This winter, Jewels reappeared in New York City Ballet repertory the way it does every few years, like a mirage of overwhelming majesty, a floating castle set amid fairy forests and ancient icecaps, a castle guarding its secrets.[1] The night before the first performance, NYCB held a seminar on Jewels for its Guild members. Dancers from the ballet’s premiere on April 13, 1967—Conrad Ludlow, Suki Schorer, and Edward Villella —were onstage to speak about that night, those steps, the rehearsals, and, of course, the ballet’s choreographer, George Balanchine. The moderator, Francis Mason, began by explaining that Balanchine had a PR angle when he conceived Jewels: he thought Van Cleef & Arpels might foot the bill (lo, City Ballet got not a sou). It was also to be just one ballet, but when Balanchine began working, his idea grew, and soon there were two ballets, then three. In rehearsal, the work was referred to as “Jewels,” but on the night of the premiere it went untitled because management was still waffling over what to call this strange evening. The three sections, however, were called “Emeralds,” “Rubies,” and “Diamonds.”

The rehearsal title won out, and Jewels became famous as the “first three-act plotless ballet.” Its sheer size was dazzling, and, as Ludlow explained at the seminar, “we were in transition still from City Center [to the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center] and I think that was one of the purposes of the ballet, part of the concept —the gigantic scale.” Balanchine wanted to show that his dance and his dancers could fill this larger stage.

“There was a kind of pandemonium in the theater that night,” said Suki Schorer, recalling that it wasn’t until the premiere that the dancers knew they were taking part in a masterpiece. In The New York City Ballet, Lincoln Kirstein writes, “Jewels has been an unequivocal and rapturous ‘success’ since its introduction; the very title sounds expensive before a step is seen.” Rich is how Jewels really looks, and not so much in terms of money (the sets are less than minimal, parures of gemstones pasted on a bare backdrop). Jewels is immediately sensuous, saturated, a pleasure-dome decreed. Its crystal and glycerine surface is magic, but inside you begin to feel shadows and murmurs, and the undertow.

Indeed, the audience at the Guild Seminar seemed to be in a state of “I know, but I don’t know what I know,” for question after question was put to the dancers, each one ignoring the fact of Jewels’s plotlessness. Did Balanchine explain what was happening in Jewels? Did he tell you what it meant or was about? (“Rubies” was “about twenty minutes,” Villella was told by Mr. B.) Did he discuss your character, your role? No, no, and no, came the answers. The castle was guarding its secrets.

Jewels doesn’t demand that you dissect it. It can be enjoyed as pure spectacle, beginning with the colors. The lighting design of Ronald Bates and the costumes of Madame Karinska work in brilliant complicity; Bates makes palpable poetic weather of his lighting, which Karinska’s costumes either sink into (“Emeralds”) or bounce out of (“Rubies”) or refract (“Diamonds”). And so the French-opaline greens that soften and blur the edges of “Emeralds” create a plush and pillowy space, a netherworld love-nest. The sharp red of “Rubies” practically vibrates against a cindery light; it’s a red with black in it, royal and radical at once. And the snow-crystal radiance of “Diamonds” is underlit with a blue as pale as a vein in a slim white wrist.

Karinska’s costumes are jaw-droppers. The tutus vary—long and misted in “Emeralds,” hip-short and heraldic in “Rubies,” stiff sprays in “Diamonds”—but all the bodices, whether green, red, or white, are glittering armatures, intricately seamed and encrusted with jewels, part Tennyson, part Dior. These bodices are fascinating. That reverse décolleté, a passementerie of jewels curving under each breast like Baroque scrollwork, leaves the bosom naked (actually, sheathed in nude fabric). It’s an odd and erotic eyecatcher, suggesting maidens framed high in tower windows, awaiting the troubadours’ song. That song is different in each section, and thus Jewels’s faceting begins.

