Program booklet »Shifting Symmetries«

shifting symmetries

The Vienna State Ballet is part of the Vienna State Opera and Vienna Volksoper

shifting symmetries Concertante Hans van Manen In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated William Forsythe Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet George Balanchine

PREMIERE 23 DECEMBER 2023 – VIENNA STATE OPERA

about today’s performance »Choreography is a language. It is like an alphabet, and you do not need to spell words that you already know. The meaning of a language is determined by the context in which it appears. The most important is how you speak this language, and not what you say.« What William Forsythe says here about choreography articulates a view of dance that applies not only to his own works, but is equally valid for artists such as Hans van Manen and George Balanchine. The triple bill Shifting Symmetries opens up a dialogue between these three masters, whose unifying element is their consistent, rigorous approach to the art form of ballet.

For his 1994 ballet Concertante, Hans van Manen was inspired by the expressive variety, dynamic rhythms and powerful character of Frank Martin’s Petite symphonie concertante to create a choreography in which eight dancers, at times joyfully, at times bristling with eroticism, at times filled with aggression, always full of surprises and yet following their own inner logic, join together to create snapshots of dance.

With In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated – created by William Forsythe in 1987 in response to a commission from Rudolf Nureyev for the Ballet de L’Opéra de Paris – a work that fundamentally revolutionised ballet joins for the first time the Viennese repertoire. To the electronic sounds provided by his artistic partner Thom Willems, Forsythe drives classical ballet to the level of absurdity with breathtaking virtuosity, using the pattern of theme and variation and the techniques of deconstruction and manipulation in an atmosphere of eccentric coolness.

George Balanchine’s 1966 Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet is a tribute to Marius Petipa and a celebration of ballet. Inspired by the magnificent orchestral version of Johannes Brahms’s Piano Quartet G minor, Op. 25, which Arnold Schönberg composed in 1937 and proudly labelled »Brahms’s Fifth Symphony«, Balanchine created four minia­ture ballets for a total of 55 dancers: full of elegance in the Allegro, full of romanticism and lyricism in the two middle movements, with intoxicating virtuosity in the finale.

ABOUT TODAY’S PERFORMANCE

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THOMAS MANN DOCTOR FAUSTUS

“For just as little as one can understand what is new and young without being at home in tradition, so, too, love for the old must remain inauthentic and sterile if one closes oneself off to the new, which arises from the old out of historical necessity.”

Liudmila Konovalova

concertante Music Petite symphonie concertante for harp, harpsichord, piano & two string orchestras by Frank Martin Choreography Hans van Manen Musical Direction Matthew Rowe Stage & Costumes Keso Dekker Light Joop Caboort Staging Nancy Euverink Harp Anneleen Lenaerts Harpsichord Sonja Leipold Piano Shino Takizawa Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera WORLD PREMIERE 13 JANUARY 1994 NEDERLANDS DANS THEATER 2, AT & T DANSTHEATER DEN HAAG

ANGELA REINHARDT

“Hans van Manen is a master at questioning order and showing us a new, unknown beauty by crossing boundaries. He challenges conventions: in movement, not in words. And yet, even today, when all conventions in dance have been broken several times, he continues to show us the standard: clarity, rigour, reduction to the essential, the perfect unity of form and content. He has never touched ballet and continues to love the beauty of its geometries, the tension of the upright body.

Van Manen’s structures are light and crystalline: right angles, parallels, reflections, horizontal lines.

Almost every one of his choreographies can be seen as neoclassical with a Balanchinean eye, as a celebration of abstract forms – if there wasn’t always a story hidden within.”

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like a thriller

ANNE DO PAÇO

One after another, eight dancers enter the stage from the right and cross it. The solemn atmosphere evoked by the music is reminiscent of a »défilé«, but there is nothing remotely venerable here. With arms raised or placed on the upper thigh, so typical for Hans van Manen, angled hands with splayed fingers and long strides that command the space yet appear thwarted by a momentary hesitation before the foot touches the floor, we are immediately drawn into the world of a dancemaker whose language is so unmistakable that it can be recognised from the very first step, while retaining an ability to fascinate us over and over again.

The first dancer swings her hips cheekily and turns her backside to the audience.

With just a brief look and an outstretched hand, she establishes contact with another dancer, who now follows her – and a third dancer then joins them. One of them moves his arms sharply, slicing through the air and driving the woman in front of him off the stage. Another practically drags the next dancer out of the wings with his pointed finger. Relationships flare up for a brief moment and are then break off. Often just a glance from the corner of an eye tells of attraction, desire or rejection – this is true of both men and women, who are not only dressed identically in Keso Dekker’s subtly shimmering, rainbow striped, unisex leotards, but also meet as equals. “Looked at from the way roles are conceived in classical dance, it is the man whose status has been elevated in

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Hans van Manen’s works because he is no longer simply used as a partner to serve the ballerina: seen in terms of traditional gender role models, it is the woman who is presented as unusually dominant in Hans van Manen”, writes Katja Schneider.

The introduction of a solo harpsichord ultimately prompts a male solo of extreme virtuo­sity, full of nimble footwork and a lot of fast spins. This is followed by group sequences and pas de deux with ever-new combinations of the eight dancers, male and female, who circle and buzz around each other like “parts of a puzzle” – with their arms at times swinging cheerfully and then folding harshly from the joints and exhibiting all manner of different walks.

The connections are all fleeting, growing consistently out of each other – which is another feature of Hans van Manen’s art: he creates transitions of compelling logic, through which, in the same way that the music works with motifs and themes, every entrance and exit arises out of a precisely co-ordinated network of forms and movement patterns without the action appearing to have been planned out in advance.

