Agon (ballet)

Agon is a 22-minute ballet for twelve dancers with music by Igor Stravinsky. It was choreographed by George Balanchine. Stravinsky began composition in December 1953 but was interrupted the next year; he resumed work in 1956 and concluded on April 27, 1957. The music was premiered in Los Angeles at UCLA's Royce Hall on June 17, 1957, conducted by Robert Craft. Stravinsky himself conducted the sessions for the work's first recording the following day on June 18, 1957.^[1] Agon was first performed on stage by the New York City Ballet at the City Center of Music and Drama on December 1, 1957.^[2]

The composition's long gestation period covers an interesting juncture in Stravinsky's composing career, in which he moved from a diatonic musical idiom to one based on twelve-tone technique; the music of the ballet thus demonstrates a unique symbiosis of musical idioms. The ballet has no story, but consists of a series of dance movements in which various groups of dancers interact in pairs, trios, quartets, etc. A number of the movements are based on 17th-century French court dances – saraband, galliard and bransle. It was danced as part of City Ballet's 1982 Stravinsky Centennial Celebration.

The title of the ballet, Agon, is a Greek word which means “contest”, “protagonist” but also “anguish” or “struggle”.

Stravinsky laid out the ballet in a duodecimal form, with four large sections each consisting of three dances. A Prelude and two Interludes occur between the large sections, but this does not fundamentally affect the twelve-part design because their function is caesural and compensatory:^[3]

• I.

1. Pas-de-quatre (4 male dancers)
2. Double pas-de-quatre (8 female dancers)
3. Triple pas-de-quatre (4 male + 8 female dancers)

• Prelude
• II. (First pas-de-trois: 1 male, 2 female dancers)

1. Sarabande-step (1 male dancer)
2. Gaillarde (2 female dancers)
3. Coda (1 male, 2 female dancers)

• Interlude
• III. (Second pas-de-trois: 2 male, 1 female dancers)

1. Bransle simple (2 male dancers)
2. Bransle gay (1 female dancer)
3. Bransle double (2 male, 1 female dancers)

• Interlude
• IV.

1. Pas-de-deux (1 male, 1 female dancer)
2. Four Duos (4 male, 4 female dancers)
3. Four Trios (4 male, 8 female dancers)

Agon is scored for a large orchestra consisting of 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones (2 tenor, 1 bass), harp, piano, mandolin, timpani, tom-tom, xylophone, castanets, and strings. At no point does the entire orchestra play a tutti. Each section is scored for a different combination of instruments.

This was not the first composition in which Stravinsky employed serial techniques, but it was the first in which he used a twelve-tone row, introduced in the second coda, at bar 185. Earlier in the work, Stravinsky had employed a seventeen-tone row, in bars 104–107, and evidence from the sketches suggests a close relationship between these two rows.^[4] The Bransle Double is based on a different twelve-tone series, the hexachords of which are treated independently.^[5] Those hexachords first appear separately in the Bransle Simple (for two male dancers) and Bransle Gay (for solo female dancer), and are then combined to form a twelve-tone row in the Bransle Double. These three dances together constitute the second pas-de-trois.^[6]

• Todd Bolender
• Barbara Milberg
• Barbara Walczak
• Roy Tobias
• Jonathan Watts
• Melissa Hayden
• Diana Adams
• Arthur Mitchell

When Agon was performed in Italy in 1965,^[7] Stravinsky was particularly pleased with the performance of mandolinist Giuseppe Anedda. "Bravo Mandolino!" shouted Stravinsky at Anedda and caught up with him to congratulate him and shake his hand.^[8]

Sources

• Smyth, David (Summer 1999). "Stravinsky's Second Crisis: Reading the Early Serial Sketches". Perspectives of New Music. 37 (2): 117–146. doi:10.2307/833512. JSTOR 833512.
• White, Eric Walter (1979). Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works (2nd ed.). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-03985-8.

• Joseph, Charles M. 2002. Stravinsky and Balanchine: A Journey of Invention. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300087128.
• Macaulay, Alastair. November 25, 2007. "50 Years Ago, Modernism Was Given a Name: Agon". The New York Times.

• Agon, Balanchine Trust
• "The Bransles of Stravinsky's Agon : A Transition to Serial Composition", by Bonnie S. Jacobi