Much has been written about the three parts or panels of Jewels, and they can be differentiated with ease. “Emeralds” is French, set to romantic Fauré, dreamy and somnambulistic. “Rubies” is American, neoclassical Stravinsky, nervy and voracious. “Diamonds” is Imperial Russia, palatial Tchaikovsky, tender and at times ecstatically elegiac. You can keep Jewels in these compartments, and read it as a lavishly illustrated monograph on Balanchine’s lifelong preoccupations, circa 1967: his experimentation with national styles of classical dancing, his exploration of his own aesthetic affinities—with Paris and Petipa, with Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky. You can even pop out a panel and perform it solo, as has been done with “Rubies” all around the world. But the wholeness of Jewels is also the power and glory of Jewels.

The score for “Emeralds” was pieced together by Balanchine from incidental music Fauré composed for theater productions of Pelléas et Mélisande (1898) and Shylock (1889), and it combines impressionist washes of sound, perfumed and yearning, with simple woodcut melodies that seem sprung from medieval lore. “Emeralds” finds Balanchine deep in the poetic realm of Coleridge and Keats—it’s an enchanted forest filled with Darke Ladies and muses on the make—and in the compositional genre of hunt and vision scenes (Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty) and twilight gardens (Serenade). It is a work of trance and transparency. You feel you can reach through the green of “Emeralds” and grasp nothing.

What explains this disconnection? To begin with, the pyramidal dance structures of “Emeralds”—its solos, duets, pas de trois, and ensembles—suggest a fairy court on the order of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and yet not one but two women are at the top: a first ballerina and, a faint shade beneath her, a second. The Paris Opéra-trained Violette Verdy originated the first role, and put her stamp on a solo that is like no other solo in Balanchine ballet. Intimate, bright, it’s an aria of upper-body animation, hands, arms, and shoulders preening, self-regarding, scintillating—a Jewel Song. This ballerina wraps herself and her thoughts in pure port de bras (a Verdy specialty). She seems lost in some fantasy—or found—we do not know. The second ballerina also has a solo, but she is more famous for the “walking duet,” a measured, measureless passage—on pointe—along a winding path in which she is supported by a man of whom she is unaware.

Verdy’s solo is, in cinematic lingo, the ballet’s establishing shot, for with this solo Jewels fixes on a pervasive Balanchine preoccupation—the unknowable woman. The second ballerina seconds it. The inequality of these two roles may be that the first is awake and the second asleep. Together, the two add up to a single ambivalence, a sensibility torn or in flux—like Titania in her two states (self-possessed, then spellbound by Oberon), or those twins in confusion, Hermia and Helena (“I have found Demetrius like a jewel/ Mine own, and not mine own”). “Emeralds” ends with three men down on one knee like knights who have dismounted, their eyes sweeping the path for signs of her, the troubled ideal.

In “Rubies” the men have remounted— they’re chess knights (and pawns)—and the girls are fillies, tomboys, pin-ups, Broadway gypsies, Gypsy Rose Lees, the whole fast-striding, high-kicking, gear-stripping gamut of leggy American allure. Stravinsky’s percussive score, Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, is syncopated like rush hour, then cocktails: you hear the subway rumbling underneath, feel neon Broadway and New York noir take over. In response to the “Rubies”=America equation, Balanchine has said “I did not have that in mind at all.” Nevertheless, the first glittering glimpse of “Rubies”—its cast holding hands upstage in a paper-doll arc, poised on pointe—never fails to draw a gasp of appreciation from the audience. It’s a city skyline at night, the Big Apple ablaze.

It is in “Rubies” that you clearly see Balanchine using his jeweler’s tools, concentrating on the angled body positions of classical dance—écarté, effacé, croisé—and throwing in épaulé, an upper-body arrangement that pulls the arms and torso in prismatic opposition to the lower body, creating a kind of dynamic duality, directional energies at cross purposes. All this was in “Emeralds,” but subliminal, cloaked in haze and dew. “Rubies,” so overtly athletic, is more pointed. Substitute leotards for those rich red Karinskas with their clacking plackets, and “Rubies” could take its place in Balanchine’s black-and-white wing, next to the quantum physics of The Four Temperaments and Agon.

