2 3 Throwback Thursday Foretelling | Ballet Webb

Thursday, June 7, 2018

Throwback Thursday Foretelling



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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