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The Prodigal Son


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I saw a Boston Ballet production of the Prodigal Son a few years ago, and posted this as part of my review her:

the crawling of the repentant Son struck me as theatrical, and I didn't agree with the interpretation of the son returning to his father -- his father forcing him to crawl on his hands and knees up to him, whereas both the text and the natural instinct of a parent would show the father moving forward to embrace the son.

Today I was reading Barbara Milberg Fisher's In Balanchine's Company, and encountered this passage:

I got up the nerve once to ask Mr. B why the father in Prodigal doesn't help the boy at the end. Why does he just stand there while the boy crawls painfully up to the tent? In the Bible story, I reminded him, the father runs to embrace the son. Why didn't Mr. B at least have the father go to meet him and help him, instead of letting him drag himself along with his cane? The boy was sorry, I pointed out; he was crippled and starving. Didn't the father feel compassion? Why was he so stern and unbending? Balanchine heard me out, and when I finally sputtered to a stop, he told me in firm tones: "No. Father does not move. He is like God. Boy must come to him.

I just thought it was funny she had the same question, and actually got an answer!

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But wait.......I remember that in the memoir of one wife/paramour or another (perhaps Shura, since she was living with him when he choreographed it) she recounts Balanchine "agonizing" over whether or not he could extend that crawl for such a long stretch of music. It was presented as an artistic decision based on the music. If anyone has access to the book (which I don't just now) we could all learn something about that decision.

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The ending of Prodigal Son bothers me more every time I see the ballet , and every time I find myself wondering why a religious man like Balanchine would so badly distort the message of the parable. Was it just that the music didn't fit the biblical ending? And if so, how could he bring himself to do the ballet at all? I'd really welcome any more light anyone could shed on this.

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Jane, I was thinking about this, and I do believe that it reflects Balanchine's own views on faith.

The Prodigal Son is based on a parable, a parable about the relationship between God and someone who comes to believe in God.

It seems that Balanchine felt that a Christian builds his/her own faith in God; God does not reach out, or compel, belief.

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Jane, I was thinking about this, and I do believe that it reflects Balanchine's own views on faith.

The Prodigal Son is based on a parable, a parable about the relationship between God and someone who comes to believe in God.

It seems that Balanchine felt that a Christian builds his/her own faith in God; God does not reach out, or compel, belief.

fendrock, that's a fascinating reading, but it's not one I've ever heard before. Certainly it's not the classical Christian reading, which sees the parable as illustrating God's eagerness to forgive someone who has willfully done wrong, and His joy in so doing. Still, as carbro, says, the father's initial impassiveness in the ballet does make his final solicitiousness more poignant. And it puts the spotlight on the effort it cost the son to return, emphasizing the sincerity of his repentance. I'm not speculating that this is what Balanchine intended, but we can watch it that way.

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This ballet has always seemed to me like an emigré's statement of longing for home. The Father is like God, but is not the God of the Gospel according to Luke. This is impassive God the Father of the Old Believer Orthodox Church. The Father is less God, and more Russia. The Father will not move; the reconciling penitent must come to him. It's a lot like consubstantiation. Very little change on earth, but a change in Heaven.

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When I first saw Prodigal Son, my first thought was "did I miss that week of Hebrew School?" I was so sure from its telling that it was an Old Testament story that I didn't know. I didn't realize it was from the New Testament, given Balanchine's take on it.

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The Father is like God, but is not the God of the Gospel according to Luke. This is impassive God the Father of the Old Believer Orthodox Church.

Why would Old Believers interpret the parable in this way? Presumably their translation of Luke's Gospel would have the father running out to meet his son as in every other translation. Nevertheless, is there any evidence that Balanchine was sympathetic to the Old Believers? I think the real question is why Prokofiev gave the piece such a somber ending. Given the music, I don't see how Balanchine could have choreographed it any other way.

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The Father is like God, but is not the God of the Gospel according to Luke. This is impassive God the Father of the Old Believer Orthodox Church.

Why would Old Believers interpret the parable in this way? Presumably their translation of Luke's Gospel would have the father running out to meet his son as in every other translation. Nevertheless, is there any evidence that Balanchine was sympathetic to the Old Believers? I think the real question is why Prokofiev gave the piece such a somber ending. Given the music, I don't see how Balanchine could have choreographed it any other way.