As in “Emeralds,” there are two female leads in “Rubies,” but this time one is a true principal, the other a soloist. The lead was originated by tiny Patricia McBride, the second by bigger Patricia Neary. “Rubies” belongs to McBride, but where she seems to be cozily moated in the pas de deux, that sirenlike second girl runs roughshod through the ballet, hitting cheesecake poses that drive the male corps mad. In one graphic sequence four men dive at her in succession, each grabbing a wrist or an ankle. They proceed to manipulate her into split penchées and leg extensions, again along the grammatical cuts of effacé and écarté. Mantrap or manhandled? This role is always cast with a “tall girl.” Her m.o. is seduction, and she is the “Rubies” theme writ large.

For smack at the center of “Rubies” is an encounter sui generis, a Genesis—the pas de deux originated by McBride and Edward Villella—and smack at the end of that is a tree. Not literally, but the pas de deux finishes with McBride standing downstage, her arms splayed like branches, Villella snug behind her and climbing around. In a nursery rhyme of intertwining limbs, Villella finally opens out a hand and McBride drops something unseen into his palm. It’s that other apple of course—“Rubies” red.

The brilliance of McBride was that with her sinuous, spiky style she turned Original Sin into a one-woman show: in “Rubies” she’s Eve and the serpent, the apple and the tree. Balanchine leads us to man’s first story of seduction with a more recent story straight out of the ballet canon, though, again, McBride is the only ballerina who’s truly shown it to us. The sensation of black one feels in the red of “Rubies” is none other than Odile, the black swan from Swan Lake, the imposter-swan who seduces the prince away from gentle white swan Odette, and destroys his life. There is a diagonal in “Rubies” straight out of the Black Swan pas de deux, as well as other Odile-isms—those distorted and dominating attitudes that relentlessly pull on the man. McBride danced this pas de deux with come-hither casualness, a faux-swan insinuation and feline triumph. In “Rubies,” Balanchine sees Woman as forbidden fruit, eternal Eve, downfall.

“Diamonds” has been called an “Odette fantasy,” and as a friend recently observed, it feels like the fifth act—a wish fulfillment— of four-act Swan Lake. Actually, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3, from which the music is taken, was composed in the summer of 1875, just months before Tchaikovsky began work on Swan Lake. There are links between the two scores in key and orchestration, almost as if Tchaikovsky were tuning up for Swan Lake, testing the waters (still cold) and feeling his way into the forest. Certainly, Balanchine hears it this way. The pas de deux in “Diamonds” refracts imagery from the pas in Swan Lake Act Two: the vow of love; Odette’s arrowy path (so like the winding path in “Emeralds”). In this act of Jewels, there is only one ballerina--Suzanne Farrell. She is aware of her isolation and the windswept forces around her.

Farrell was Balanchine’s growing obsession throughout the 1960s, and when he choreographed Jewels the obsession was in full bloom. In a New Yorker essay on Jewels published in 1983, Arlene Croce writes, “If I had to guess how the piece was made, I’d say that Balanchine worked backward from the pas de deux of Diamonds… .” This is an assessment of Farrell’s power as creative muse. Croce also describes how in “Diamonds,” mixed in with the Odette iconography, there are pawing steps and forward extensions that allude to the unicorn in the Cluny tapestries. Croce’s view is supported by Farrell herself, who writes in her autobiography of 1991, Holding on to the Air, of how Balanchine took her to the Musée de Cluny to see The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries. Of the sixth tapestry she writes: “He loved the title A Mon Seul Désir [“To My Only Desire”] and said he wanted to make a ballet for me about the story of the unicorn.” It seems safe to say that “Diamonds” is that ballet, or rather, that Jewels is, that it was the white glow of the unicorn that Balanchine chased into the forest, only to find himself in a thicket of haunting and hunted creatures. Claude Debussy himself began at the end when he composed Pelléas et Mélisande. The first thing he wrote was the climactic Act Four love duet, as if to make for himself a white light at the end of the tunnel—which he needed because the forests of Pelléas et Mélisande are so thick and dark that “there are places where you never see the sun.” What are these forests but the human psyche? And what is light but love? And who is Mélisande?

