I saw a fair amount of ballet in the ’50s. The NYCB was young then, with Balanchine present and creating, and we had the annual stands of the Joffrey and Alvin Ailey companies, too, as well as visits from the Sadler’s Wells (later the Royal Ballet) and the Royal Danish company. I grew familiar with the dancers, the works, and the choreographic styles I encountered, and was on my way to becoming a connoisseur balletomane. When at the end of that decade I began writing professionally about opera, my ballet attendance did not cease, but it fell into line with my efforts to keep up with concert, recital, and theatre events. And some of my attention shifted to American Ballet Theatre, largely in search of deeper familiarity with the Romantic story ballets whose narratives and cultural attitudes have so much in common with those of the canonical opera repertory. When I return to ballet now, I am reminded of what it has in common with opera, and what it does not. To state the obvious: both forms present theatrical action while music plays. In opera, though, the onstage performers are themselves generating the single most important element of the music, and that element has a verbal component. Thus, the relationship of the onstage action to music and to the conveyance of “meaning” is not the same in the two forms, nor is the nature of dramatic action itself. For the audience, this means that the sensory balance between eye and ear, between the body and the voice, and thus the reception of performance at the biological level, is shifted more toward eye dominance for ballet than for opera. This shift is strengthened by the fact that owing to the space requirements of dance, the ballet eye’s attention is seldom commanded by “production,” by a set. It contents itself with only indications of place, or else with no place at all, but with only an aesthetically framed space, and focuses almost exclusively on the costumed dancers’ movements. Further, ballet’s wordless nature makes possible something for which opera, a few experiments aside, has no equivalent—an abstract, “pure dance” work.      

Jewels is just such a work. It has no plot, no characters. It presents no conflict, and is therefore not a drama. Its aim is entirely aesthetic. It has a theme (the beauty of gems, whose only function in the world is aesthetic), and its prevailing mood is celebratory—the non-story has a happy end. Its three sections are set to classical music, none of which was composed for dance. These scores are by Fauré (Emeralds, drawn from his incidental music for Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande and for Edmond Haraucourt’s Shylock), Stravinsky (Rubies, to his Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra,) and for the climactic Diamonds, three movements of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3. The only one of these that much suggests dance to my mind’s ear is the spikey Jazz Age Stravinsky, and despite Balanchine’s indubitable genius for searching out the hidden danceability in music designed for other purposes, there are moments in the other two when I find myself wondering just what the agreement of movement and music is meant to be. Lovely dancing is still lovely dancing, and the moments pass, but the choice of the lyrical, predominantly gentle Fauré still has me less than fully persuaded. It also revives my hunger for another sort of dream-on theatre company, the sort that would specialize in the many fascinating plays that have substantial musical scoring of quality, and which for us would need performers capable of both credible modern-sensibility acting and skill with the pantomimic or even dance-oriented styles of some of the musical interludes. The Fauré/Maeterlinck Pelléas is hardly the most exciting in prospect among them, and our ears are prejudiced by Debussy’s masterly opera. But I’d still love to find out: just how was Fauré’s music in full intended to support the play, and does it perhaps achieve some of that?