In Balanchine’s Beautiful Forest
Jennifer Homans writes: ‘When George Balanchine (pictured, with Jacques d’Amboise) choreographed “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for the New York City Ballet in 1962, he had been living with Shakespeare’s play for most of his life. He was fifty-eight years old and recalled playing an elf or bug in a production when he was a child in St. Petersburg in the years before the 1917 revolution. He liked to say that he knew the play “better in Russian than a lot of people know it in English,†and his dancers remember that he quoted the text in English freely from memory. It was a play, and as importantly a musical score—Felix Mendelssohn’s overture and incidental music—that seemed to follow him through life.’
