© New York Public Library Exhibition Details/ Press Release Exhibition brochure with many pictures in pdf format (3.1MB) Alex Martin's Fonteyn memories Margot Fonteyn in Ballet.co Legends section Renee Renouf reviews Anjuli Bai reviews New York Public Library website

In the autumn of 2004 Renee Renouf and Anjuli Bai happened across the New York Public Library exhibition about Margot Fonteyn and wrote some brief notes in it's praise for our postings.

Renee and Anjuli also included some quotes from the exhibition about Fonteyn's famous opening night in America on 9 October 1949 when Sadler's Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet) opened at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York with Sleeping Beauty. We really wanted to share all the quotes more widely.

So with the kind permission of the New York Public Library below are the quotes from various people who were present on that night in October as printed in the brochure which accompanied the exhibition. And following the quotes are Renee's notes and observations on visiting the exhibition. Huge thanks to Renee Renouf and Anjuli Bai for bringing this all together for us. BM

Quotes on Margot Fonteyn's opening night in America on 9 October 1949

Jerome Robbins
It was a magisterial performance. Margot took New York's heart and honor with her performance. Never has there been another debut like that one. We all cheered and cheered, for the gift she left us and for her true Art of Dance. The memory is still alive and with us and she gave an inspired lift to all who saw her.

Margot Fonteyn
from her Autobiography
When the long-awaited night was upon me, I became unnaturally calm, which worried Pamela May terribly. "Are you all right?" she asked. "You're always so nervous before the performance. I've never seen you like this." In fact I was completely numb. But everyone else was on edge, from Hurok down to the last corps de ballet dancer. It was a sweltering hot October night, an Indian summer. The atmosphere inside the Opera House was like a jungle minutes before a tropical storm. As the curtain rose, applause greeted the Oliver Messel set before anyone danced a step. When I ran out onto the stage there was a burst of sound. It drowned out the music and also some part of my mind, for I have never been able to remember anything between those first minutes of deafening applause on my entrance, and the incredible reception after the third act pas de deux with Bobby (Helpmann). It must have been the sheer unexpectedness that induced that trance-like state. Unimaginable success! It was unlike anything we had ever experienced before.

The storm had broken. There were flowers everywhere. (Ninette) De Valois made a speech from the stage. Everyone was hysterical. Crowds tried to reach the dressing rooms, the doormen panicked and held distinguished visitors at bay in the street. I felt like a person reprieved from the gallows.

Pamela May
SWB principal dancer, appeared as the Fairy of the Enchanted Garden.
By the time Fonteyn/Aurora made her first entrance in Act One, the house was buzzing and she was out of this world from her first steps forward. In the Rose Adagio, each Prince was really "with her" and the last Prince, John Hart, stood smiling at the side of the stage with folded arms waiting for Margot to come off balance, and after what seemed to be an eternity he offered her his hand. The house went mad and the applause was unbelievable. The company members standing in the wings all had tears rolling down their cheeks with excitement - I was one of them and will never forget it.

The standard of the performance was sustained at this level throughout, and we were all thrilled with Fonteyn and each other! De Valois was out front having a delightful time with the Mayor, and there were Russian and American dancers offering her their congratulations and sharing her company's huge success. I also remember that there was a lot of running about backstage from one dressing room to another during the performance, as we wanted to keep each other posted on what was going on!

Afterwards, we left the theatre in a fleet of cars with police escort and sirens! I was with Margot - we never stopped giggling and laughing until we arrived at the Mayor's party.

Maria Tallchief
It was as if a flash of sunshine came onto the stage. It was astounding. Everything about Margot was just glistening. You expected just another English dancer, but Margot was not like that. She was full of poetry, of musicality. It was a rare, God-given talent.
 

Alexander Grant
SWB company soloist, appeared in Danse Russe
Among the many talents of Margot Fonteyn was the ability to rise to a challenge. October, 1949, was her greatest challenge. Margot's first appearance wasn't until Act One, after the extended Prologue. When she did appear, she was so on form that the balances in the Rose Adagio were transformed. She let go of each of the four Princes' hands and for the first time took the arms up to fifth position, standing like a rock, unsupported on pointe in attitude, all with amazing musicality such as we had not seen before, and which every ballerina to dance Aurora has attempted since.

The audience exploded. For the entire evening her dancing was miraculous. Margot's eyes, speaking right to the back wall of the theatre, her musicality giving light and shade to every movement, she inspired the entire company. The audience reaction was phenomenal during the entire performance, with Margot the jewel at the top of the crown.

The company on the following visit was billed as "The Fabulous Sadler's Wells Ballet."