“Only the most beautiful emeralds contain that miracle of elusive blue,” wrote Colette in Gigi. And it is through elusive blue we must travel if we are to grasp Jewels, through Fauré and Debussy and the playwright Maurice Maeterlinck to the deep-sea mystery of Mélisande, the ingenue-soprano who has kept opera lovers guessing for almost a century. She is the central question of Maeterlinck’s play, for she herself will answer no questions. We, along with Golaud, the older man who marries her, know only where he found her--Maeterlinck’s stage direction reads: “A forest. Mélisande discovered at the brink of a spring.” It could be Balanchine’s stage direction for “Emeralds.” Mélisande is lost and weeping, has dropped the crown she was wearing into the spring, and will later drop her wedding ring there as well (a Freudian slip of the fingers). Pelléas is Golaud’s younger half-brother, and he has instant affinity with Mélisande, which becomes love and leads to his death at the hand of Golaud. Where Pelléas believes in “the truth, the truth, the truth,” Mélisande offers evasion, as if unversed in human rules. She nurses a secret sorrow, and is allied with water, fountains, the sea.

What—not who—is Mélisande, may be the better question. There are those who believe she is one of the water sprites immortalized (and they are immortal, unless they mix with humans) in Friedrich, Baron de la Motte Fouqué’s story Undine (1811). Also, the name Mélisande is very like Mélusine, the undine of a famous French fairy tale. (Mélusine marries a human on the terms that he must never interrupt her privacy. Breaking the terms, he enters her chamber and finds her transformed, playing in a pool. She leaves him.) And in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, a work of ravishing irresolution begun in 1893 and premiered in 1902, the closest the composer comes to a true aria occurs when Mélisande lets her otherworldly hair fall from a window. Mermaids are known for two things—their long, long hair, and their song.

Although “Emeralds” has been likened to a tapestry, to chivalric France, to green earth, it has always been described with liquid images. Verdy commented on its “underwater quality,” and Kirstein described it as a “submarine summer-green garden.” In his book George Balanchine, Richard Buckle reports that in 1958 Balanchine had discovered the music of Fauré and imagined a “tipped ballroom” behind a scrim with “a projection of the sea … which pulsates.” It not only makes musical-textual sense that the first ballerina in “Emeralds” is an undine, but it also makes sense choreographically. In Verdy’s solo, it is easy to see a woman modeling bracelets and tiaras. When asked if Balanchine ever mentioned such jewelry, Verdy answered, “No. No bracelets.” It is just as easy to see Undine or Mélusine in her imaginative element, wearing water droplets like gems. In fact, it was only during this season’s round of Jewels that those Karinska costumes—so charming, so puzzling—struck me with new depth. That bare bosom, accentuated by gemwork, and those bodices so tightly seamed and sheathed beneath, recreate the naked flash and surge of mermaids.

“Rubies” is more Lorelei Lee than Undine, the golddigger with no regrets (rubies are a girl’s best friend). But in “Diamonds” the green-blue waters of “Emeralds” turn to frost and ice. Tchaikovsky’s hunting horns seem to answer the far-off horn calls in “Emeralds.” Furthermore, Balanchine knew that the watery theme of Swan Lake’s Act Two—the lakeside pas de deux—was not original to Swan Lake. Tchaikovsky recycled it from an earlier, failed opera, Undina. Balanchine has given Farrell some swan queen flutterings. Yet she also reiterates the undine port de bras of Verdy’s solo, with a heightened, perhaps frightened emphasis. Where Verdy drew delight from her invisible spring center stage, Farrell draws awesome strength and scale.

Move in close and Jewels acts more like a solitaire under a spotlight, a single gem glinting a spectrum of hue and allusion. Jewels is knee deep in French Symbolists, Mallarmé as much as Maeterlinck. Listen closely to Fauré, and you hear Debussy’s tumescent woodwinds, Mallarmé’s faune stretching in the leaves, wondering “Loved I a dream?” Jewels takes up the tensions of the Symbolists, who took up symbols of the Romantics before them—their use of the half-human to understand the human, their sense of the dislocation between possession and privacy, infatuation and freedom. Jewels is a vision touched with myths of transformation, with the conflicting impulses of escape and rescue. That the mermaid swims through all channels of Jewels is yet another flash of recognition: mermaids have always symbolized the free flow of the mind, the sea of the subconscious. The questions whispered in these waters and woods are the stuff of Balanchine’s dreams, and they are unanswerable: to what extent can you possess a woman, a wife, a ballerina? To what extent can you possess your Only Desire without killing it?