Though for a long time Hans van Manen represented the belief that “dance is about dance and nothing else”, all his works consistently show what George Balanchine said of his own, plotless symphonic ballets: “one character on stage is a solo. Two characters on stage are a story.” The “abstract” choreographic form, usually marked by a neoclassical coolness and a clarity in which no step, no gesture, no glance seems surplus to requirements, is always balanced in Hans van Manen’s works by a level of emotion and temperament, informed by acute observation of human behaviour and conveyed by a movement vocabulary based on classical ballet and enhanced with elements of modern dance and everyday movement – without ever being anecdotal or enriched with sentiment – which, remarkably, everyone seems able to understand.

The atmosphere of Concertante is marked by a strange ambivalence, a tension derived from the youthful and playful behaviour of the eight men and women and a lingering aggression with which they confront each other as rivals or simply dismiss an expression of tenderness with a brusque hand movement. Like a thriller, there is always something dangerous in the air, always something brewing. Hans van Manen describes this as follows: “However much we love each other, we never know what someone else is thinking. We try to be considerate but before we know it, we’ve gone and done something wrong again.”

Finally the eight dancers come together in a group scene in which Hans van Manen proves he is an architectural choreographer, forming space out of clear lines and lending his vocabulary, executed in unison here, multiple meanings by twisting its points of focus. At the end of this finale they all bunch up together to form a gang, out of which they gradually dance their way with exuberant leaps and spins back to where they came from at the beginning.

Concertante forms a triad, together with Polish Pieces and Kammerballett, that Hans van Manen created in 1994/95 during his inspiring collaboration with the Nederlands Dans Theater in The Hague. Concertante was devised for the 17- to 20-year-old dancers of the emerging artists’ company NDT 2. And if the ballet is inspired by the joyous audacity of young people who still have their lives ahead of them, in no way is it 9

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a piece exclusively for juniors: indeed, it now forms a natural part of the repertoire of several prestigious dance companies.

Hans van Manen was inspired by Frank Martin’s Petite symphonie concertante for harp, harpsichord, piano and two string orchestras, from which the ballet also takes its title. Frank Martin was one of the most striking Swiss composers of the 20th century and discovered his own unique language in the tension between Schönberg’s twelve-tone technique and traditional tonality. The Petite symphonie concertante was written during the Second World War, in 1944/45, in response to a commission from the conductor Paul Sacher, who directed its world premiere in Zurich in 1946. Sacher suggested that Martin writes a piece in which the instruments that provide the basso continuo in Baroque music be placed in the foreground as soloists. Martin expanded this idea to include contemporary string instruments by having the harpsichord, harp and piano face two groups of the string orchestra. The instrumentation, in combination with a rhythm that drives the work forward, leads to stubbornly brittle sound effects that are at first restrained but then glowingly expressive, though in many cases there is an undercurrent of aggression. In this Concerto grosso, whose mood of extremely playful collective music making is reminiscent of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, Martin combines a neoclassical movement structure of Adagio – Allegro con moto – Adagio – Allegro alla marcia with twelve-tone techniques that he treats very freely.

The first time Hans van Manen heard the work, he was immediately impressed “by the wonderful variety of the music, its forceful nature that makes certain decisions inevitable, and its constant rhythm”. Martin’s highly individual modification of Schönberg’s method of composition is matched by the choreography – if perhaps only unconsciously, as Hans van Manen always stresses that he does not read music and only absorbs music by listening to it: in the forms he creates, Hans van Manen extends and enriches the movement canon of classical, academic dance with his own characteristic elements.

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HORST KOEGLER

“It is Hans van Manen’s very personal secret, that he knows how to humanize even abstract, concertante dance, how to fill it with warm, pulsating humanity. In doing so, he has also emancipated the dancesensitive, mature ballet spectator, who is called upon to discover the story behind the dance in his storyless ballets – to complete the ballet in his imagination.”

Iliana Chivarova, Alisha Brach, Liudmila Konovalova

Liudmila Konovalova, Marcos Menha

Géraud Wielick, Aleksandra Liashenko

in the middle, somewhat elevated Music Thom Willems in collaboration with Leslie Stuck Choreography, Stage, Costumes & Light William Forsythe Stage & Lighting Supervision Tanja Rühl Staging Kathryn Bennetts

WORLD PREMIERE 30 MAY 1987 BALLET DE L’OPÉRA DE PARIS, PALAIS GARNIER, PARIS

WILLIAM FORSYTHE

“Originally created for the Paris Opera Ballet, In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated is a theme and variations in the strictest sense. Making use of academic virtuosity, it extends and accelerates these traditional figures of classical ballet. By shifting the alignment of positions and the emphasis of transitions, the enchainments begin to tilt obliquely and receive an unexpected drive that makes them appear at odds with their own origins.”

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work on what ballet can be GERALD SIEGMUND

“Ballet only exists in theory”, according to the choreographer William Forsythe. “Every dancer has to learn that ballet only exists as potential. Nobody can dance an absolutely correct arabesque. All a dancer can do is use their individual body and ability to move through the position of an arabesque as if through an empty form.” What Forsythe describes here has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of ballet as an art form. Ballet is usually understood as a certain repertoire of movements and step sequences, co-ordinates and body positions that future dancers have to learn so that afterwards they can execute them as perfectly as possible on stage in front of an audience. By contrast, Forsythe emphasises that a position such as the arabesque, which is regarded as the perfect ballet position, only ever exists in its respective incarnations, which will inevitably differ from each other. His attention is focused away from fulfilling a prescribed form and is directed towards the various interesting or uninteresting ways a dancer can take to arrive at that form. As a result, ballet becomes a performative event that is generated and changes with every repetition. In his view, dancers have countless opportunities for movement between an inner impulse to move, the visible execution of a movement that follows and their culmination in a held pose.

The ballet programme Shifting Symmetries traces the development of classical ballet in the 20th century by featuring three choreographers and their iconic works. It draws our attention to three possible ways of approaching this abstract notion of ballet and, from three directions arranged in chronological order, shows a variety of perspectives on an ideal that recedes every time one looks at it, thereby eluding any form of possession. From George Balanchine’s re-vision of Romantic ballet, via Hans van Manen’s playful take on elements of modern dance to William Forsythe’s re-figuration of

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ballet through everything lying along the way that the established ballet codex conceals, these three works each show one thing above all: work on what ballet can be.

