Throwback Thursday Foretelling
Dance is a strange and sometimes
superstitious world. The plots of ballets by themselves are a testament to this
fact.
Today I ran across another superstitious
tidbit: did Balanchine foretell his own death in his last piece of choreography
(1980) entitled Davidsbündlertänze?
Some people think so.
Davidsbündlertänze which means ‘Dances of the League of David’, comes from a group of eighteen piano
pieces composed by Robert Shumann who named them after a music society he
created called Davidsbündler.
This society’s purpose was to defend contemporary music from its critics.
But back to
Balanchine. According to a review in the New York Times in 2014 https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/16/arts/dance/city-ballet-revives-davidsbundlertanze-and-union-jack.html
: Davidsbündlertänze
“ends tragically, as the leading man backs offstage into what feels like
despair, seclusion and death, while his wife ruefully watches him go and then
buries her face in her hands.”
In 1983, the
New York Times published Balanchine’s obituary https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/01/obituaries/george-balanchine-79-dies-in-new-york.html
and includes this reference to his cause of death: “Mr. Balanchine, who was 79
years old, died at Roosevelt Hospital of pneumonia, a complication that arose
from a progressive neurological disorder.”
Did this
neurological disorder cause him to foretell his own death? Or is the ballet
just another in a long line of tragic stories? Hmmmmm….I wonder.
From the Big
Blue Book of Ballet Secrets
Dance History Question #135:
“Did Balanchine foretell his own death in his last piece
Davidsbündlertänze?”
Link of the Day:
Quote of the Day:
“Why are
you stingy with yourselves? Why are you holding back? What are you saving
for—for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.”
-
George Balanchine
-
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