There is an alternate view to Mélisande’s identity, and its meanings move deep and dark under Jewels. This analysis also comes by way of the opera. If Mélisande has dropped her crown into the spring, the obvious next question is, who gave her the crown? She says: “It is the crown he gave me… . I will have no more of it! I had rather die.” The scholar Henri Barraud identifies Mélisande as one of Bluebeard’s ex-wives escaped from his castle. Perhaps she is a wife to be. One of Charles Perrault’s more rigid and unforgiving tales (it’s hard to call it a fairy tale), Bluebeard’s Castle connects with Pelléas et Mélisande in its atmosphere of hot and cold unknowns, its Symbolist portents ripe with erotic suggestion. Another link is Maeterlinck himself. He wrote a version of the tale called Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, and he named one of the wives Mélisande.

In brief, Bluebeard’s Castle is the story of old Bluebeard’s young bride, who, in order to know him better, asks for keys to the seven locked doors in his castle. He gives her all the keys but as a test of fidelity forbids her opening the seventh door. In some versions of Bluebeard’s Castle—Béla Bartoïk’s opera of 1918, for instance—the keys are given with no stipulations, only foreboding. In eerie empathy, Bartoïk accompanies the opening of each door with a wash of color —Jewels-like lighting effects in red, blue-green, gold, and bright white. Beyond the doors are rooms, each room a facet of Bluebeard’s wealth. We see one by one the torture chamber, the armory, the house of jewels, the garden, Bluebeard’s lands, a Lake of Tears. Finally, from the seventh room, three ex-wives emerge, the loves of Bluebeard’s dawn, noon, and evening. This new wife must take her place behind the seventh door as the wife of Bluebeard’s nights.

Violette Verdy once coached Suki Schorer in her role in “Emeralds” and passed on the story she’d invented for herself. “It happens in a bedroom,” Verdy insisted. Schorer, imagining a glorious Parisian apartment, repeated this interpretation to Balanchine, who replied “no it doesn’t.” But Verdy’s instincts ring true. Jewels does feel like a castle full of rooms, doors opening onto air. Without imposing Bluebeard too rigidly on Balanchine, you can see the kingdom’s gardens and woodlands in “Emeralds.” As for the torture chamber and armory, that would be blood-red “Rubies.” At the seminar, Villella made no bones about the fact that his role in “Rubies” was a “gutcruncher,” aerobically brutal. He asked Balanchine to change a long stretch that left him gasping for breath, and got one hardly helpful rest in the wings. And I go back to that moment in which the tall girl is manacled by four men, then drawn and quartered.

“Diamonds” is the sixth room, the Lake of Tears, for, as we know from the Act Two mime of Swan Lake, Odette resides in the lake made of her mother’s tears. And “Diamonds” is the seventh room, too. Like Bluebeard, Balanchine had wives throughout his life. In 1967, when Balanchine was sixty-three, there were three ex-wives alive (plus one common-law ex, Alexandra Danilova); he was currently married to his fourth wife Tanaquil Le Clercq; and was in love with the woman he wanted to be the fifth, the twenty-one-year-old Farrell. She was his Hope diamond, the ballerina in Jewels who doesn’t share the stage with a second because she was all women, all enchantments—unicorn, swan, undine—in one.

When Balanchine choreographed Jewels, he did not know Farrell would refuse him. They were still in the flush of their affinity, and the finale he put on “Diamonds”—not the actual suicide-apotheosis of Swan Lake, but a wedding-coronation—reflects his hope for a happy ending. In her autobiography, Farrell tells of how she and Mr. B. went to Van Cleef & Arpels and “while cameras clicked away, George and M. Arpels threw priceless jewelry at me. They even took the crowns of Empress Josephine and the Czarina out of the vault and put them on my head. We were like children locked in a candy store.” Or in the third room, the House of Jewels.