William Forsythe, born in New York in 1949, began his career in the junior company of New York’s Joffrey Ballet. In 1973 he joined Stuttgart Ballet, whose Director, the choreographer John Cranko, hired him at an audition while he was touring the USA. It was in Stuttgart in 1976 that he choreographed his first official work for the Noverre Society, a forum for emerging choreographic talent: this was Urlicht, a duet to music by Gustav Mahler. As a result of its great success, in the years that followed he was able to work as a guest choreographer for several prestigious international companies, before taking over as Director of Frankfurt Opera Ballet Company in 1984.

His first full-length ballet for the company, Gänge, indicated the direction in which Forsythe’s work would continue to develop in future. Forsythe devoted his period in charge of Frankfurt Ballet (where from 1990 he would be the first ballet director in Germany to be given the prestigious title ‘Intendant’) to research into ballet and its tradition.

However, the results were anything but academic or dry, thanks to his remarkable feeling for theatre and virtuosic use of devices such as lighting, music, staging and costumes. In addition, he created an ensemble made up exclusively of soloists, who were given a great deal of leeway to improvise and invent movement in their work together and with this a degree of responsibility for their actions. Through multiple variations, his thinking about his chosen subject would return repeatedly to two areas. Firstly, he challenged the composition and structure of classical ballet by exposing its rules and operating principles.

Secondly, he worked on how classical ballet was perceived by its audiences and, by association, how ballets are staged in the theatre. In Gänge he reduced ballet to the demand that the dancers operate in sync with each other. “But together” was the rallying cry in Act Three, which the ensemble embodied before the audience’s eyes by endlessly repeating the same basic steps. In Artifact (1984), he reproduced the four-act structure of Romantic ballet and in the second “white” section, dedicated purely to neoclassical dance, repeatedly dropped the curtain in the middle of a scene, thus breaking the continuity of what the audience was watching. With every curtain, the formation of the corps de ballet changed, with their geometric shapes being clearly visible as building blocks of classical choreography. Sometimes the corps would form a rectangle, sometimes a triangle and then two lines facing each other, each providing a new frame for the soloists in the centre. Forsythe’s ballets are always a process of thinking about ballet while it is happening on stage. Self-reflection is an inbuilt part of Forsythe’s art of dance.

In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated is also a contribution to Forsythe’s research work – in incomparably virtuoso style. Along with The Second Detail (1991), the piece is one of Forsythe’s neoclassical works. In the Middle premiered on 30 May 1987 at the Paris Opera. The piece’s brilliance lies in its aesthetic of radical reduction, focusing simply and solely on the dance, which transcends its boundaries. It was subsequently incorporated as the second part of Forsythe’s full length ballet Impressing the Czar (premiere: 10 January 1988 at the Frankfurt Schauspielhaus). In the middle, somewhat elevated, as the title describes, two large golden cherries hang from the flies, bathed in the bright light from a single spot. It begins with two female dancers standing forlornly on the 19

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otherwise empty and only sparsely lit stage, tracing small circles on the floor with their pointe shoes, stretching their feet as if they are preparing to dance, and waiting for something to happen. The rest of the dancers stand in the background as if they are waiting for their cue. Soon one of the female dancers leaves her position, a male dancer from the group moves forward and begins a duet of synchronic movements with the first female dancer. A third female dancer joins them, at which point the man leaves the group and begins to dance a solo to one side. The dancers move on, rather like a relay race, continuing to form new combinations. Their constant entrances and exits, rapidly changing formations and combinations of solos, duets and small groups, sharing the stage in counterpoint to the soloists, alter the traditional spatial structure of the ballet.

In the Middle repeatedly directs our attention away from the centre of the stage as the main location of the action by opening up subsidiary sites, allowing our gaze to wander.

Here there are always several centres of attention, upsetting the traditional hierarchy between the centre and the periphery. The stage opens up at its fringes and becomes porous to what lies beyond its frame.

The piece also generates its wacky dynamism from the fact that it creates what we call and are used to seeing as ‘ballet dancing’ being created in front of our eyes out of almost everyday movements such as walking and standing still. The effect is like a visual puzzle: suddenly we can see ballet where none could be seen before. And in the next moment it has gone again, only to re-emerge elsewhere. Without any preparatory step sequences, which might herald a lift or lead into a duet, the nine dancers leap directly into their positions, collide with each other, pull at each other, directing their limbs outward and tensing them to the utmost. The golden cherries, hanging at an unreachable height above the stage, provide the vanishing point for the movements on stage. They indicate the ideal of the vertical line with which the ballet body aligns itself by elevating its centre of gravity and attempting to overcome gravity by dancing on pointe. The brusque manner in which the dancers expose their vertical orientation produces firstly a rapid pace and secondly a heightened tension and aggression that strips the dancing of any hint of Romanticism. The music by Thom Willems is just as sharply defined as the movement. The emphatic rhythms of the composition by the Dutchman who first worked with Forsythe in 1985 underlines the intense dynamism of the dancing.

Beginning with a gentle, nervous fluttering over a scattering of melodic particles, the electronic sounds increasingly condense into a pulsating sound texture that covers the movement while also carrying and supporting it.

In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated is also the first of Forsythe’s works in which his analysis of ballet is applied to the bodies of the dancers themselves. Stretching the hips forwards, arching the back backwards, while a fully extended arm reaches upwards, at whose end one hand is bent at a right angle, pointing forwards – Forsythe dismembers the ballet body into single components and reassembles the individual parts, relating them to each other in new ways. The bodies of the dancers are active within themselves and composed spatially in three dimensions. They rarely show only their front side to the audience, presenting their bodies like a flat, two-dimensional image. Instead, individual body parts are pushed up against each other and as a result of their multidirec-

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tional alignment, they break out of the composed, harmonious image of a classical dance body to find a new stability in the greatest possible imbalance.

