I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [55]
In 1973, Stravinsky had been dead several years, Balanchine was close to seventy, and Cranko, at forty-five, was close to the age Balanchine had been when they first met in London. New York City Ballet was in its spring season at Lincoln Center, and Cranko’s renowned Stuttgart Ballet was performing across the plaza at the Metropolitan Opera House. Hype and marketing about the Stuttgart Ballet was intense, and the critics were in a laudatory chorus about Cranko’s works, in particular Eugene Onegin.
Savoring poetry, I had read and reread Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in a variety of translations. Once, I had gone to Balanchine to show him a particular passage (chapter six, stanza 31) in Russian and ask his opinion on which was the best of several English translations I had found. He perused them, reflected a moment, and declared, “None. You cannot translate this. Only in Russian can you understand Pushkin. So much more than ‘lump of snow’!”
Onegin has shot his friend, Lensky. Filled with remorse, Onegin cradles Lensky in his arms and witnesses in Lensky’s eyes the curtain of death slowly descend. At that very second, deep in the forest, a sheet of snow (glïba snegovàya), glittering in sunlight, slid silently down a slope.3
Balanchine explained that the phrase “glïba snegovàya” has more meanings than can be translated. The way it is used, the words imply the voyage of a life—past, present, and future—everything one has already done, what one is now, and the myriad possibilities of what one could do and be in the future. Glïba snegovàya evokes a sense that the totality and potential of Lensky has silently slipped away. A mountain of a life, yet vulnerable to melting.
A few days later, Balanchine gave me his four-volume translation by Vladimir Nabokov of Eugene Onegin: “Here is gift for you. In it is everything you need to know about everything.”
Every morning, Balanchine taught a company class. His routine: enter the studio precisely on time; head to the piano; greet the pianist; then, after a few words of conversation, he would snap his fingers, and class would begin. If a practice bag had been left on the piano, or there was a coffee cup or debris left there, he would personally clear it before starting—the practice bag to the corner, the coffee cup or debris in the wastebasket. On rare occasions, he would single out a dancer to greet with a few personal comments, before the snap of his fingers established the tempo for our pliés.
One morning, in 1973, an agitated Balanchine entered, skipped the pianist, and made a beeline for me. “You know, Jacques, last night, I see this ballet, by Cranko, where he took Onegin to make choreography. And the music, you know, different pieces of Tchaikovsky, put together, no attention to harmonies. Bad. And the worst, the letter, the beautiful letter to Tatiana—Pushkin’s poetry. Cranko has man put hand on ballerina behind, between legs, and lift in air, then run around stage like weightlifter in circus.” I put an agreeable expression on my face and nodded. Balanchine continued, “Oh! What he has done to Pushkin and Tchaikovsky.”
“Is it worth seeing, Mr. B?” A moment of silence, a twitch of his nose, and he mumbled, “If you want … you can.”
A little later in June, I was in class, and once again Balanchine entered the room and headed right to me, all excited. “Jacques, did you read paper this morning?” “No, I didn’t.” What did I miss?
“Well, you see what happened to Cranko? He was in airplane, over forty thousand feet, up there near