Sol Hurok
from his book S. Hurok Presents (1953)
I have had the privilege of handling the world's greatest artists and most distinguished attractions; my career has been punctuated with stirring opening performances of my own, and I have been at others quite as memorable. However, so far as the quality of the demonstrations and the manifestations of enthusiasm are concerned, the premiere of the Sadler's Wells Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House, on 9 October, 1949 was the most outstanding of my entire experience.

Dame Ninette de Valois, outwardly as calm as ever, but, I suspect inwardly a mass of conflicting emotions, was seated in the box with Mayor O'Dwyer. As the curtains closed on the first act of The Sleeping Beauty, and the tremendous roar of cheers and applause rose from the packed house, the Mayor laid his hand on "Madame's" arm and said, "Lady, you're in!"

Frederic Franklin
(Alicia) Markova and (Alexandra) Danilova had been invited, as was I, for the opening performance. We were seated in the front row, possibly the worst place in the house to see ballet.

Up went the curtain on the magnificent set. The dancers were nervous on a raked stage with potholes all over it and also a trapdoor. We were all waiting for Act One. The music played and I remember the two ladies, one on either side of me - suddenly their backs went up very straight, because they knew this was the entrance of Aurora.

Margot appeared behind the scrim, way back, as far as you could get on the old Met stage. She ran on, looking absolutely wonderful. Her tutu was pink with billowing sleeves and a beautiful headdress. She looked 17 or 18. She went through the mime with the mother and the father and the four Princes, and then we got to the Rose Adagio, and I thought, "This is it."

We got to the big finale, where she's wheeled around by the four men. By this time she is utterly secure, with the conductor Constant Lambert absolutely breathing with her. She took her hand away from each Prince, with a ripple of applause around the theatre, and as it came to the last turn, the audience was really building. Margot took her hand away from the fourth Prince, and looked out at the audience as if to say, "Yes, I've got England on my shoulders, and I think it's all right."

She held the balance, she did the pirouettes, she made a bow to the court and the audience fell apart. Well, the two ladies - oh, the noises were coming out, rather strange noises. The applause was deafening. The shouts were deafening. She took so many calls that the two ladies were taken aback by it all. They were completely bewildered. They had expected a good performance - after all, she was a ballerina - but not like that.

At the end of Act One, Markova and Danilova didn't say a word. Nothing - they were strangely silent. They were both reigning ballerinas. Somehow, someone had come along and upset the whole thing. And it was Margot who did it.

Margot knew that everything rested on her shoulders that night, everything, and the fate of de Valois was also on her shoulders. She realized it, and Lord knows, she came through. It was the beginning of an American career; she had found another home.

Marian Seldes
When the lights dimmed and the gold curtain rose with a sound like an ocean wave, the audience became part of King Florestan's court in attendance at Aurora's christening. We saw almost every member of the fine Sadler's Wells Company - and it's Princess Aurora, Margot Fonteyn, in her unforgettable American debut. She was an enchanting dancer. Her technique, her musicality, her acting were perfection.

The Sleeping Beauty had the quality of a dream that night. When the curtain calls began, the most sophisticated New Yorkers behaved like children who had just been given the best party of their lives, laughing, shouting, even crying with joy. It was, to use Arnold Haskell's term, "Balletomania."

Guthrie McClintic took me backstage to see his friend, Margot. He walked toward her and went to his knees as formal as any courtier. I had never seen anyone do that before, off the stage. He kissed her hand, then her cheek. He introduced me. I knelt, too.

The dream is still with me. A rare dream that comes back again and again over the years when I am wide awake.

John Martin
The New York Times review, October 10, 1949
The American debut of the Sadler's Wells Ballet from Covent Garden, London, at the Metropolitan Opera House last night was an occasion in every sense of the word, complete with national anthems, a list of distinguished patrons, and flag draped boxes. Almost everybody in the auditorium bore a label of some kind in the arts or public affairs....

The admirable policy of having no stars can go only so far; when a star of the first magnitude appears before our eyes, it makes no earthly difference how she is billed. Margot Fonteyn is unmistakably such a star, a ballerina among ballerinas. London has known this for some time, Europe has found it out and last night she definitely conquered another continent.

She is young and lovely to look at, has technical equipment so strong that she seems to ignore it altogether, moves not only with ease but with an active pleasure in movement, and is just about as enchanting a dancer as has come along in a score of years. What she did with the by no means unfamiliar title role of this old ballet was artistically beautiful and theatrically exciting. Indeed, it is possible to say that we have never seen the famous Rose Adagio really danced before.

Walter Terry
The New York Herald Tribune, October 16, 1949
As Princess Aurora, Miss Fonteyn is completely lovely.... The English ballerina's dancing of the role is, in my opinion, an unforgettable experience. Not only is the overall performance a miracle of beauty but the dance details are endlessly fascinating and, I insist, lovely. The simplest of movements - a lifting of the foot, the exactitude with which a gesture is placed in a phrase of action, the tilt of the head, a miniature glissade - as hypnotic as are her precise accomplishment of multiple turns or the light darting (she neither sweeps or swoops) of her leaps. Miss Fonteyn's way of dance is pure distillation of the dance style of other members of the company, of English dance.

