Dybbuk (ballet)
Encyclopedia
Dybbuk is a ballet made by New York City Ballet
New York City Ballet
New York City Ballet is a ballet company founded in 1948 by choreographer George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Leon Barzin was the company's first music director. Balanchine and Jerome Robbins are considered the founding choreographers of the company...

 balletmaster Jerome Robbins
Jerome Robbins
Jerome Robbins was an American theater producer, director, and choreographer known primarily for Broadway Theater and Ballet/Dance, but who also occasionally directed films and directed/produced for television. His work has included everything from classical ballet to contemporary musical theater...

 to Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim...

's eponymous music and taking S. Ansky
S. Ansky
Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport , known by his pseudonym S. Ansky , was a Russian Jewish author, playwright, and researcher of Jewish folklore....

's play The Dybbuk as a source. The premiere took place on May 16, 1974, at New York State Theater
New York State Theater
The David H. Koch Theater is a theater for ballet and opera, part of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts located at the intersection of Columbus Avenue and 63rd Street in New York City, United States. Originally named the New York State Theater, the house has been home to both the New York...

, Lincoln Center
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is a complex of buildings in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of New York City's Upper West Side. Reynold Levy has been its president since 2002.-History and facilities:...

 with scenery by Rouben Ter-Arutunian
Rouben Ter-Arutunian
Rouben Ter-Arutunian was a costume and scenic designer for dance, opera, theater and television.Born in Tiflis, Georgia, he attended the Reimann Art School from 1939 to 1941, studied film music at the Hochschule fur Musik and took courses at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University , 1941–43, and at the...

, costumes by Patricia Zipprodt
Patricia Zipprodt
Patricia Zipprodt was an American costume designer. She was known for her technique of painting fabrics and thoroughly researching a project's subject matter, especially when it was a period piece...

 and lighting by Jennifer Tipton
Jennifer Tipton
Jennifer Tipton is a lighting designer. She has designed for dance, theater and opera.In 1958, she graduated from Cornell University...

; Dybbuk Variations was made later the same year, receiving its premiere in November.

Premise

Yiddish
Yiddish language
Yiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages...

 playwright S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk (1912–1919) centers around Khonnon and Leah, a young couple that has been promised for marriage to each other by their fathers before they were born. Before the wedding, Leah’s father breaks off the marriage with the penniless Khonnon who dies instantly of a broken heart. However, Khonnon has his revenge when he enters Leah’s body in the form of an evil spirit called a dybbuk
Dybbuk
In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a malicious or malevolent possessing spirit believed to be the dislocated soul of a dead person.Dybbuks are said to have escaped from Sheol or to have been turned away for serious transgressions, such as suicide, for which the soul is denied entry...

, which makes her act as though she is possessed. After rabbinical intervention, the likes of which Ansky had seen in exorcism-like ceremonies among the Hasidim
Hasidic Judaism
Hasidic Judaism or Hasidism, from the Hebrew —Ḥasidut in Sephardi, Chasidus in Ashkenazi, meaning "piety" , is a branch of Orthodox Judaism that promotes spirituality and joy through the popularisation and internalisation of Jewish mysticism as the fundamental aspects of the Jewish faith...

 when traveling through present day Belarus
Belarus
Belarus , officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel ,...

, Leah is forced to decide whether to marry the richer man or enter an unworldly union with the ghost of Khonnon. She chooses the latter to great dramatic effect at the fall of the curtain.

Composition

In Dybbuk, Bernstein used created a Kabbalistic
Kabbalah
Kabbalah/Kabala is a discipline and school of thought concerned with the esoteric aspect of Rabbinic Judaism. It was systematized in 11th-13th century Hachmei Provence and Spain, and again after the Expulsion from Spain, in 16th century Ottoman Palestine...

 tree to derive some of the melodic motives. By Kabbalistic tradition, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet
Hebrew alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, or more historically, the Assyrian script, is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. There have been two...

 has its own numerical value. The name of the female lead in Dybbuk, Leah, is equal to the numerical value of thirty-six. Bernstein focused his composition on the divisions of thirty-six and eighteen (the numerical value of the Hebrew word chai
Chai (symbol)
Chai is a symbol and word that figures prominently in Jewish culture. It consists of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet Chet and Yod .The Hebrew word "living" is related to the term for "life", chaim; ḥayyim....

 , meaning "life"), each multiples of the nine—the number of notes including the repetition of the top note in a symmetrical octatonic scale
Octatonic scale
An octatonic scale is any eight-note musical scale. Among the most famous of these is a scale in which the notes ascend in alternating intervals of a whole step and a half step, creating a symmetric scale...

. The result lent itself well to dodecaphonic
Twelve-tone technique
Twelve-tone technique is a method of musical composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg...

 composition but baffled critics, causing Oliver Knussen
Oliver Knussen
Oliver Knussen CBE is a British composer and conductor.-Biography:Oliver Knussen was born in Glasgow, Scotland. His father, Stuart Knussen, was principal double bass of the London Symphony Orchestra. Oliver Knussen studied composition with John Lambert, between 1963 and 1969 and also received...

 to write in Tempo
Tempo (journal)
Tempo is a quarterly music journal published in the UK and specialising in music of the 20th century and contemporary music. Originally founded in 1939 as the 'house magazine' of the music publisher Boosey & Hawkes, Tempo was the brain-child of Schoenberg's pupil Erwin Stein, who worked for Boosey...

, "…it is surprising to encounter Bernstein making use of numerical formulas derived from the Kabbalah… and producing his most austerely contemporary-sounding score to date." Jack Gottlieb commented, "The Dybbuk ballet (1974), however, marks a kind of departure for the composer since its concern with numerology results in far more hard-edged dissonant music (sometimes 12-tone) than in any of his other works."

original

  • Patricia McBride
    Patricia McBride
    Patricia McBride is a ballerina who spent nearly 30 years dancing with the New York City Ballet....

  • Tracey Bennett

  • Helgi Tomasson
  • Bart Cook
  • Victor Castelli
  • Hermes Conde


2008 Spring – Jerome Robbins celebration 

  • Rachel Rutherford
    Rachel Rutherford
    Rachel Rutherford is a soloist with New York City Ballet. She began her training at age eight at the Joffrey Ballet School, entered the School of American Ballet in 1987, where she received the D.A.N.C.E. scholarship allowing her to study in Spring 1992 at the Royal Danish Ballet...


  • Benjamin Millepied
    Benjamin Millepied
    Benjamin Millepied is a French danseur, best known for his work as choreographer in the movie Black Swan .-Early life:...



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