This newly-won, different stability of the dancing body is also where the difference lies with the choreographies of Hans van Manen. In common with Forsythe’s neoclassical works, van Manen’s œuvre is also distinguished by a clear line, emphasised by Keso Dekker’s leotards fitting closely to the dancers’ bodies. On an empty stage, nothing distracts from the movement, whose reduction down to the essentials to the point of abstraction commands the audience’s full attention. In contrast to Forsythe, however, van Manen leaves the bodies of the dancers intact. To this day his name is associated primarily with Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT), which he co-founded in 1959 and for whom he has choreographed since 1960.

In Concertante, first performed on 13 January 1994 by NDT 2 in Den Haag, four female and four male dancers enter the stage from the right one after another and then exit left.

As if on a screen, they move past us in eight individual solos, in which they play virtuosically around the body’s central axis without ever abandoning it. One dancer rolls her shoulders, another spins in pirouettes, hips circle, bowed bodies snake around each other only to open out again into the space shortly afterwards with outstretched arms. After this, van Manen choreographs an alternating sequence of duets, trios and groups arranged in rows that are notable for their absolute synchronicity and adjust in response to each other, producing a dense web of lines and movements. Concertante draws its underlying tension from the inventive alternation between opening and closing the body and between the flowing suppleness and abrupt firmness of the movements, which – especially in the duets – reveal the complex dynamics of gender relations.

Nederlands Dans Theater, and with it Hans van Manen, was one of the first European companies after 1945 to make an outstanding contribution to a modern understanding of dance and ballet. One strand of the exciting mix of styles that characterises the company’s works can be traced back to George Balanchine, the founder of neoclassicism. William Forsythe always described Balanchine as his great role model, and even dedicated a piece to him, France/Dance, after his death in 1983. Balanchine was trained at the ballet school of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre before he began to choreograph for the world famous Ballets Russes in Paris in 1925, emigrating to the USA in 1933, where just one year later he founded the School of American Ballet together with Lincoln Kirstein, from which New York City Ballet would ultimately emerge in 1948. In his choreographies he extended the vocabulary of classical ballet, making the steps narrower and the movement radius of his dancers wider. His choreography to Arnold Schönberg’s 1937 orchestral version of Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, opus 25 premiered in the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center in 1966. The piece tells no story, being one of Balanchine’s abstract works, whose choreography is orientated solely around the music. It is a large ensemble piece whose four parts each exude a festive character, brilliantly highlighting the virtuosity of the soloists with elegant lifts and broad leaps. It is notable for Balanchine’s handling of larger groups, which he interweaves into ornamental garlands that constantly take on new shapes like a kaleidoscope, thus energising and setting in motion the eye of the viewer.

Shifting Symmetries offers three exciting perspectives on what classical ballet can be.

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WORK ON WHAT BALLET CAN BE

ROLAND BARTHES

“In fact, the meaning of a text can be nothing but the plurality of its systems, its infinite (circular) ‘transcribability’: one system transcribes another, but reciprocally as well: with regard to the text, there is no ‘primary’, ‘natural’, ‘national’, ‘mother’ critical language: from the outset, as it is created, the text is multilingual; there is no entrance language or exit language for the textual dictionary, since it is not the dictionary’s (closed) definitional power that the text possesses, but its infinite structure.”

Hyo-Jung Kang, Brendan Saye

Kiyoka Hashimoto, Brendan Saye

Davide Dato, Hyo-Jung Kang

Arne Vandervelde, Ensemble

brahmsschoenberg quartet Music Piano Quartet No. 1 G minor, Op. 25 by Johannes Brahms orchestrated by Arnold Schönberg Choreography George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust Musical Direction Matthew Rowe Stage Thomas Ziegler Costumes Vera Richter Light Robert Eisenstein Staging Nilas Martins & Christian Tworzyanski Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera WORLD PREMIERE 12 APRIL 1966 NEW YORK CITY BALLET, NEW YORK STATE THEATER

JENNIFER HOMANS

“Petipa, then and later, was a touchstone for Balanchine – a tradition, place, person he could trust and draw upon. It was his garden – an ordered and artful style, like the court to which it belonged, nothing wild or dismembered. It was whole in its way, complete, and it could be trusted and expanded upon; he could make it plotless and his own, in speed, timing, and gesture, without losing Petipa, as he did in many pure dance ballets of immense beauty, pattern, and musical design, including Allegro Brillante, Divertimento No. 15, Theme and Variations, Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet, and Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2.”

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romantic magic & thrilling virtuosity ANNE DO PAÇO

“… and finally, once the music was ripe, dance emerged. And swept everyone away. It crashed through the ballrooms in waves, of people meeting and choosing each other, parting and finding each other again, revelling in the glamour, blinded by the lights and cradled in summer breezes caught in the warmth of women’s dresses. From dark wine and a thousand roses time rushes on into a dream of night.” – Was it these lines from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke, written between 1899 and 1904, that Lincoln Kirstein had in mind when he described George Balanchine’s Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet as a celebration of dance just before the downfall of the Habsburg monarchy that is “drunk on wine and roses”? The ballet is indeed suffused with echoes of a great Austro-Hungarian musical tradition, heard through the ears of the Hamburg-born Johannes Brahms and his Viennese orchestrator Arnold Schönberg. But Balanchine’s choreography also looks to the past: to Marius Petipa’s great divertissements and the fairy-like magic of French Romantic ballet – the world in which Balanchine, born in St. Petersburg in 1904, had grown up, and from which liberated himself in radical fashion without ever burning bridges behind him, first by joining the Ballets Russes in Paris and then going to New York, where he developed an attacking movement language of athletic physicality, with overextended or angular, unbending limbs and created ballets influenced by a stark “black and white” aesthetic.

