Serenade, page 22
They proceed magisterially toward the still girl. Ten unified steps later they reach her and stop just behind her, as if he, in his blindness, has encountered a physical impediment. What unfolds next is so very beautiful.
The Dark Angel lifts her right hand from the man’s eyes, allowing him to see again in such a way that the power is clearly hers, the decision to restore his sight hers. At the same time, her left arm lifts from her hold about his shoulder, releasing him from her entirely. Her arms float skyward, forming, briefly but distinctly, a V. Both arms stretched upward like this is not one of classical ballet’s codified arm positions. Are these the Dark Angel’s wings? Of course.
Angels were unique for Balanchine: they were not unreal to him. He called his dancers “angelic messengers”—though never, ever, to us directly—intermediaries between gods and humans, between the divine and the mortal, angels, with their wings, after all, can fly—classical ballet’s highest aspiration and occasional illusion. “When Balanchine spoke of angels,” wrote Lincoln Kirstein, “as he often did, and of his dancers as angels, he intended confidence in an angelic system that governed the deployment of a corps de ballet.” In keeping with ballet’s verticality, Balanchine’s angels’ wings are always raised upward, never folded down, most notably in the massive six-foot-high wings on the angels in the 1980 Adagio Lamentoso[*1]—two-winged seraphim—and as in one of the two angels on Tschaikovsky’s grave, who stands guard, holding the crucifix, protecting and blessing the composer.
The Dark Angel’s arms then drop low—are they still wings? or now arms again?—and she and the man lower themselves together on bended knees, she folded over his back, toward the prone, elongated body in front of them. As they descend, they arch their upper bodies over the girl on the stage floor, their arms curved downward to her.
Simultaneously, she moves too—she is revived!—drawing herself up so that her torso is vertical, though she remains sitting on the stage. She lifts her arms, mirroring theirs in an upward arc: four arms reaching down, two arms reaching up in a wide, all but closed, embrace. It is a gesture of intimate greeting, of compassion, of tenderness, the man airily sandwiched between the two women.
Or perhaps he is hovering between a woman he loves and his art, which, inexorably fastened to his being, pulls him elsewhere? How often a man—a woman—is lured by romance, though sense, and providence, dictate otherwise. This was most certainly the path of Balanchine’s own love life: many loves, but his work—celebrating women, expanding women—the constant throughout.
Tschaikovsky’s grave in St. Petersburg (© Paul Kolnik)
This grouping will be repeated later, closing out the ensuing drama, with broken yearning. But for now, they are together, not quite entwined. Not yet.
This pose is a re-creation of Antonio Canova’s voluptuous marble sculpture Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss. The young Balanchine likely saw it in Paris in the years just before he arrived in America and made Serenade.[*2] The statue was commissioned from the Italian sculptor in 1787 by a young Welsh member of parliament, John Campbell, later the Right Honorable Lord Cawdor. But Campbell never received the piece, having never paid for it, and, for two thousand gold coins, it came into the possession of Napoléon’s brother-in-law General Joachim Murat. He was executed in 1815, and the statue was eventually acquired by the Louvre, where it now resides. Canova was in his early thirties when he carved this statue (as was Balanchine when he made Serenade) that commemorates, in three dimensions, the birth of Love itself.
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The story of Cupid and Psyche is an allegory about the fiery melding of physical desire and spirit. The tale was written in Latin, based on numerous folktales, by Lucius Apuleius, in the second century in his book The Metamorphosis (St. Augustine called it The Golden Ass). The story is later echoed in “Cinderella,” “Beauty and the Beast,” A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and “Orpheus and Eurydice.” It is a lengthy, poetic, entertaining, and ribald tale that includes not only a good deal of unsanctioned lovemaking but also what today would be termed the kidnap and rape of a woman by an anonymous captor, who impregnates her and with whom she falls in love. Despite these untoward doings, the mischievous Lord Byron wrote, “The story of Cupid and Psyche is not only one uniform piece of loveliness, but is so delicate that it might be read at school by a class of young ladies.”
