Memento Mori
In Memory Of..., choreographed by Jerome Robbins to music by Alban Berg. New York City Ballet, 1986.
IT HAD reached the point where people were beginning to die around him. As the late 1970s gave way to the 1980s, the idea was becoming personal. Jerome Robbins himself had turned sixty in 1978, and seventy loomed in the near distance. His body was no longer the flexible, easy instrument he had depended on in his youth. Mortality was encroaching, and his level of anxiety, too, was increasing. After one particularly stressful period—during which he discovered that his latest lover was involved with someone else, at the same time as he was losing his beloved Snedens Landing summer place—Robbins went so far as to commit himself to McLean’s mental hospital. Even after he emerged three weeks later, he still felt shaky, and it was months before he could really work again.
Still, the decade and a half that encompassed the period between his celebratory and his death-ridden … contained numerous professional satisfactions. In 1975 he contributed five ballets to Balanchine’s Ravel festival—including the substantial , starring Suzanne Farrell—and in 1981 he created two more works for the Tchaikovsky festival, despite his lack of enthusiasm for that particular composer. The discipline itself, Robbins acknowledged, was worth something. “Whenever we did our festivals that Mr. Balanchine organized, suddenly we were all doing Stravinsky ballets or Tchaikovsky ballets or Ravel ballets, whether we thought we wanted to or not,” he once commented. “And that wasn’t a bad discipline. It sometimes is good to work not where you always feel the most comfortable or the most ready.” He also noticed a corollary, that “the days when I want to go to the theater, and want to choreograph, because I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m the most upset about it, is the day when something happens.” In short, a choreographer could not afford to be an overly sensitive prima donna—among other reasons, because rehearsal rooms and dancers might not be available at his preferred times. “Terpsichore has to come down between three and six on a Friday afternoon, even though you
