All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine by Terry Teachout

 Rooted in my seat, eyes wide with astonishment, I asked myself, Why hasn't anybody ever told me about this?  And what kind of man made it?

For the most part ballet and modern dance have retreated to the periphery of American cultural consciousness, just as dance criticism has all but vanished from the pages of American magazines; you don't have to know who Balanchine was, or what he did, in order to be deemed culturally literate.  Most of my acquaintances regard my love of dance as a harmless idiosyncrasy, and when I assure them that Balanchine was every bit as important as, say Matisse, they look at me as though I tried to tell them that Raymond Chandler was as important as Proust.

Terry Teachout, All in the Dances (Harcourt, 2004)

While many people see Balanchine's The Nutcracker every year how many them return, with or without their children, to see the range of Balanchine's ballets at New York City Ballet?  I took music humanities and art humanities as part of the core curriculum at Columbia but there was no dance humanities and no mention of the brilliant ballets of Balanchine being performed by NYC Ballet fifty blocks south.  I was fortunate to know someone who knew Arlene Croce, the noted writer on dance, and was introduced to Balanchine's choreography in 1971 wondering, as I watched Balanchine's Symphony in C (music by Bizet), why had I never heard of this genius.  From then on I attended NYC Ballet performances every chance I could, trying to catch up on this incredible art form in the same way I did with movies after seeing Citizen Kane at MoMA several years earlier.  I never missed a new Balanchine ballet because I knew I would almost always be surprised and delighted by what I saw; during the last ten years of his life (he died in 1983) Balanchine produced some of his greatest ballets, including Vienna Waltzes, Mozartiana and Union Jack.

Terry Teachout died last month at the age of 66.  I read him in every issue of Commentary, where he wrote every month, as critic-at-large, about music, film and theatre, though he never wrote about ballet that I know of, perhaps because of editor John Podhoretz's opinion "ballet being thought, for reasons that elude me, to be high art, rather than the ludicrous kitsch some of us believe it to be."  I wonder if Teachout tried to take his editor to see some of Balanchine's ballets, as he did with many others.  No matter, he has written a thoughtful and intelligent book about Balanchine, though he saw his first Balanchine ballet in 1987, four years after Balanchine's death, the astoundingly beautiful Concerto Barocco to the music of a Bach concerto for which Teachout had played one of the solo parts in high school.  Teachout eschews technical ballet terms (he is writing a book he wishes he had read after his first Balanchine ballet) but effectively uses his music background to emphasize the incredible musicality of Balanchine's ballets.