The father would have, but Balanchine's change was to equate the father with G-d, and the G-d of the Orthodox Church, in his vision, would behave differently.
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The father would have, but Balanchine's change was to equate the father with G-d, and the G-d of the Orthodox Church, in his vision, would behave differently.

But that's just it. The father in the parable has always been understood to be God and the son represents repentant sinners. In the notes to the Orthodox New Testament (Holy Apostles Convent, 2000) Blessed Theophylact is quoted as writing, "The man who is introduced here is God, verily the one who loves mankind. The two sons portray the two ranks of men, the righteous and sinners" (vol. 1, p. 357). The parable of the prodigal son comes right after the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin, and in both cases they're followed by explanations about there being more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than many righteous men in no need of repentance.

And yet both Prokofiev and Balanchine seem to focus on how difficult it is for the sinner to humble himself and repent, rather than how eager God is to welcome back the wayward. Now I see how the other son's subsequent irritation and the father's explanation about the dead coming back to life and the lost being found would be difficult to translate into movement, but that still leaves the punchline of the parable missing.

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In art, as opposed to love, Balanchine didn't beg, and he didn't let his dancers ask for much. He was known to be unforgiving. He bestowed. I think his father figure in Prodigal Son is very much in that vein, as well as resembling the formal, ritualistic religious figures of the Orthodox Church and the monarch whose court he left most reluctantly.

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That's why I always consider it more of an emigrant's tale of homesickness than much of a relation of a Christian parable. But Helene is right, it's a very formal, distant God-figure that is the Father. One of the reasons for the Great Schism (1054) was that the western church argued that Christ was homoousias (of one being with the Father), while the eastern church maintained that the former was homoiousias (of a being LIKE the Father). The trinity of the orthodox had rather rigid and hierarchic job descriptions for the various aspects of God. Souls in heaven might not even see God the Father. Too high up.

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The music, as volcanohunter says, does in deed provide the emotional foundation for Balanchine's interpretation. This is not meant to discount the possibility of various theological interpretations as well.

The son at the end of the ballet, crawling across the stage to his Father's open but unyielding arms, seems totally drained and humbled, and completely dependent. This is human salavation as abject surrender. It is a vision of parental Love that is quite foreign to our usual idea of -- and frequent sentimentalizing of -- human parenting. God's "Fatherhood" is not your comforting fix-everthing-here-on-earth Diety. I guess you can interpret it in a variety of ways. As for me, I am reminded of John Knox, Jonathan Edwards, and other variants of the Puritan Protestant view of things. (Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God, even when being forgiven.)

This discussion me back to Bernard Taper's biography of Balanchine, where I found the following:

... the libretto Kochno prepared was fairly straightforward. For some of the action, such as the Prodigal's return, Kochno drew on a Pushkin story, "The Stationmaster," in which are described in detail several engravings, depicting scenes from the bibilical story, which hang on the walls of the little post station, someonwere in the middle of Russia.
A brief Googling reveals that Pushkin's prodigal offspring is a daughter, and that the stationmaster, deeply distressed by her abduction to the capital, becomes unhinged and dies. From an article by Lina Steiner, in Comparative Literature:
... the first mention of the parable in Pushkin's take is the reference to the German 'lubok' pictures representing the Biblical story that used to hang on the wall of the Stationmaster's house. These pictures are so deeply ingrained in Vyrin's mind -- or, to be more precise, Vyrin's mind is so comfortably circumscribed within the circular image of the world projected by these pictures -- that after his unfortunately expedition to Petersburg in search of his prodigal daughter he succumbs to desolation and ruin. What brings the Stationmaster's ruin is his firm conviction that the German pictures depict a 'universal truth,' according to which the seducer will repent and the daughter who has strayed will return to her father.'
Is anyone familiar with the imagery in these engravings, or with the Pushkin story which is apparently an ironic comment on them?
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One of the reasons for the Great Schism (1054) was that the western church argued that Christ was homoousias (of one being with the Father), while the eastern church maintained that the former was homoiousias (of a being LIKE the Father).

:blink: The issue at the root of the schism of 1054 was the filioque, not the nature of Christ. It was a dispute over whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from both Father and Son. What you're referring to is related to the Arian heresy, which was condemned in 325. I can assure you that both Orthodox and Catholics refer to Christ as homoousios or consubstantial with the Father. (The Church Slavic term is edinosushchna.) On this point there is no dispute.