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He has this in common with Schönberg, whose adoption of atonality around 1909 took all the parameters that had previously applied to music out of play and eventually established dodecaphony as a new system, free from all the hierarchies and gravity of harmonic stress, in contrast with the old major-minor tonal system. However, Schönberg never denied that his roots lay in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and the classical Viennese school, and he saw Brahms as a “progressive” who had made the principle of developing variation productive for his own composition. With his orchestration of the Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25 while in American exile in 1937, Schönberg produced an affirmation in sound that eloquently went beyond his praise of Brahms in words.

For Balanchine too, radically extending the thinking behind classical danse d’école to create a ballet for the 20th century, as demonstrated by the remarkable power and boldness of a piece like Agon from 1957, was just one aspect of his work. He reveals a different aspect in his brilliant homages to classical ballet, of which the Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet is one. The choreography was created for a celebration: after many years of financial difficulties and quarrels about finding a suitable new venue for New York City Ballet, in 1964 Balanchine was finally able to move his company into the New York State Theater (now the David H. Koch Theater) in the Lincoln Center complex. The requirements of this new venue would drive the changes in Balanchine’s work during this period. For one thing, he had to present pieces that could fill an auditorium with 2,500 seats, for another, it was also necessary to adapt to a new, larger stage. In some of his works, such as Symphony in C, he expanded the size of the cast “but mostly the dancers expanded the ballets from within”, Jennifer Homans writes, “as they learned to move farther, faster, bigger”. And for repertoire, he turned more to the past, “to the full-length narrative ballets of his childhood at the Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg” – not only with an eye on the box office, but also in order to give the young dancers he had now recruited from all over the USA in order to increase the size of the company “the education he had received (...): nothing would make them stronger than the strict exigencies of Petipa’s classical form”, as Homans puts it.

While he was looking for a piece of music to which he could create a ballet for the new theatre, Robert Craft – the conductor, assistant to Igor Stravinsky and a great admirer of the Second Viennese School – came up with the apt suggestion of Schönberg’s orchestral version of Brahms’s 1st Piano Quartet. Balanchine was delighted as in this composition he found everything that he had in mind to inaugurate the new stage and pay homage to his incomparable company.

To the four movements of Brahms’s score, Balanchine presents four scenes, which could each stand alone as independent miniature ballets, using a total of 55 dancers.

The first movement (Allegro) can be read as an elegant variation on hierarchy and order within the space. Cast with one female soloist, a featured couple and a corps de ballet made up of eight women and four men, a cycle unfolds of ever-new geometric patterns, flower-like forms and ingenious entanglements, whose features are accentuated by the soloist and the couple. Flanked by and interwoven with a female trio, the Intermezzo (Allegro ma non troppo) that forms the second section is one of the most breathtaking 31

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pas de deux that Balanchine created: a duet in which intimacy between a man and a woman occurs in an extremely fleeting atmosphere, as a permanent shifting back and forth between moments of tenderness and repulsion, of assertiveness and submission, of refusal and attraction, of escape and return, symbolised by a leitmotiv-like lift in which the female dancer presses her stomach against her partner’s upper body while at the same time pushing her head and neck backwards away from him: a gentle butterfly pinned, but also an erotic longing and a woman’s attempt to free herself. In the third scene (Andante con moto), Balanchine returns to the world of ballet blanc and once again explores the beauty of geometric forms and symmetrical lines. The magic of Les Sylphides wafts through this lyric scene for one solo couple, a female trio and a corps de ballet of twelve dancers, however, relations between the two soloists have become more real and human. The piece then concludes with thrilling virtuosity: Brahms’s Rondo “alla zingarese” is made up of simple changes between its main theme and individual episodes in similar style to his Hungarian Dances with its particular atmosphere of echoing bordun and cymbals, refined, yearning melodies and rubati that slow down the flow, culminating in a Csárdás at breakneck speed. Balanchine allows his dancers – a solo couple and a corps de ballet of eight women and eight men – to throw themselves into this music with magnificent verve, savouring the delays with vastly overstretched movements. He supplements his vocabulary with folk dance elements to produce a finale that genuinely brings the stage to the boil and demands considerable endurance from the dancers.

Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet is one of the Balanchine ballets that only very few companies have in their repertoire. It was a personal favourite and as long as he lived he kept it in the repertoire of the New York City Ballet, which still performs the piece today – though not in Peter Harvey’s original setting, but a 1986 stage design by David Mitchell, showing a faint sketch of the façade of Schönbrunn Palace. When the Ballet de L’Opéra de Paris produced the work in 2016, Karl Lagerfeld created a new design, not only reinterpreting the stage but also replacing Karinska’s original costumes. For the production by Hamburg Ballet in 2018, the stage design was by Heinrich Tröger and the costumes by Judanna Lynn. And in Vienna too, the Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet will now be seen with its own designs. Thomas Ziegler – like Karl Lagerfeld in Paris – has captured the atmosphere of a celebration of dance in front of the architecture of an Imperial palace, however, its realism is represented in pointillist form. Vera Richter’s Viennese costume designs emphasise great elegance, conveying historical associations and – in a departure from the original version – giving each section its own range of colours.

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“ brahms’s fifth” CONDUCTOR MATTHEW ROWE IN INTERVIEW

Balanchine’s Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet is based on the Piano Quartet No. 1 in Schönberg’s orchestral version. How would you describe Brahms’s composition?

MR

This piano quartet, written between 1855 and 1861, is one of Brahms’s most infectious and attractive compositions – combining youthful exuberance with a mastery of structure and thematic development. The first movement contains no less than eight different themes all linked by a web of shared motifs and rhythmic elements. It opens with a theme constructed from a series of four 4-note cells that each contain a semitone or half step. (Of course, this is a nice link to Frank Martin’s Petite symphonie concertante.) This movement is followed by a bitter-sweet Intermezzo, which is tender and reflective. To provide contrast there is a fleeting central section that also returns, in a much-shortened version, to close the movement. The slow, third movement is also one of notable contrasts. After an expansive opening, we find ourselves in a lively, rhythmic march – first played pianissimo, then repeated in a thrilling and powerful fortissimo. The reflective, slower music returns, and this brings the music to a gentle conclusion. The fourth movement is a foot-tapping, infectious Hungarian dance, full of excitement and bravura. It comprises a series of separate sections each with a distinctive character and mood. These are followed by a several short cadenzas and the movement ends with a thrilling headlong rush marked molto presto.

