Move over Fonteyn and Nureyev, Makarova and Baryshnikov, Astaire and Rogers*: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and George Balanchine were the ultimate dance partners. There is at least one hitch: Mr. B, as he became known in America, was born ten years after Tchaikovsky died. The chronological gap that separates these two Russian artists did nothing to diminish Balanchine’s feeling of kinship with Tchaikovsky, whom he loved “like a father.” For Balanchine, the process of creating ballets to Tchaikovsky’s music was like learning from a beloved mentor. “Without Tchaikovsky’s help, I would not have managed… I’m not smart enough for it.”

George was only nine years old when he was sent from his native Georgia to St. Petersburg to study at the Imperial School of Ballet. Three years later, he played Cupid in a production of The Sleeping Beauty at the Mariinsky Theater, and the experience was formative: “Thanks to The Sleeping Beauty, I fell in love with ballet.”

Of the more than eighty works Balanchine created for his company, New York City Ballet, no fewer than fourteen are set to music by Tchaikovsky. It is fitting that Mr. B chose for his very first ballet in the U.S. Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, a piece that Tchaikovsky referred to as his “favorite child.” The only composer who provided as much music for Mr. B was his dear friend and fellow emigré, Igor Stravinsky, himself also a fervent admirer of Tchaikovsky.

The Tchaikovsky/Balanchine output is rich and varied. There are works that celebrate the sounds and grandeur of Imperial Russia, such as Diamonds and Ballet Imperial, and others that highlight Russian folk music, such as The Nutcracker‘s Trépak and Arabian Dance, the latter of which is a Georgian folk tune. There are narrative works, such as Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, and there are some ballets that are intimate and even quirky, such as Allegro Brilliante and Serenade. Always mining the depths of Tchaikovsky’s output, Mr. B drew attention to many of the composer’s less famous works, such as the second and third piano concertos and the orchestral suites. And surely it was the music geek in Mr. B that led him to bring Act I of The Nutcracker to a dead stop with an extended and hitherto rarely-performed violin solo from The Sleeping Beauty. During the first third of this seven-minute solo, the stage remains dark; it is Mr. B’s way of asking the audience to sit up and take notice of Tchaikovsky’s wondrous music.

Thanks to the legacy of our founder, Barbara Weisberger, Philadelphia Ballet has presented almost the entire Tchaikovsky/Balanchine partnership to Philadelphia’s dance audiences over the last nearly 55 years. How lucky we are to have been partnered with these giants of dance.

Thank you, Peter and George!

* This writer has adored Astaire and Rogers since she was a little girl, and she would never actually ask them to “move over.”

–Beatrice Jona Affron, The Louise and Alan Reed Music Director and Conductor