Notes on Frederick Ashton’s choreographic anticipations of George Balanchine’s “Agon”
George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton were born the same year. Balanchine, educated in ballet and music in St Petersburg (Petrograd) and then given a second education by Serge Diaghilev in the West, started faster and more prestigiously; but the two men became friends in London before Balanchine’s departure for New York in 1933. (Lincoln Kirstein’s handwritten diaries reveal that it was Ashton who introduced him to Balanchine that spring. In later years, Kirstein liked to remember that it was Pavel Tchelitchew, in Paris, who introduced him to Balanchine, but his diaries show that he went to Paris without ever meeting Balanchine.)
Balanchine, at his most insecure and least generous when any other choreographer was praised, tended only to bestow praise in patronising circumstances to those who worked for his own company; and yet he liked and admired Ashton from their early days (knowing him as “Freddy”, the name Ashton far preferred to “Fred”). Since Diaghilev went to see Ashton’s first ballet, A Tragedy of Fashion, twice, it’s possible that Balanchine, then Diaghilev’s main choreographer, saw it too: its young female dancer, Diana Gould, who greatly impressed Diaghilev, would later dance for Balanchine in 1933.
Ashton reached New York not long after Balanchine. As choreographer-director of Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), he choreographed on American soil before Balanchine made Serenade. Four Saints was not just a success but an avant-garde success: words by Gertrude Stein; music by Virgil Thomson; all African American cast; transferring from Hartford, Connecticut, to Broadway.
Balanchine’s Russian colleague in directing the School of American Baller, Vladimir Dimitriew, would rail at him for not developing other choreographers. In one of those diatribes, Dimitriew once singled out the one and only young choreographer Balanchine was known to like: Ashton. (Dimitriew spoke dismissively of Ashton. Balanchine replied not a word.)
The two men’s mutual admiration resumed after the Second World War. Ashton’s company, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet (later the Royal Ballet), became New York’s and America’s favourite visiting company in 1949, visiting New York and America every other year, sometimes more frequently, for twenty-seven years. Ashton was invited to create two ballets on New York City Ballet (Illuminations, 1950; Picnic at Tintagel, 1952); Balanchine came to London (staying in Ashton’s house) to stage Ballet Imperial for the Sadler’s Wells company in 1950, returning some months later to create Trumpet Concerto (Haydn) for Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet. While Ashton was in New York to create Illuminations, Kirstein invited Ashton to advise him and Balanchine on New York City Ballet’s important 1950 Covent Garden season: it was Ashton who advised that Balanchine’s Serenade (1934) - a ballet previously always danced in skirts ending at the knee or much higher - should be given in “flowing robes”. As soon as Ashton became director of the Royal Ballet in 1963, he arranged for Serenade and Apollo to join Ballet Imperial in repertory at Covent Garden.
There were frictions between the two men, bur what matters much more is that the two men created a culture of inventive ballet classicism that spread across the Western world. And their admiration for each other is most apparent in the ways they borrowed choreographic ideas from each other. I have always been struck by how the highly sexual duet in Ashton’s Tiresias (1951, seen in New York in 1955) featured (see photograph 1) one configuration in which the ballerina (Margot Fonteyn), on point, held her raised foot behind her, thus anticipating the pas de deux of Agon (1957). Recently, I’ve spotted how a comparable point is true of a photograph (see no 3) of Ashton’s La Péri (1956): the ballerina (Fonteyn again), on point, extends her line in arabesque penchée while the man, supporting her hand with his, flattens himself on the floor. I know of no pas de deux before La Péri in which the man abased himself to floor level while supporting the ballerina. La Péri seen in New York in September 1957 at the Metropolitan Opera House; Agon, with the man lying yet flatter, had its world premiere less than three months later. Agon, still radical after more than sixty years, has become a classic: it’s startling to see that in the shorter-lived Tiresias and La Péri Ashton seems to have been paving the way.
Sunday August 15
1: Margot Fonteyn as the female Tiresias with John Field in Frederick Ashton’s Greek ballet “Tiresias” (1951). The pas de deux was so strikingly sexual that Fonteyn’s husband stopped her from dancing it, not wanting the public to know that side of her. Ashton then gave the role to Violetta Elvin, whose new fiancé soon said the same. (This recalls the sopranos Kirsten Flagstad and Lotte Lehmann, who only once appeared onstage together. Flagstad is said to have said of Lehmann “She behaved onstage as a married woman should only behave in private with her husband.”) After Elvin’s withdrawal, Ashton withdrew “Tiresias” from repertory. Photograph: Roger Wood.
2: Arthur Mitchell supporting Diana Adams in the pas de deux of George Balanchine’s “Agon” (1957), in a 1960 performance for Montréal TV.
3: Michael Somes supporting Margot Fonteyn in Frederick Ashton’s “La Péri” (1956). This extended pas de deux (Ashton had choreographed an earlier version for himself and Alicia Markova in 1931) had its New York premiere in September 1957. Photograph: Houston Rogers.
4: Arthur Mitchell, on the floor, supporting Diana Adams in the pas de deux of George Balanchine’s “Agon”, which had its premiere in December 1957. (This photo is from the 1960 Montréal TV performance.) Whereas Fonteyn’s leg and arm make a single penchée line, the contrast between Adams’s right arm and the rest of her line is striking - whereas her right arm and Mitchell’s left one make a single sweep.