What did Schönberg make of this chamber music score?

MR

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Schönberg was undoubtably a brilliant composer, but he was also a master orchestrator, and in 1937 he was invited by Otto Klemperer and

“BRAHMS’S FIFTH”

the Los Angeles Philharmonic to create an orchestral transcription of Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 1. Klemperer and Schönberg knew each other well from Vienna but had both relocated to California to escape the Nazi threat. Despite his ground-breaking innovations to composition techniques – such as the invention of the 12-tone system, Schönberg also had great esteem for his musical predecessors. This was reflected in his extensive output of arrangements and transcriptions of works by Bach, Busoni, Schubert, Mahler, and others. Schönberg greatly admired Brahms’s Piano Quartet and didn’t feel it received the exposure and attention it merited. He said: “it is always very badly played, because the better the pianist, the louder he plays, and you hear nothing from the strings.” He continued “I wanted once to hear everything, and this I achieved.”

While remaining utterly respectful to the original composition, Schönberg drew on a 20th Century palette of instrumental colors and created combinations that Brahms could have only dreamed of in his late orchestral works. The orchestra is expanded and complemented with the addition of both Eb and bass clarinets, and extra percussion (snare drum, glockenspiel, xylophone, and tambourine). Furthermore, the transition from a four-part chamber to a full orchestra work calls for the creation of new melodic lines derived from existing material as well as frequent doublings, a technique seldom employed by Brahms. By doing this, Schönberg managed to highlight details and motivic relationships previously hidden within the chamber textures and bring them into the foreground. Klemperer found the resulting transcription to be “magnificent”, even saying that it makes one “not want to listen to the original quartet anymore”.

Schoenberg himself was also pleased with the final product and often referred to the transcription, cheekily, as “Brahms’s Fifth”.

What do you think inspired Balanchine about this music?

MR

In the hands of Brahms, all four movements of the quartet are constructed with clear and beautiful architecture and laid out in a largely “classical” form. In addition, Brahms was also a master of the principal of developing variation, wherein small motifs are used as building blocks for the creation and unfolding of ideas. Each movement of the Piano Quartet is constructed using this method, and each contains distinctive motivic “cells” that are subjected to continuous variation and development (e.g. extension, compression, rhythmic modulation, harmonic modulation, and reorchestration). These two aspects (both macro and micro) open the door to so many possibilities for choreography. The large-scale groupings and patterns on stage echo the overall structure of the music, while the continuous development and variation give endless possibilities for variety and innovation. In addition, the score, in its orchestral version, glows with colour and light. The Brahms/Schönberg “combination” results in music that brims with contrasting ideas, moods, and images. There are moments of great power and majesty, moments of high energy and excitement, but also moments of extraordinary sweetness, intimacy, and tender dialogue. There are also stunningly beautiful melodies. I find it easy to see why the work was such an irresistible inspiration for a choreographer of George Balanchine’s musicality and genius.

“BRAHMS’S FIFTH”

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Hyo-Jung Kang, Masayu Kimoto

Marcos Menha, Kiyoka Hashimoto

Liudmila Konovalova, Davide Dato

Ketevan Papava, Alexey Popov, Ensemble

Ketevan Papava, Alexey Popov

MATTHEW ROWE – Musical Direction Concertante & Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet Matthew Rowe was born in London. He studied conducting with Colin Metters, George Hurst and John Carewe. As a Fulbright Scholar he continued his studies in Baltimore with Frederik Prausnitz. He has won several international conducting competitions, including the Nicolai Malko and Lovro von Matačić competitions in 1995 and the Leeds Conductors Competition in 1999.

After his debut with Het Nationale Ballet in 2004, Matthew Rowe returned to Amsterdam as a guest conductor in the following seasons, until he was appointed Music Director of the company and Principal Conductor of the Netherlands Ballet Orchestra in 2012. His major productions with the company include Christopher Wheeldon’s Cinderella, Alexei Ratmansky’s Firebird, the world premieres of Shen Wei’s Sacre du Printemps, Hans van Manen’s Variations for Two Couples, Ted Brandsen’s Mata Hari, David Dawson’s Requiem and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Frida, as well as other works by van Manen, Balanchine and Pastor and classics such as Giselle, Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Don Quixote, Coppélia and Romeo and Juliet.

As a guest of the Nederlands Dans Theater, Matthew Rowe has worked with Alexander Ekman, Marco Goecke, Jiří Kylián, Sol León & Paul Lightfoot, Crystal Pite and Hofesh Shechter. He has also conducted productions by the San Francisco Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Finnish National Ballet, Royal Swedish Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet and Polish National Ballet.

In the concert field, Matthew Rowe has worked with all BBC orchestras as well as the major British orchestras including the London Symphony, Scottish Chamber and Scottish National Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic and London Philharmonic Orchestra. He has conducted the Royal Danish and Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, Norwegian Radio and Malmö Symphony, as well as orchestras in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, Mexico and the USA. His opera repertoire includes Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Le nozze di Figaro, Bizet’s Carmen, Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins, Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann and several world premieres. Another focus of Matthew Rowe’s repertoire is the live accompaniment of silent films, including performances of Chaplin’s City Lights, Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.

Matthew Rowe makes his debut at the Vienna State Opera with the premiere of Shifting Symmetries.

