On the Stage & Screen, An Unrequited Love

On Tuesday evening, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts unveiled a crucial document from one of the most controversial episodes in New York City Ballet's history. It is a newly edited print of the first performance of George Balanchine's evening-length "Don Quixote," a gala preview that occurred in May 1965, one night before the ballet's official opening.

At the preview, the then 61-year-old Balanchine danced the Don, and Suzanne Farrell, his 19-year-old Galatea, was Dulcinea. Photographer Bert Stern, who was then married to one of the company's leading ballerinas, Allegra Kent, set up two cameras in the lighting booth of the New York State Theater, providing both close-up and long-range coverage of the performance. Ms. Farrell helped the library edit the twin camera tracks into a final print. The orchestra is muffled, and the print is fuzzy, but the occasion recorded is momentous: Backstory and front-stage converge as both Balanchine's infatuation with Ms. Farrell and the Don's idealization of Dulcinea seem to play out simultaneously.

It is not idealization but rather a haze of eroticism that envelops Ms. Farrell in her first entrance as the serving girl Aldonza, transformed by the Don's fantasies into Dulcinea. She enters the Don's room barefoot. Her hips swing seductively. She washes his bare feet, then unties her hair and dries his feet with it.

Then he kisses her.

When a ballet director becomes obsessed with a young performer, it is almost always an aspirant who is vulnerable on some score, thereby ensuring, so the director would believe, the dancer's gratitude and loyalty. Ms. Farrell's professional vulnerability resided in the fact that she had not come to the School of American Ballet until the relatively advanced age of 15 without, however, having had the foundation of a great deal of serious training. Probably no one in the world besides Balanchine could have turned her into the linchpin of one of the world's great ballet companies in less than five years.

In the past, Balanchine's ballerina muses had inspired him to create some of the greatest ballets of the century. This time the same miracle did not happen: The ballets Balanchine made for Ms. Farrell during the 1960s were, for the most part not his best. "Diamonds," made in 1967, is an exception; "Don Quixote" is not. The ballet seems oddly rambling and disjointed. A big part of the problem is the undistinguished score by Nicholas Nabokov; the aggregate is less than the sum of its many overly protracted musical episodes; Nabokov's modernist noodling doesn't comport with the needs of a narrative ballet.

By far the strongest choreography is for Ms. Farrell. Her best dancing comes in the third-act pas d'action, which was perhaps Balanchine's answer to the dream scene in Petipa's 19th-century "Don Quixote," a comic repertory warhorse in which the Don himself is much more peripheral of a participant than in Balanchine's work. Attended by Conrad Ludlow, then one of New York City Ballet's most stalwart partners, the tall and large-boned Ms. Farrell (beautifully svelte here, however), becomes ethereal, disembodied, as she dances an adagio through which are threaded the women of the corps. Then she dances a remarkable solo, her silhouette constantly changing amidst repeated swirls and eddies. She confronts sinister phantoms; she whirls almost constantly off-balance, and is characteristically unsparing in her avid attack and abandon. It's one of the classic examples of the moth-tothe-flame movement intensity that attracted Balanchine to his favorite dancers, as much as he often encouraged a downplayed emotional projection.

Balanchine's own pantomimic performance is impressively agile, yet he seems physically frail, emotionally exposed. Balanchine's portrayal of the Don subscribes to the classic Russian interpretation as visionary rather than simply deluded. Yet Balanchine's "Don Quixote" is as much an indictment of human folly as is Cervantes's epic adventure, and here and — particularly at this performance — Balanchine did not spare himself. The abjection that the Don suffers throughout the ballet could easily, in this context, be read as autobiographical.

"Don Quixote" began a troubled period for Balanchine, Ms. Farrell, and NYCB. As Balanchine's personal preoccupation with Ms. Farrell grew, he was perhaps less able to supply the strict artistic guidance that she required. Her dancing became increasingly mannered and exaggerated, while NYCB was demoralized by Balanchine's blinkered attention to her. She refused to marry Balanchine and in 1969 married Paul Mejia, a young dancer in the company. A few months afterward she and Mr. Mejia had left the company; Ms. Farrell claimed that her husband was being punished for the marriage by having his roles taken away. She returned to the company six years later, still married, but Mr. Mejia this time embarked on a choreographic career. Having recovered from his obsession, Balanchine set about making his best roles and ballets for Ms. Farrell, and it was in that period that she gave the greatest performances of her career.

The Performing Arts library's restoration of the Balanchine-Farrell "Don Quixote" confirms its status as one of the world's most important archives of the arts. The library is to be commended for restoring and making available this fascinating and slightly disturbing artifact.