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Margot Fonteyn:  A Life

by Meredith Daneman

Viking $257

George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker

by Robert Gottlieb

HarperCollins $156

The relationship between a choreographer and his muse is legendary. The Royal Ballet's Margot Fonteyn, Britain's first prima ballerina  assoluta was Frederick Ashton's only muse. George Balanchine, choreographer and co-founder of the New York City Ballet, had several muses, five of whom became his wives. Because Fonteyn and Balanchine were involved with their respective companies from the start, their biographies also chronicle the parallel rise of ballet in  Britain and in the US. (Until early last century ballet was such a Russo-French monopoly that dancers  had to change their names to be taken seriously. Britain's Alice Marks became 'Alicia Markova' and Ireland's Edris Stannus  became 'Ninette de Valois'.)

Britain had a slight head-start when de Valois founded the Academy of Choreographic Art in 1926. Along with Ashton, the academy and the company became the Vic-Wells Ballet, the Sadler's Wells Ballet and finally the Royal Ballet in 1956.

The US had Lincoln Kirstein who, after Serge Diaghilev's death, brought Balanchine to the US in 1934 to start the School of American Ballet and its company the American Ballet, later the Ballet Society and in its final form, the New York City Ballet in 1948.

Meredith Daneman's Margot Fonteyn, which took 10 years to write, is comprehensive and well-researched. She begins by tracing Fonteyn's British-Irish-Brazilian roots, the childhood spent in Shanghai - where she took lessons from a former Bolshoi dancer,  George Goncharov - her arrival in Britain in 1933 with her  mother  and her successful audition at the Sadler's Wells aged 14.

Because Daneman herself is a dancer and graduate of Royal Ballet School, she is able to elucidate not only on the choreography and the music but also on the intricacies of the steps on Fonteyn's legendary interpretation of Odette in Swan Lake, Stravinsky's Firebird and Princess Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty. Daneman spends as much time analysing the creative and personal relationship with Ashton, dance partners  Robert Helpmann, Michael  Somes and Rudolf Nureyev, composer Constant Lambert and husband Roberto Arias.

Fonteyn danced until she  officially retired on her 60th birthday. The book ends with her death in Panama in 1991 where she had gone to care for her quadriplegic husband.

Robert Gottlieb's Balanchine is part of the Eminent Lives series - designed as an introduction rather than as a comprehensive biography. No doubt a balletomane, Gottlieb had also worked with Balanchine  as a member of the board of directors of the New York City Ballet. But he fails to get under the skin of the man and his creative genius. As Daneman's book is intimate, Gottlieb's is distant.

The book begins with Balanchine's training as both dancer and musician in St Petersburg, his 'first trip abroad' to Germany  (never to return to Russia until 48 years later) and how  Diaghilev hired him as a choreographer of Ballets Russes at the age of 20. The bulk of the book is his arrival in America when he was 29 and began to make his impact not just at the New York City Ballet, but also in Broadway and Hollywood.

At times the book reads like a catalogue of the ballets that Balanchine had created and who danced it first or best (usually one of his five dancer-wives and numerous lovers). Descriptions of ballets are vague and often only quotations from ballet critics.

What is evident in both books is that until the mid- to late-20th century, the star dancers were bigger than their  companies. Classical roles were reserved for them and new ballets were created for them.  Balanchine said of his muses: 'I have the right to love', to which a senior dancer, Patricia Neary, replied: 'You should love all 80 of us.'



Margot Fonteyn:  A Life