Farrell didn’t wish to stay locked in. Balanchine’s ardor grew; he wanted to have and to hold, and in 1969, in an act of escape, Farrell married a dancer her own age, Paul Mejia. The couple was banished.

Filling the ballerina roles of Jewels once the first ladies left them has always been a company challenge, though these days it can feel more like a confrontation. The bigness of Jewels requires clarity and an air-cushion of commitment around that clarity. The romance of Jewels requires delicacy. Yet how small so many performances feel today.

Unlike McBride in “Rubies” and Farrell (who came back in 1975) in “Diamonds,” both dancing their roles well into the 1980s, Verdy left NYCB and “Emeralds” in the Seventies. The most crucial ballet in Jewels because it is the one that casts the spell, “Emeralds” today is a scent without complexity, a profound evocation reduced to prettiness. Well, it has been this way for a long time, and people have been complaining ever since Verdy left, though I’ve never forgotten Stephanie Saland in the role, smoky and remote. Neither Miranda Weese nor Kathleen Tracey was up to her level of imaginative interest, let alone Verdy’s, though I had great expectations for Weese, who has been quietly sublime in some of the more stylistically distilled Balanchine roles—in the first movement of Symphony in C, for example, and in the first movement of Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet—and who is the only young NYCB principal with upper body sophistication.

Weese in “Rubies” was another story. While Margaret Tracey had great glitter, she tired visibly, showing chinks. Wendy Whelan had wit and snap, yet there was no sense of seduction, or, as critic Robert Greskovic put it, “no silk.” Weese, however, put silky and sinful together, adding her own prancing élan. The longer she was on stage, the stronger and more tonally secure she got— and she took the audience with her. I’ve never seen a bare back used to such effect in this ballet. It somehow magnified her serenely correct carriage, which in turn called attention to her reserves of stillness, a facet of true musicality and something very rare in ballet today (though it didn’t used to be rare). In start-and-stop “Rubies,” Weese used her ability to really stop (versus the usual pause), and showed what a decisive, dramatic impact a full stop can have. In the three Jewels I saw, “Rubies” was the ballet that caught the audience—its energies are cracklingly coherent in the computer age— and it was Weese’s “Rubies” that plugged in.

Darci Kistler and Kyra Nichols took turns with difficult “Diamonds.” Both have performed it before, and both have recently had first babies, which is to say there is a built-in subtraction of strength. In Kistler, too much subtraction. She satisfied herself with effects (a halo here, a silvery spin there) but caught no current of sustained concentration. She now looks little, and brittle, in the face of Tchaikovsky’s grandeur, unable to find herself in the fine skeins of the soliloquy or to take might from the music’s ascent. Nichols, however, not as technically tight as she has been in the past, connects on ever higher levels, bringing to “Diamonds” a moving and magisterial sense of float. She’s the last Balanchine ballerina on the roster, and the hush and dignity of her placement attest to it. She’s monumental, Tolstoyan, unspooling arabesques and pirouettes in the white-marble corridor of Tchaikovsky’s Scherzo, snow moving out of her way in drifts. She has made “Diamonds” her own lonely winter palace.

A final note. During the guild seminar, Edward Villella, who is now the artistic director of the Miami City Ballet, the only company other than NYCB ever to stage a complete Jewels, told of how he had invited all three ballerinas—Violette Verdy, Patricia McBride, and Suzanne Farrell—to coach his ballerinas in their roles. He praised the commitment and skill of all three equally. And then he paused, angled his body toward the audience, and moved into a more searching key, as if to grapple with something difficult. It was his opinion that Suzanne had become too serious in her devotion to Balanchine, serving his memory and coaching his ballets as if she were wearing a mantle, and maybe it was too much. That Villella was compelled to voice this particular feeling—saying what has been unsaid—in the context of this particular ballet should come as no surprise. Is it not another shock from the house of Jewels? Farrell didn’t marry Balanchine in his lifetime, but she has become the wife of his nights.

Notes
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Jewels was performed five times between January 6 and January 24, 1998, at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center. Go back to the text.