill
With unique expertise in ballet . . . Homans shows rare insider understanding of Balanchine s inexhaustible creativity a magnificent and enthralling biography. Marina Warner
Brilliant . . . Homans brings a keen historian s mind and a dancer s physical knowledge to her unflinching account of Balanchine s life. Heather Watts, former principal dancer, New York City Ballet
Awe-inspiring. The evocative writing and research that is as deep as it is meticulous make me feel like I am right there with Balanchine. Merrill Ashley, former principal dancer, New York City Ballet
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