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Without wishing to draw out a discussion further :blink: , oh, but there CAN be, there can. It's why the heresiology classes at the seminaries are so crowded. Individual heresies don't exist in little bottles, even after they are apparently squelched. Some scholars (not me) like to trace the Great Schism all the way back to the Corinthian Heresy ("Let's try to sin more, so we can have more forgiveness, and therefore be more blessed" {sounds like fun, doesn't it?}) These differences of interpretation and belief persist for centuries. St. Cyril of Jerusalem thought he had completely destroyed Nestorianism, but there's a Nestorian church in Jerusalem even today. The filioque clause ("We believe in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the son....) was the proximate cause of the separation of the eastern from the western churches. The eastern didn't support the idea of the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Son as well as the Father, which may actually have something to do with the hermeneutic which led Balanchine to an image of the solid, stolid Father, and the depraved, albeit penitent Son in his ballet. And besides, there was all that damn music to fill!

It would be of great interest to know how Prokofiev chose to end his ballet score with the somberness he did. Anybody have any insight on that? Was there more that Balanchine cut?

And Consubstantion remains a heresy within the Roman Catholic Church, who maintain Transubstantiation as the true way in which the bread and wine of the mass become the actual body and blood of Christ.

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And Consubstantion remains a heresy within the Roman Catholic Church, who maintain Transubstantiation as the true way in which the bread and wine of the mass become the actual body and blood of Christ.

:blink: Just for the sake of clarity, let's not confuse the Nicene Creed with the Lord's Supper.

The Nicene Creed in both versions (325 & 381) states that Christ is ομοούσιον τω Πατρί (homoousion to Patri). In Latin this is translated as consubstantialem Patri. In Church Slavic it's единосущна Отцу (edinosuščna Otcu). (I apologize for not having proper Church Slavic fonts installed on my computer.) In the Book of Common Prayer it's translated as "being of one substance with the Father," as it is in the Lutheran Service Book. The Orthodox Church of America translates it as "of one essence with the Father." At present the Roman Catholic Church translates this into English as "one in Being with the Father," although the committee responsible for the English liturgy has decided that it ought to be translated as "consubstantial with the Father," to bring it closer to the Latin. The key thing here is that Orthodox, Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans and many other Protestants accept the Creed as authoritative and none of them holds that Christ is "of like substance" (homoiousios) with the Father.

Consubstantiation is something entirely different. That term, generally but not entirely accurately associated with Martin Luther, is used for the doctrine that states that Christ's body and blood substantially coexist with the consecrated bread and wine. This doctrine was indeed condemned by the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent. The Catholic Church holds to a doctrine of transubstantation, which states that consecrated bread and wine actually change into the substance of the body and blood of Christ, so that only accidents of bread and wine remain. The Orthodox position is essentially the same.

But back to the parable itself. I don't think there's much basis for attributing Balanchine's interpretation to the Russian Orthodox Church. It probably has more to do with the personal religious views of Prokofiev, Kochno or Balanchine. I've never seen the translation of the Bible used by Old Believers, but in the standard Church Slavic Bible the father is described as running out to meet his son while the latter is still far away. The word used is текъ (tekŭ) derived from the verb meaning to flow or run, and related to the modern Russian течь (teč').

As for suggestions that the libretto was inspired by Pushkin, Kochno himself seems to have disavowed the idea.

When I [Anna Kisselgoff] interviewed Mr. Kochno last year in Paris, he said his inspiration for the ballet did not, as is generally believed, come from "The Station Master," an Alexander Pushkin story in which the hero comes across pictures that depict the biblical parable of the prodigal son.

Mr. Kochno said the aim was accessibility in the ballet - to tell a story straightforwardly, directly from the Bible, and to have Prokofiev's commissioned score serve the cause of intelligibility. Balanchine, he rightly said, found the modern language to tell the story.

"As I have tried to stress in the last 15 years, that language derived from the Expressionist and Constructivist styles Balanchine had seen in the Russian theater before 1924," he said. "It is not the language of naturalism or realism."

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...&pagewanted=all

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Thanks for that link to the 1986 NYCB review, volcanohunter.It does indeed seem to undercut to suggestions of a Pushkin plot influence, although I still wonder what the engravings in the story looked like and how they handled the return to the Father.

