LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2023

From the author of Apollo's Angels, the first major biography of the figure who modernized dance: an intimate portrait of the man behind the mythology, on a vivid canvas of the century that shaped him.

Balanchine's radical approach to choreography reinvented the art of dance and his rich, captivating ballets made him a lasting legend. Today, almost thirty years after his death, the man is so revered that the mysteries of his biography are often overlooked. Who was George Balanchine?

Born in Russia under the last tsar, Balanchine experienced the turmoil of World War I, the Russian Revolution, exile, World War II, and the cultural Cold War. He was part of the Russian modernist moment, a key player in Paris in the 1920s, and in New York he revolutionized ballet, bringing it to the forefront of modernism and making it a serious and popular art.

His influences were numerous. He considered himself Georgian, yet did not set foot in his ancestral homeland until he was fifty years old. He was deeply influenced by the austere grandeur and sensual beauty of the Orthodox Church, but equally absorbed the new rhythms and dance steps emanating from Harlem in the 1930s. He collaborated extensively, with figures like Diaghilev and Stravinsky.

As a man of the muses, Balanchine married five times, always to young dancers, and was consumed by many other loves in between. The hardships of his life - personal losses, periods of ill health, crippling loneliness, and dark moods of despair - resonate in his dances, which speak so movingly of love and loss, and yet the full implications for his art remain unexplored.

Now, for the first time, we look beyond the myth of "Mr. B" - the mask that Balanchine himself helped to create - to see "Mr. B," the man.

Pages: 784, Dimensions: 14.9x14.9cm