{"id":339899,"date":"2026-09-07T13:26:36","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T13:26:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/339899\/"},"modified":"2026-09-07T13:26:36","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T13:26:36","slug":"new-york-city-ballet-celebrates-the-60th-anniversary-of-balanchines-jewels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/339899\/","title":{"rendered":"New York City Ballet Celebrates the 60th Anniversary of Balanchine’s Jewels"},"content":{"rendered":"

Debuting in 1967, George Balanchine<\/a>\u2019s Jewels was a smash hit. Writing for The New York Times, amidst an abundance of effusive praise, dance critic Clive Barnes went so far as to claim, \u201cIt is open to doubt whether even George Balanchine has ever created a work in which the inspiration was so sustained, the invention so imaginative or the concept so magnificent.\u201d New York City Ballet Co-founder Lincoln Kirstein said, \u201cThe very title sounded expensive before any step was taken,\u201d and the glitter and glam paid out in gold.<\/p>\n

The story of the ballet\u2019s inception is well-known, and characteristic of Balanchine\u2019s instincts, which were often as artistically innovative as they were commercially sound. In 1955, world-renowned violinist and Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9 Nathan Milstein hosted his close friend Balanchine and the businessman Claude Arpels, Jr.; over dinner, they discussed gemstone mining as the potential creative impetus for a new ballet. More than a decade later, Balanchine visited the Fifth Avenue salons of Van Cleef & Arpels and, as Kirstein noted in the 1967 program notes, \u201cSo impressed was Mr. Balanchine by the beauty of the jewels he saw there that he decided to try to capture it forever.\u201d NYCB had moved to the New York State Theater, with its vast stage, just three years prior. The idea of coupling a large cast with the sparkle of jewels, and expansive footwork to bring them to radiant life, was quite attractive.<\/p>\n

\"Mira<\/p>\n

George Balanchine’s Jewels, “Diamonds,” performed by the New York City Ballet
\n (Erin Baiano)<\/p>\n

Amidst the landscape of popular ballets\u2014productions like The Nutcracker or The Sleeping Beauty, for example\u2014Jewels is uniquely abstract, and is generally considered the first evening-length, plotless ballet. At its debut, Jewels was presented with-out an overarching title; the program included only the simple, one-word names for each of the three sections: \u201cEmeralds,\u201d\u201cRubies,\u201d and \u201cDiamonds.\u201d (In keeping with his general approach to such matters, Balanchine declined to provide further explanation for the \u201cmeaning\u201d of the ballet, insisting that \u201cThe ballet had nothing to do with jewels. The dancers are just dressed like jewels.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The ballet begins, with \u201cEmeralds,\u201d in France, where Balanchine danced and choreographed for the Ballets Russes under the impresario Serge Diaghilev, and where Kirstein first witnessed Balanchine\u2019s work. This section is scored to excerpts from Gabriel Faur\u00e9<\/a>\u2019s incidental music for the 1898 Maurice Maeterlinck<\/a> play Pell\u00e9as et M\u00e9lisande and for Edmond Haraucourt\u2019s 1889 play Shylock, adapted from Shakespeare\u2019s The Merchant of Venice. Though Faur\u00e9 never achieved the popularity of Claude Debussy<\/a>, who, along with Impressionism as a classical genre, succeeded Faur\u00e9, the earlier composer\u2019s noble and crystalline approach to these pieces evokes \u201cthe France of elegance, comfort, dress, perfume,\u201d per Balanchine. This sense of reminiscence and romance permeates the choreography as well, with languid footwork and expressive arm movements that recall the French ballets of the 19th century, and Karinska similarly turned to the Romantic era for the costumes.<\/p>\n

\"Isabella<\/p>\n

George Balanchine’s Jewels, “Rubies,” performed by the New York City Ballet
\n (Erin Baiano)<\/p>\n

Following \u201cEmeralds,\u201d \u201cRubies\u201d bounds onto the stage with the vibrancy and immediacy of jazz-age America. For this section of the ballet, Balanchine selected Stravinsky\u2019s 1929 Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, which Kirstein called \u201cOne of the liveliest of [the composer\u2019s] neo-classic works.\u201d Stravinsky had originally composed the piece as a solo for himself when he was touring as a pianist; he relied on the 16th-century German theorist Michael Praetorius\u2019s definition of a capriccio as \u201ca fantasy with a freely organized form allowing flights of imagination.\u201d Thus the piece is playfully alive with the influences of American jazz, showtunes, and other popular stylings, and reflects Balanchine and Stravinsky\u2019s shared embrace of their new home\u2019s unique artistic contributions. By the time he\u2019d begun work on \u201cRubies,\u201d Balanchine had already collaborated directly with Stravinsky, in America, on Orpheus (1948) and Agon (1957), and used a healthy number of Stravinsky\u2019s pieces for ballets, including for the similarly watershed Firebird in 1949. Their relationship was well established, and their shared history of relocations to France and then the United States only served to further strengthen the bond. Karinska carried this expat enthusiasm into the flapper-esque costumes, which feature headdresses for the women that are notably similar to the Statue of Liberty\u2019s crown.<\/p>\n

With \u201cDiamonds,\u201d the sensational finale of Jewels, the ballet shifts to the earliest phase of Balanchine\u2019s creative life\u2014the city of St. Petersburg, the Mariinsky Theater, and the Imperial Ballet of his youth. For such regality and nostalgia, the choreographer turned to the quintessential Russian ballet composer: Peter\u00a0lyitch Tschaikovsky. Composed in 1875, around the same time as Swan Lake, \u201cTschaikovsky\u2019s third symphony is not as familiar as his later ones,\u201d wrote Kirstein, \u201cbut its full-blown majesty and dominating melodies recommend it as music for the great panoply of the opera-house stage.\u201d For \u201cDiamonds,\u201d Karinska invented the \u201cpowder puff\u201d tutu; the combination of a shorter tulle skirt with a wired hoop lends the dancers a dreamy, floating quality. The look befits the way in which \u201cDiamonds\u201d is both looking backward, and facing beyond; it is a work that symbolizes timelessness, as much as Balanchine\u2019s personal past.<\/p>\n

Jewels are by their very nature fixed, hard-edged objects of unchanging beauty. And yet, what the dancers and audiences of Balanchine\u2019s Jewels have remarked upon so frequently is the freedom the ballet exemplifies: as a representation ofBalanchine\u2019s history of relocations and avant garde artistic innovations\u2014and often surprising musical choices\u2014and as a canvas for our collective imaginings throughout its distinctive three movements. In 1983, Arlene Croce wrote in The New Yorker that Jewels is \u201cunsurpassed as a Balanchine primer, incorporating in a single evening every important article of faith to which this choreographer subscribed and a burst of heresy, too.\u201d That push and pull of window-display sparkle and unbridled, dazzling expression ensures that the ballet\u2019s allure will continue far beyond its 60th anniversary this season.<\/p>\n

Visit\u00a0NYCBallet.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Debuting in 1967, George Balanchine\u2019s Jewels was a smash hit. Writing for The New York Times, amidst an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":339900,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,11,10],"class_list":["post-339899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339899\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/339900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}