The story is set in motion by the wrath of one very jealous woman, Venus, the goddess of love, beauty, and desire. “The earth had produced another Venus,” wrote Apuleius about the young and human Psyche, who is “endued with virgin-like flower,” such that the disciples of Venus divert their “celestial honors to worship a mortal virgin.” Psyche’s beauty is so great that her despairing father can find her no willing husband—she is worshipped but not loved—while he easily dispatches her two (also madly jealous) sisters into wedlock.
Venus plans her revenge, conscripting her son, the capricious Cupid, who, with his “depraved manners” runs “through other men’s houses at night,” “corrupting the matrimony of all,” and inciting “pernicious desires.” She orders him to arrange, with a prick of his arrow, for Psyche to awaken and fall in love with “a miserable son of the vulgar.” But upon viewing the beauty of Psyche, Cupid himself is so enraptured by her that he defies his mother—a Freudian field day.
Antonio Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (Jean-Pol Grandmont/Wikimedia Commons)
There ensues a sequence of misadventures: Cupid captures Psyche in a paradise where her every wish is met, and he comes to her each night, incognito, and ravishes her, eventually impregnating her. Disobeying his order never to look upon him, one night Psyche shines the light of an oil lamp on Cupid, and discovers that he is not the monster she feared but the god of love himself, with “wings of shining whiteness.” Examining his arrows, she inadvertently pricks herself and falls “in love with Love.”
But a drop of the boiling lamp oil burns Cupid and he springs “on his pinions” to Mount Olympus to convalesce in the “bedchamber of his mother,” while Psyche begins her arduous quest to locate her beloved. Her “desire of finding him,” wrote Apuleius, describing one of love’s great truths, increased “in proportion to the difficulty of the search.”
The Canova moment: Darci Kistler and Kip Houston, with Valentina Kozlova as the Dark Angel behind them (© Paul Kolnik)
Venus, meanwhile, resorts to the “consolation of revenge,” and appoints Mercury to find her rival. Soon enslaved by her, Psyche is given four increasingly dangerous trials. The last requires her to travel to the underworld to retrieve from Proserpina (also known as Persephone), queen of the underworld, a box of beauty for Venus. Though counseled not to open the box, once again, Psyche cannot resist knowing the forbidden. But Proserpina has tricked Venus, and when Psyche opens the box “it contained no beauty, nor indeed anything but an infernal and truly Stygian sleep, which being freed from its confinement, immediately invades her…so that she lay motionless, and nothing else than a sleeping corpse.”
Once recovered from his injury, Cupid flies to Psyche and rouses her with “an innoxious touch of one of his arrows.” It is this very moment when the lovers are reunited after a long separation and much suffering that Canova chose for his commission—and which Balanchine, in turn, replicated in the Elegy of Serenade. It is a tableau of such beauty, such tenderness, such erotic promise. While his arrows and quiver rest on his hip, Cupid cups Psyche’s right breast with one hand while cradling her head with the other as he leans in close to her, his slim, nubile body carried by the magisterial wings of an archangel. Their two faces are poised only inches apart, the kiss imminent.
Apuleius ends the tale with the god of all the gods, Jupiter, for whom Cupid has supplied “many a virgin,” ordering Mercury “to bring Psyche to heaven.” Upon her arrival, Jupiter gives her a cup of ambrosia: “Take this, Psyche,” he says, “and be immortal.” Thus Psyche becomes one of the few women in mythology to become a goddess, and thus Soul attains its desire: immortality. The lovers are wed. The daughter of Soul and Eros is named Pleasure.
Aside from breathing life into Canova’s moment of divine unison, what has the tale of Cupid and Psyche to do with Serenade? Balanchine repeatedly refuted all conjecture about his work: “There are no hidden meanings in my ballets.” Indeed, the links to the myth of the birth of Love itself weren’t hidden at all, but there in layers, in levels, both explicit and muted. He never acknowledged any connection of this myth about the unification of Psyche and Cupid with Serenade. He didn’t need to.
