The Death of the Heart

By By Martha Duffy

Balanchine 's new ballet looks sadly on love

A lovely woman reaches out toward her partner and gently cradles his face in her hands. He enfolds her hands tenderly in his for a moment. Then he moves distractedly away. She is left holding the shape of her lover's face, and has only anguish to fill the hollow sculpture she has made.

The brief sequence is in Robert Schumann 's Davidsbuendlertaenze, a new ballet by George Balanchine that received its world premiere at the New York City Ballet last week. From this choreographer it is a radical work. Balanchine relies on music to give shading and mood to his ballets, and has been known to deride the overblown sentiment often found in romantic works. There is much that is familiar about Davidsbuendlertaenze: the steps annealed to music, the virtuosity, the surprises. What is new is that it is openly, drenchingly emotional, a meditation that darkens into melancholy and isolation.

The form of the ballet has much to do with Schumann's piano suite, written when he was 27. The composer was also a music critic then, and it amused him to make up pseudonyms to represent various aspects of his personality. He even in vented a club for his fantasy creatures to join. Called the Davidsbund, it was sup posed to combat the philistines of the music world. (For a time, readers thought that the group actually existed.) Schumann also made up imaginary women, especially during his long, arduous court ship of his wife Clara. Three of the four couples who make up the ballet (Suzanne Farrell and Jacques D'Amboise, Heather Watts and Peter Martins, Kay Mazzo and Ib Andersen) are doubtless members in good standing of Schumann's magic cir cle. The fourth pair, Karin von Aroldingen and Adam Lueders, inhabit a desperate interior world. For although Schumann's youthful pipe dreams were lightly scatty, his mind eventually disintegrated into madness.

For the cast, Balanchine has turned to his "old guard," people whom he has worked with and molded over years. Only Ib Andersen is a newcomer. Only he and Heather Watts are under 30, and she and Peter Martins live together. There is a common instinct and a shared intimacy, even love, among the performers and the choreographer that make Davidsbuendlertaenze a pleasure to watch. One sees Farrell's stabbing attacks and abandoned extensions, Mazzo's charm and pliancy, Watts' unguarded enthusiasm, Martins' cool, assessing mastery. There is little vir tuosity here; steps seem less important than the flow and the feeling.

Von Aroldingen and Lueders are at the ballet's center. They reach out and try to sustain each other. They walk slowly to gether, they caress, at one point they push at each other as if the energy might connect them. But he withdraws, becomes frantic or engulfed in icy loneliness (all too heavily underscored by a set that looks like an ice floe along which curtains have somehow been hung). In the end he walks slowly into a void. She is left, head bowed, her hand cupping her chin. Both dancers give bold performances. One expects Von Aroldingen to be Balanchine's perfectly tuned instrument. Lueders, an elusive and sometimes awkward presence, has his best role yet.

Balanchine may have been putting a distance between himself and this out pouring of emotion by including Schumann's name in the full title. But on opening night he seemed positively merry, pleased enough with the ballet to take four curtain calls (in the past, fans have clapped blisters onto their hands trying to coax him to appear once). If the old master, now 76, is thinking about death, he is thinking about it creatively and at the highest level. --By Martha Duffy

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