Doris Hering (critic for The Daily Compass): Before the last act, John Martin and Walter Terry very dutifully ran up the aisle to go out and do their reviews. And I thought to myself, "How can they leave before the grand pas de deux? How can they?" And their newspapers were only within walking distance of the old Met, and I had to go down to the financial district where The Daily Compass had its plant.

I stayed and I sat all the way through the pas de deux, and then I finally left. And I ran down the street, ran into the subway, and took out a piece of eight-and-one-half by eleven paper, which I folded into squares, and started writing madly. I was under the spell of Margot Fonteyn. Nothing existed around me. The subway was not there.

And then I heard a very strange sound. It didn't sound like a tunnel. So I looked out of the window and I was going over the water to Brooklyn. There was nothing I could so, and I just kept on writing. When I got to Brooklyn, I got out and ran upstairs, ran across, ran down the other side and took the train back to Wall Street. Her effect on one incipient critic was not terribly important. But it was that kind of effect that she had on all of America.

Mary Clarke
Ballet Today
There is probably, at each moment in time, one place on earth where a lover of dancing simply must be. On October 9, 1949 that place was inside the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, and for the rest of my life I shall be grateful that I was there.

Margot Fonteyn
December 1949, in a letter to an American friend after returning to England.
We started last night with Cinderella, and found London audiences rather cold and suspicious after New York. However, I expect we shall get used to them, and they will learn to love us again.
 

Notes and Observations on the Exhibitition by Renee Renouf
Renee Renouf is Ballet.co's West Coast reviwer.

By some kind fate, the Margot Fonteyn exhibit was still on view when I reached the Dance Collection at Lincoln Center in New York City on September 9. I stared at it for two days before asking if I could walk in and see it, which I did on September 11, its final day before dismantling, this wonderfully conceived, executed and thoroughly nostalgic view of probably the first ballerina of magnitude to arise in Western Europe in the mid-twentieth century. (Markova and Danilova belong to the first half of the twentieth century even though they were still active when Fonteyn came dancing across the stage of the old Met in New York in 1949. Fonteyn’s principal rival would be Yvette Chauvire and I am placing Galina Ulanova and Maya Plisetskaya in the Eastern European tradition for argument’s sake).

The exhibit was conceived and executed by Joy Williams Brown, a one-time demi-soloist with Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and Robert Gottlieb, The New York Observer dance critic, who was an editor with Alfred Knopf when he persuaded Fonteyn to write her autobiography.

Sections outside of Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and Ondine were divided into categories: Fonteyn and Nureyev; Other Dances: Curtain Calls: Life in New York; Fashion; Friendship. The comments included contributions by Irina Baronova; Natalia Makarova; Frederick Ashton; Galina Ulanova; Martha Graham; Roland Petit; Jerome Robbins; Anthony Dowell; Lincoln Kirstein and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

The walls were divided between comments by dance notables and enlarged images of Fonteyn in some of her major roles. The costumes included Act I of Sleeping Beauty, the lovely sweet sixteen pink tutu designed by Oliver Messel. Two other cases displayed the diaphanous robe from the Bedroom Scene of Macmillan’s Romeo and Juliet and the white dress from Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand. There was also Fonteyn’s Odette costume, designed, I think, by Leslie Hurry.

Lent by The Royal Opera House, these costumes were enchanting because of their meticulous workmanship, particularly the embellishments on the classical tutus. Among other indications of the necessities in tutu construction were the double row of hooks and eyes at the back of the bodices, reminding one that in the course of a ballet the dancer’s lungs and diaphram expanded and required extra space. Mind you, Fonteyn was reputed to possess a nineteen-inch waist.

In a larger case there were six spectacular examples of Fonteyn’s taste and love of fashion, mirrored on the walls by images of her in the garments on special occasions. These elegant garments came to the exhibit from a special collection of Yves St. Laurent designs. One was called Africa (1967), a totally beaded sheath in which one saw Dame Margot making a curtsey to Diana, Princess of Wales. Another, called Charleston (1969) was a short sheath covered with multi-hued pastel fringe in which she was pictured dancing The Twist with Rudolph Nuryev at some bash. Two evening dresses from 1963 and 1982 included one in grey with magnificent appliqués of sequins and Fonteyn’s picture on some grand curving staircase. A black suit, called Bolero (1968) was embellished with numerous black balls and braid.

A waist-high document case included the occasion when the City of New York bestowed its Handel Medallion on Fonteyn, plus the program on that fateful night when Fonteyn’s toe shoes carried the fate of Sadler’s Wells as well as her own body on them.