Psyche’s marble mane (© Sailko/Wikimedia Commons)
One might recall that it was in his debut onstage at the Maryinsky, as Cupid, that young Georgi was first entranced by the theater, igniting his passion for dance, and heralding the early deliverance of his destiny. And Canova’s Psyche displays an astounding, luscious, truly mad, marble mane.
Skip Notes
*1 The full name of the work is Symphony No. 6—Pathétique: Fourth Movement, Adagio Lamentoso.
*2 A censored rendition, with a fig leaf on Cupid and an oversized drape on Psyche’s lower body, is also in the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, but it was not there until 1926, two years after Balanchine left Russia.
20. MARIA’S ARABESQUE
The gentle embrace of the Canova-esque Cupid and Psyche pose shifts when the Dark Angel and her wings break from the triune. As she rises up from them, she splits from the man, to whom, until now, she was integral, leaving him and the Waltz Girl alone in their intimacy. Taking five large, considered steps around the couple—she passes carefully outside the Waltz Girl’s elongated legs—she moves from behind them to in front of them and, extending her right leg forward, piqués into an arabesque in precise profile to the audience. This is not, however, a transitional arabesque, or the arabesque of a sequence; this arabesque is the defining leitmotif of the Dark Angel, not only her signature but her core, her essence: her reach is vast.
The man, crouching behind the Waltz Girl, places both his hands under the Dark Angel’s long tulle skirt and around her leg, above the knee, holding her ramrod straight in place. Because the man is now invisibly supporting her, the Dark Angel can sustain her arabesque far beyond her own balancing abilities—though it is still a tricky situation. As if this magical arabesque on pointe were not enough, the man then rotates her supporting leg clockwise while she maintains her position. It is a magnificent event. While she is revolving, she not only holds her arabesque leg high behind her, perpendicular to her torso, but holds her head high too, as if balancing a crown, and her eyes face constantly forward—unlike “spotting” in pirouettes, where we keep our eyes on a single point in front of us and then quickly whip our heads back to that same point.
Rotating thus as a single entity, the Dark Angel magisterially maps the globe. She is sister incarnate to Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s weather vane of Diana, virgin goddess of women, slaves, nature, and the moon, who twirled for three decades at the turn of the twentieth century atop Madison Square Garden in New York, where her gilded body caught the sunlight and glittered for miles around.
The “Lady Higher Up,” as the writer O. Henry called Saint-Gaudens’s golden goddess, was commissioned by architect Stanford White in 1891 for his new design of Madison Square Garden, and White was infamously shot dead on the rooftop, just beneath Diana, fifteen years later amid a love triangle involving the beautiful young model Evelyn Nesbit. This Diana did not sport her usual tunic and boots but—scandalously in 1894—was nude. And she is slim, leggy, small-breasted, narrow-hipped, her hair gathered in a high bun, presaging not only what became known as a “Balanchine dancer” but more specifically his revolving Dark Angel in Serenade, as Diana balances in arabesque on a single demi-pointe, her scarf trailing, her bow drawn before her, like Cupid’s crossbow of love.
Saint-Gaudens’s Diana was, at the time, the highest point in New York’s skyline—forty-two feet taller than Lady Liberty. She was removed from her perch in 1925, and nine years later Balanchine echoed her in Serenade—probably unknowingly, as Diana had been taken down eight years before he arrived in New York. He reincarnated her revolution in the flesh.
The Dark Angel makes her full 360-degree inscription in space not just once, but then again, with increased risk, a second time—in case you missed round one. Repeats in ballet, as in music, are frequent and purposeful and often arrive in threes, but here it’s just two.
For the man and the Dark Angel, this arabesque double rotation is a tricky choreographic moment that can be fraught with trouble—mostly due to the fact that as he pivots her, however carefully he proceeds, the endless yards of tulle of her skirt will wrap into his hands, loosening his secure grip on her leg while also pulling on her skirt and threatening her already perilous balancing act on her right toe tips.
Balanchine did a version of this movement eight years earlier, in 1926, in a ballet for Diaghilev called La Pastorale, starring the elegant, endlessly leggy Felia Doubrovska. But for her—and in pre-1952 versions of Serenade—the skirt was short, so the audience could see the man’s hands turning her. Easier for the dancers, but not so mysterious as it is when his hands are hidden by tulle. This precarious turn is usually rehearsed a lot. A lot.