As he crawls back home, Mr. [ib] Andersen knows how to build toward a climax: the celebrated moment when his father gathers him up in his cloak. Shaun O'Brien was magnificent as the patriarch in his granitelike stillness.
I love the phrase "granitelike stillness," as if the Father is a magnet drawing the son to him, but not himself moveable. Kochno's reference to the influence on Balanchine of Expressionism and Constructivism -- two movements not associated with sentimentality -- may also have a bearing on Balanchine's treatment of the interaction of son and Father in this scene.

Also, I hope that someone can answer Mel's interesting question about the role of Prokofiev in all this:

It would be of great interest to know how Prokofiev chose to end his ballet score with the somberness he did. Anybody have any insight on that? Was there more that Balanchine cut?
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(snip)

In the Book of Common Prayer it's translated as "being of one substance with the Father," as it is in the Lutheran Service Book.

(snip)

I don't think there's much basis for attributing Balanchine's interpretation to the Russian Orthodox Church. It probably has more to do with the personal religious views of Prokofiev, Kochno or Balanchine.

1) No it doesn't. We say "of one being with the Father."

2) So when did Balanchine's personal religious views become informed by, say, the Presbyterians?

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::mod beanie on::

While the religious contexts of The Prodigal Son are indeed a fascinating topic of discussion, it is outside the scope of this forum to be discussing theological issues in and of themselves. Remember also that not everybody who participates in Ballet Talk practices Christianity.

Please keep the discussion related to Balanchine's ballet in order for this thread to stay open.

Thank you.

::mod beanie off::

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But back to the parable itself. I don't think there's much basis for attributing Balanchine's interpretation to the Russian Orthodox Church. It probably has more to do with the personal religious views of Prokofiev, Kochno or Balanchine.
I think it has to do with both. Organized religions of all stripes have created ritual and general teaching that is expected to be absorbed through repetition, ritual, and impression. Do I think that Balanchine's interpretation was based in Orthodox doctrine? No. Do I think that Balanchine's interpretation was rooted in his concept of what it meant to be a Russian Orthodox man of deep religious faith, based on the ritual he observed in childhood, noted by Taper and many subsequent biographers, and reinforced by similar ritual at court and on the ballet stage? Yes.

Just as he experimented with Impressionistic ballet during his school days into his professional career, and just as he expanded ballet into a neoclassicism and use of modern music that would be alien to his childhood stage idols and often ignored the concept of institutional hierarchy as a ballet master, he kept the essence ingrained from when he was student: "Ballet is woman" and structural hierarchy on stage.

The distinction reminds me of a an interview with Karen Armstrong, a former nun who has written extensively about religion and religious history, that was published on salon.com. Since it is accessible by subscription, I won't add a link, but will quote a small portion:

You're saying these ancient sages really didn't care about big metaphysical systems. They didn't care about theology.

No, none of them did. And neither did Jesus. Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing good and being compassionate. In the Quran, metaphysical speculation is regarded as self-indulgent guesswork. And it makes people, the Quran says, quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian. You can't prove these things one way or the other, so why quarrel about it? The Taoists said this kind of speculation where people pompously hold forth about their opinions was egotism. And when you're faced with the ineffable and the indescribable, they would say it's belittling to cut it down to size. Sometimes, I think the way monotheists talk about G-d is unreligious.

Unreligious? Like talk about a personal G-d?

Yes, people very often talk about him as a kind of acquaintance, whom they can second-guess. People will say G-d loves that, G-d wills that, and G-d despises the other. And very often, the opinions of the deity are made to coincide exactly with those of the speaker.

Yet we certainly see a personal G-d in various sacred texts. People aren't just making that up.

No, but the great theologians in Judaism, Christianity and Islam say you begin with the idea of a god who is personal. But G-d transcends personality as G-d transcends every other human characteristic, such as gender. If we get stuck there, this is very immature. Very often people hear about G-d at about the same time as they're learning about Santa Claus. And their ideas about Santa Claus mature and change in time, but their idea of G-d remains infantile.

While I'm not saying that Balanchine's view of G-d was infantile, I do think that in his interpretation of the Prodigal story, he retained the essence of what he distilled from his religious experience and turned it into theater. That's why I think that a discussion of doctrine is not the central point.
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