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BIOGRAPHIES

HANS VAN MANEN – Choreography Concertante Dutch-born Hans van Manen is one of the most significant choreographers of our time. He started his career in 1951 as a member of Sonia Gaskell’s Ballet Recital followed by engagements at the Nederlandse Opera Ballet and Roland Petit’s company in Paris. In 1960 he began to work with the Nederlands Dans Theater as a dancer, choreographer and from 1961 to 1971 as Artistic Director. In 1973 he was appointed Choreographer in Residence at the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam. From 1988 he was again associated with the NDT as a resident choreographer before returning to Dutch National Ballet in 2003.

Hans van Manen’s œuvre counts more than 120 works, carrying his unmistakable signature. His ballets belong to the repertoire of many well-known companies worldwide. In addition to his choreographic work, the artist achieved a high reputation as a photographer. In 2003 he founded the Hans van Manen Foundation.

He has received numerous awards, including the Sonia Gaskell Prize for his complete works in 1991 and the Choreography Prize of the Association of Directors of the Schouwburg and Concertgebouw Amsterdam. In 1992 Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands made him an officer in the Order of Knights of Orange-Nassau. In 1993 he was awarded the German Dance Prize. In 1996 the Dutch COC awarded him the Bob Angelo Medallion for “the way in which he portrays men and women, human relations and sexuality in his ballets and photography”. In 1997 he received the Gino Tani International Prize in the category of Dance. In 1998, at the Edinburgh International Festival, Hans van Manen was honoured with a retrospective and the Archangel Award. In 2000 he received the Erasmus Prize, in 2004 the Music Award of the German city Duisburg, in 2005 the Prix Benois de la Danse for Lifetime Achievement and the Grand Pas Award. In 2007 the city of Amsterdam honoured the artist on his 75th birthday with the appointment as Commandeur in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw and a three week festival. In 2013 he was named Patron of the National Ballet Academy, received the Golden Age Award and another Prix Benois, and in 2017 with the title Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres the French State’s highest honour in the field of arts.

Since the Viennese Premiere of Adagio Hammerklavier and Twilight in 1977, a number of works by Hans van Manen have been performed with the Vienna State Opera and State Ballet, including Five Tangos, Grand Trio, Lieder ohne Worte, Große Fuge, Bits and Pieces, Black Cake, Solo, Trois Gnossiennes and most recently Live and Four Schumann Pieces.

BIOGRAPHIES

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WILLIAM FORSYTHE – Choreography, Stage, Costumes & Light In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated Raised in New York and initially trained in Florida with Nolan Dingman and Christa Long, William Forsythe danced with the Joffrey Ballet and later the Stuttgart Ballet, where he was appointed Resident Choreographer in 1976. Over the next seven years, he created new works for the Stuttgart ensemble and other ballet companies around the world. In 1984, he began a 20-year tenure as director of the Ballet Frankfurt, where he created works such as Artifact (1984), Impressing the Czar (1988), Limb’s Theorem (1990), The Loss of Small Detail (1991), Eidos: Telos (1995), Kammer/Kammer (2000) and Decreation (2003). After the closure of the Ballet Frankfurt in 2004, Forsythe established a new, more independent ensemble, The Forsythe Company, which he directed from 2005 to 2015. Works produced by this ensemble include Three Atmospheric Studies (2005), Human Writes (2005), Heterotopia (2006), I don’t believe in outer space (2008) and Sider (2011). Forsythe’s works developed during this time were performed exclusively by The Forsythe Company, while his earlier pieces are prominently featured in the repertoire of virtually every major ballet company in the world. More recently Forsythe has created original works for the Ballet de L’Opéra de Paris, English National Ballet, Boston Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Ballet of La Scala di Milano, as well as A Quiet Evening of Dance produced by Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London and The Barre Project (Blake Works II) created for the digital stage.

Forsythe has been commissioned to produce architectural and performance installations. These Choreographic Objects, as he calls these works, have been presented in numerous museums and exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial New York, Louvre Paris, the Wexner Center for the Arts Columbus, Tate Modern London, MoMA New York, the Biennale di Venezia, 21_21 Design Sight Tokyo, ICA Boston, Folkwang Museum Essen, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and Kunsthaus Zürich. In collaboration with media specialists and educators, Forsythe has developed new approaches to dance documentation, research, and education. Core elements of his CD-ROM Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye, developed with the ZKM Karlsruhe are accessible online.

In 2002, Forsythe was chosen as the founding Dance Mentor for The Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative. He is an Honorary Fellow at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance London and holds an Honorary Doctorate from The Juilliard School New York.

The Vienna State Ballet has shown in its repertoire Slingerland Pas de deux, The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, The Second Detail and Artifact Suite.

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BIOGRAPHIES

THOM WILLEMS – Music In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated Dutch composer Thom Willems studied composition with Louis Andriessen and electronic music with Jan Boerman and Dick Raaijmakers at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. Since 1985, he has been a close artistic partner of choreographer William Forsythe, for whose ensembles Ballett Frankfurt and The Forsythe Company he has composed over 65 works. His electronic scores are characterized by subtle soundscapes, insistent rhythms and urban sounds and are an intrinsic part of the architecture of Forsythe’s choreographies. Among his best-known works are In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated (1987), commissioned by Rudolf Nureyev for the Ballet of L’Opéra de Paris and premiered by Isabelle Guérin, Sylvie Guillem, Laurent Hilaire and Manuel Legris as soloists, among others, and The Loss of Small Detail (1991). Other key works include Impressing the Czar (1988), Limb’s Theorem (1990), A L I E / N A(C)TION (1992), Eidos/Telos (1995), One Flat Thing, reproduced (2000), Sider (2011) and Study #3 (2013).

Thom Willems’ music, in combination with works by William Forsythe, is represented in the repertoire of 68 ballet companies in 26 countries worldwide, including the New York City Ballet, Het Nationale Ballet Amsterdam, San Francisco Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, Ballet de L’Opéra de Paris, Ballet de L’Opéra de Lyon, Corpo di ballo del Teatro alla Scala di Milano, Semperoper Ballett Dresden, Nederlands Dans Theater, Royal Ballet and English National Ballet. In 1997, Forsythe’s short film Solo was presented with Willems’ music at the Whitney Biennial.