Minute 24:12.
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Over the decades there have been some memorable Dark Angels, including Mimi Paul, Yvonne Mounsey, and Jillana. Maria Calegari was the reigning Dark Angel of Balanchine’s last years—my own time dancing the ballet. Her presence in our midst onstage was particularly felt in the amplified grandeur of her quiet authority. After Balanchine’s death, she continued dancing the role for yet another decade, during the fragile, transitional years of the company, during which his ballets became, for us, even more literally him. By the time Calegari retired, she had danced the Dark Angel almost one hundred times: it was imprinted in her DNA.
Born in Bayside, Queens, Maria is of Italian heritage, and like so many thousands of little girls, started classes at a local ballet school at age five. But this girl, unlike 99.9 percent of young ballet students, actually became a great ballerina.
Maria entered the big-league School of American Ballet in Manhattan at age fourteen and was invited by Balanchine to join the company at age seventeen, in 1974. She was promoted to soloist six years later, and became a lead dancer in 1983, the year of his death.
While this may sound like a smooth, steady rise to stardom, it was not, and Maria’s stall-stop-start struggle is illustrative of a certain alchemy wrought by Balanchine. He could make a ballerina out of a merely graceful, talented dancer. But he could not do it alone. A real ballerina is magic, but to become one, the dancer, the very rare one, must rise to the occasion and incarnate that tenuous entity called “promise.” Most of us, beautiful and accomplished as we were to even be chosen by Mr. B for the company, did not, could not, would not, go as far as Maria did.
Within two years of joining the company, she was cast by Mr. B in a few solo roles—the fierce and fast-spinning Dewdrop in The Nutcracker; the lead in the sultry, soft Elegy section of Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3; a tight, fiendish solo in Divertimento No. 15—and the Dark Angel in Serenade. It was an unusual, but not unprecedented, occurrence for a young dancer, fresh out of the School, to be singled out, but when Balanchine liked something, he abided by no rules of seniority, even less so any notion of “fairness.” He knew that budding talent needed immediate attention, how quickly a flower can blossom—or wilt. And he loved her name; Maria was his mother’s name. But soon after being showcased, she faltered and went into what she calls her “hibernation,” her “rest period.” Calegari says, “I wanted results without the work. I couldn’t handle the jealousy from other dancers. I also couldn’t handle his attention, so I gained twenty pounds.” Weight gain was often a sign in a ballet dancer, as it would be in an athlete whose profession resides in their body, that she was troubled, conflicted—a way, unconsciously, to put forward movement on hold. “I had a lot to work out,” she explains. “I was so insecure, and I hated the thought of being by myself on the stage. It was just too scary.”
Maria Calegari, age five, in her first tutu and ballet slippers, before a recital (© Richard Calegari)
Balanchine was frustrated with Maria’s inability to handle her own talent and its attendant pressures, and he stopped scheduling her in her various solos. Casting for Balanchine always told the real story, as he once said: “It’s all in the programs.” Maria went to Mr. B’s office for an explanation of his apparent withdrawal of interest.
“He really let me have it,” she says. “He told me the truth, is what he did. He said that dancing was 99 percent skill, not art. He told me I was too ‘fancy-schmancy.’ That I was trying to elaborate without getting to the nitty-gritty. ‘You have to work,’ he said. ‘You have to get in a room and you have to work. I can’t do it for you. You have to do it. You have to be able to jump; you have to be able to turn.’ Then he said, ‘You have no aura,’ which really killed me because that was the one thing I thought I had. He said, ‘If you want to do a matinee for your mother, I’ll give it to you. Or you can go to Ballet Theater and become a soloist.’ It was brilliant, saying everything that was against my real nature. He took a chance: I could react to this by going either straight up—or straight down. I started to cry, those sobs where you can’t control what you’re doing. As I cried, he said, ‘Now, dear, grown-up people do not get hysterical.’ Well, that just lifted me straight into reality. I remember leaving that room and that conversation and I began to change my life.”
