Balanchine’s ‘Apollo’: On Gods, Ballet and the Creation of Poetic Art

When the choreographer George Balanchine created dances, he generally confined himself to matters of pure form: These steps go this way, with this rhythm, these dynamics. He allowed dancers and audiences to work out meanings, if any, for themselves.

With one ballet alone Balanchine (1904-83) departed from this policy: “Apollo” (1928), and in particular its title role. This masterpiece, the oldest that Balanchine kept in repertory, returns to open New York City Ballet’s winter season on Jan. 22, with new Apollos. The role is a matchless adventure for any performer; but when Balanchine himself coached it, he moved and spoke as with no other role.

Three leading interpreters — Jacques d’Amboise (who first danced the role for Balanchine in 1957), Edward Villella, (1960s), Ib Andersen (1980) — attended an “Apollo” seminar last summer at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Each had created roles in Balanchine premieres and had inherited other lead roles — but all recalled that, for Apollo, Balanchine brought a new kind of drama to his tuition. Though he never said so, he prompted others to believe that this was his most autobiographical role: a portrait of the artist as a young god.

As with other roles, Balanchine demonstrated more than he spoke; and he moved with a skill every Apollo found brilliant. Mr. Villella had been taught the role by another ballet master; when he showed Balanchine what he had learned, Balanchine responded tartly “No poetry!” And part of the revelation that followed was the thrilling way that Balanchine — dressed that day in a suit — showed the role’s inner life. But all these Apollos also remember that the choreographer used words to open up “Apollo” as drama.

Balanchine spoke of imagery in other ballets, too. But with “Apollo,” the imagery came in a flood, revealing the sustained wealth of references he had in mind. Most Balanchine ballets are high poetry; but the creation of poetic art is the very subject matter of “Apollo.”

Most myths of Apollo show him as fully divine, the mature god of music and the arts. The composer Igor Stravinsky, however, had conceived the Apollo of this ballet as a raw youth, still finding his feet. This was the vision that Balanchine fulfilled.

Toward the ballet’s end, this young god suddenly rests his head in exhaustion on the hands of his three muses (one of several touching images of vulnerability). Then, at a turning point in the music, he lifts his head, as if hearing something offstage. This, Balanchine made clear to his interpreters, is the call from Zeus — Apollo’s father and the king of the gods. From then on, the ballet is a leave taking. Apollo is departing to join his father on Olympus; but the muses do not want to let him go.

For Balanchine, the whole ballet is conducted as if Zeus were watching Apollo graduate to godhood. Apollo has two solos: Each shows a growth in mastery. The first has a series of steps in which the young god’s supporting leg gives way beneath him. With each new step, however, Apollo finds more strength and is able to view more of the world. Near the end of this solo, Mr. Andersen said, there’s a moment when Apollo looks up and out, as if to say, “Hi, Daddy!”

Mr. d’Amboise is clear that Apollo is “a wild, untamed youth who learns nobility through art.” Balanchine, he said, loved to recall the Paris critic who, reacting negatively to the original 1928 production, said, “Whoever saw Apollo on his knees?” (Balanchine’s response: “Whoever saw Apollo?”)

Sure enough, Apollo goes onto both knees soon after the three muses — Terpsichore, Calliope and Polyhymnia — have joined him. In that position, he holds his lute vertically aloft, while the muses, around him in a ring, incline toward him, like birds drinking from a pool. The lute, rising like a central fountain, is, Mr. d’Amboise said, quoting Balanchine, “a sacrifice.”

Apollo dances his second solo after each muse has shown him what she knows. Calliope (muse of lyric poetry) and Polyhymnia (mime) have elements of labor in their solos, of trial and error. Terpsichore (dance), however, is more fully the mistress of experimentation: Her solo is characterized by a larger playfulness that satisfies Apollo.

Early on in his solo he kneels again, but now to extend his arms powerfully behind him as he bends his torso and head forward. This is “the eagle,” with wings spread: a crucial image that Balanchine emphasized to each male dancer. The eagle is perched on a crag; he sees all.

In what follows, Apollo remains exploratory. There’s a famous “neon-light” image, where Apollo opens and closes his two hands in alternation. (Balanchine often said he took this from the illuminated signs in Piccadilly Circus, London.) Later on, Apollo kicks the air: as several of Balanchine’s Apollos remember, he’s “playing soccer.”

The eagle, the Piccadilly Circus neon sign, the soccer-playing are images that Balanchine seems to have shared with all his Apollos. Other details he gave to some Apollos but not others. Peter Martins, a long-term Apollo interpreter, has said that he was told, for one series of quick-prancing steps, “You’re dancing on hot coals.”

Though Balanchine looked back on “Apollo” as a milestone ballet from which he learned, in later years he went through many seasons without reviving it. In 1979, when he brought it back to repertory for Mikhail Baryshnikov, he cut its Prologue and changed its ending in ways about which people still argue fiercely. Nonetheless, once he was working on it, he did so with passionate detail: “The only ballet on which he was super-specific,” Mr. Andersen said.

Several of the Balanchine alumni at the “Apollo” seminar agreed the role of Apollo was where Balanchine the creative artist came closest to a self-portrait. Yet it also shows us sides of Balanchine few ever saw: The young god Apollo is effortful in his search for inspiration as the mature, phenomenally assured Balanchine never seemed. But the young god reveals himself in eagle imagery above all; and with “Apollo” Balanchine found his own commanding, eagle-eyed view of his art.