His work is used by fashion designers, e.g. Issey Miyake and Versace, and was performed at the opening of Tate Modern in London in 2000.

Further choreographers he has worked with include Daniel Ezralow, Daniel Larrieu and Krisztina de Châtel. In 2007 he was involved with Tadao Ando’s research center for design, 21_21 Design Sight in Tokyo, and in 2008 with Matthew Ritchie’s installation The Morning Line for Thyssen-­Bornemisza Art Contemporary.

BIOGRAPHIES

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GEORGE BALANCHINE – Choreography Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet George Balanchine, born Georgi Balantschiwadse in St Petersburg in 1904, was one of the most influential pioneers of neoclassical ballet. His life, which took him from St Petersburg to various places in Western Europe and finally to New York, reads like a journey through the history of dance over the last 100 years: rooted in the ballet world of Tsarist Russia and strongly influenced by the aesthetics of Petipa, he joined the Ballets Russes and thus the avant-garde movement in Paris and changed his name to George Balanchine. In 1928 he created his first masterpiece, Apollo, for Diaghilev’s troupe, laying the foundations of his own aesthetic.

In 1933, Balanchine was invited to the United States by Lincoln Kirstein, a prominent industrialist and patron of the arts, which gave him the opportunity to focus on developing his style with specially trained dancers. Kirstein persuaded him to become director of a new ballet school, with a view to forming his own company. The School of American Ballet opened in 1934 with an educational concept specially formulated by Balanchine. From the training of dancers, which always formed the basis of his understanding of dance, Balanchine’s path led him to choreography – and what was originally intended as a kind of exercise became his first American masterpiece, Serenade.

Further works followed at the Metropolitan Opera, for Hollywood and for Broadway, and new ballets were created for his company, which from 1948 became known as the New York City Ballet and soon became one of the world’s leading dance companies. In addition to many new creations, including Concerto Barocco (1941), The Four Temperaments (1946) and Orphée (1948), Balanchine built up an extensive repertoire based on his existing works. He was able to focus on refining his aesthetic, which had one aim in particular: to make dance, with the utmost clarity, the central means of making music with the body. The incarnation of his style, and one of the most important examples of New York modernism in the 1950s, was the ballet Agon. Other important works over the next two decades included Liebeslieder Walzer (1960), Jewels (1967), Symphony in Three Movements (1972), Stravinsky Violin Concerto (1972), Chaconne (1976), Davidsbündlertänze (1980), and Mozartiana (1981).

When George Balanchine died in New York on 3 May 1983, he left behind an œuvre comprising 425 ballets, many of which are still part of the repertoire of major companies worldwide, including the Vienna State Ballet, which has regularly presented choreographies by the neo-classicist since 1973.

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BIOGRAPHIES

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Shifting Symmetries Hans van Manen / William Forsythe / George Balanchine Season 2023/24 PUBLISHER Vienna State Opera GmbH, Opernring 2, 1010 Vienna General Director: Dr. Bogdan Roščić Administrative Director: Dr. Petra Bohuslav Director & Chief Choreographer Vienna State Ballet: Martin Schläpfer Financial Director Vienna State Ballet: Mag. Simone Wohinz Editorial Team: Mag. Anne do Paço, Nastasja Fischer MA, Mag. Iris Frey Design & Concept: Fons Hickmann M23, Berlin Image Concept Cover: Martin Conrads Layout & Type Setting: Miwa Meusburger Producer: Print Alliance HAV Produktions GmbH, Bad Vöslau

PERFORMING RIGHTS Concertante © Hans van Manen Petite symphonie concertante by Frank Martin © Universal Edition AG, Vienna In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated © William Forsythe represented by Forsythe Productions GmbH, Frankfurt am Main / The music by Thom Willems © Boosey & Hawkes · Bote & Bock GmbH, Berlin Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet © The George Balanchine Trust, New York. The Ballet is presented by arrangement with The George Balanchine Trust and has been produced in accordance with the Balanchine Style® and Balanchine Technique® service standards established and provided by the Trust.

Performance material Piano Quartet No. 1 G minor, Op. 25

by Johannes Brahms orchestrated by Arnold Schönberg: Bosworth Music GmbH, Berlin TEXT REFERENCES About today’s performance, the texts by Anne do Paço and Gerald Siegmund (English translation: David Tushingham) as well as the interview by Anne do Paço with Matthew Rowe are original contributions to this programme booklet. Reproduction only with the permission of the Vienna State Ballet/Dramaturgy.

P. 3: Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus (English translation: John E. Woods). New York 1997 / p. 6: Angela Reinhardt: Scharf umrissene Porträts des Menschen. Hans van Manen zum 85. Geburtstag. In: Ma­gazine Ballett am Rhein Düsseldorf Duisburg b – No 8, Season 2017/18 (English translation: Anne do Paço) / p. 11: Koeglerjournal, 11 July 2002, www.tanznetz.de / p. 16: William Forsythe on the occasion of the Paris premiere of In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated: provided by Forsythe Productions GmbH / p. 22: Roland Barthes: S/Z (English translation: Richard Miller).

Oxford 1990 / p. 28: Jennifer Homans: Mr. B. George Balanchine’s 20th Century. New York 2022.

PHOTO CREDITS Cover: Sébastien Preschoux: Nocturne (2009) © Bildrecht, Vienna 2023 All stage photos from the dress rehearsal on 20 December 2023 photographed by © Ashley Taylor / p. 7: © Gert Weigelt / pp. 17 & 43: © Julian Gabriel Richter / pp. 29 & 45: © Martha Swope/The New York Public Library Bill Rose Theatre Division / p. 41: © Frances Marshall, Marshall Light Studio / p. 42: © Sebastian Galtier / p. 44: © Jodokus Driessen.

Right Owners who could not be reached are requested to contact the editorial team for the purpose of subsequent legal reconciliation.

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