Two Geniuses, Together Again By Daniel Mendelsohn
"He was the only genius I’ve ever known.”
That’s what the late Robert Gottlieb, longtime friend and advisor to the Miami City Ballet—“Bob,” to everyone who knew him—had to say about George Balanchine (1904-1983). Few would disagree. From the 1920s until his death, the Russian-born Balanchine, widely acknowledged as the greatest choreographer of our time, gave new life to the centuries-old art from of ballet, grafting the pure European classicism he absorbed as a student in pre-revolutionary Russia (as a young dancer, he was presented to Tsar Nicholas II) onto the exuberant athleticism he found in America, the country he adopted, in 1933, and lived in for the rest of his life.
That the high, pure, European- descended neoclassicism of Balanchine should have found an ideal home in Miami Beach since the 1980s, when the MCB was founded, is not as surprising as it may have seemed at first to some. As Bob Gottlieb, who knew Balanchine well—the two worked closely together at New York City Ballet starting in the 1970s, when Bob helped with programming—often observed, the energy of Miami, in particular the vitality of Latin culture, so evident in the company’s many Latin dancers, was a perfect fit for Balanchine’s works, which depend as much on an intense and sustained physicality as they do on classicizing beauty and fluidity of line. Small wonder, then, that Balanchine is the artistic “genius” that continues to preside over the Miami City Ballet—which has been guided since its inception by two figures who began as Balanchine dancers at the NYCB, Edward Villella and Lourdes Lopez—as this year’s programs attest.
Many people would describe Bob Gottlieb himself a genius. Certainly in the world of publishing he was—there is no other word—a legend, often referred to as the greatest editor and publisher of the second half of the twentieth century. It was Bob who was the hidden talent behind the successes of dozens of writers from the 1950s to the 2020s, from novelists such as Toni Morrison and Doris Lessing and Joseph Heller (whose “Catch 22” he both edited and came up with the now-proverbial title for), to the eminent biographer Robert Caro, to former president Bill Clinton. Bob himself would have disdained the title of “genius.” Not, I hasten to add, that he was particularly: like many accomplished people, he had a healthy sense of his own talents and value. I happened to be with him at MCB studios one morning, watching company class, when the news broke that Mr. Clinton had selected Bob to edit his memoirs. A member of the MCB board who was also present at the class walked up to Bob, brandishing a copy of the New York Times, which featured a big story about Bob and Clinton’s new editorial relationship. “Well,” the board member beamed, “this must be a huge honor!” Without missing a beat Bob shot back, “Yes, I’m sure it’s a big thrill for him.”
No: Bob saw himself not as a “genius” but as (as he liked to put it) “a person who liked to be useful.” And nothing gave him as much joy in the last decades of his life as being useful to Miami City Ballet. Bob had fallen in love with ballet at first sight, as a teenager in the late 1940s, when New York City Ballet, then in its infancy, was showcasing Balanchine’s work to enthralled New York audiences; since that first encounter, there was no higher art form for him, no greater choreographer. (A point he often made in the many dance columns he wrote after he retired from his publishing career.) Four decades later, in the early 1990s, he fell in love at first sight again, this time with Miami (during a publishing event at the old convention center!) and impetuously bought himself a 1930s Art Deco house, the Villa Serena, across from the golf course on Meridian and Twenty-third Street. At the very same moment, he fell in love with MCB, then in its early years, a love affair that was to continue to the end of his life.
Every February and August for three decades, when he was in residence at the Villa, he’d be at company class and rehearsals for much of the day, observing, talking to and getting to know the dancers, consulting with Edward and, later, with Lourdes, sharing his immense knowledge and expertise with them, all for the benefit of the company that for him, embodied the true Balanchine spirit more than any other. Bob, who died this summer at the age of ninety- two, was not a sentimental person, but I know that he’d have been thrilled to be the subject, along with Balanchine, of this program’s tribute: Two Geniuses, Together Again.