Music: Classic Achieved

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Yeats' oft-quoted couplet sums up the ideal of ballet—the ideal so rarely achieved. And no wonder. Classical dance is at once the most sensuous and the most abstract of the theatrical arts. Its essence is the interaction of music with the movement of male and female bodies—the erotic impulse styled and formalized by discipline and grace and shaped to a unified whole.

Seldom have these ingredients been brought together in such perfect balance as in the New York City Ballet's new instant masterpiece, Choreographer Jerome Robbins' The Goldberg Variations. The unspectacular title refers to the music that both inspired and accompanied the work: the 30 variations based on a theme from the Anna Magdalena Pianobook composed by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1742. Just as Bach's music constitutes a lifetime lesson in keyboard knowledge, Robbins' variations in motion add up to a passionate yet restrained encyclopedia of dance. The Goldberg Variations, which has been made part of the City Ballet's repertoire, is a collaboration that transcends the centuries, a joint work of art as remarkable as the flawless translation of a great poem.

The ballet begins in darkness. A pianist (Gordon Beelzner) sounds the delicate, unobtrusive theme upon which Bach built his variations. Onstage, as the curtain rises, are a couple (Michael Steele and Renee Estópinal) in period attire: he in black frock coat and breeches, she in a white bell-shaped dress. Their movements together are as much mime as dance: a conversation of courtly gestures, expressed more by arm and hand than by the deceptively easy steps that subtly accent Bach's limpid line.

This opening dance—low-keyed, understated, elegant—is followed, without a pause, by a dazzling choreographic sequence of episodes that sometimes deliberately echo each other, but never quite repeat. There is no story line, only a progression from simplicity to sumptuousness, from youth to maturity. In the early variations, which have about them an air of soft, bucolic wonderment, the dancers appear in pastel-shaded practice clothes. In the final scenes, which call upon the full resources of the huge cast (49 in all), they are resplendent in Baroque dress.

The Goldberg Variations runs unbroken for 80 minutes—one of the longest nonstory ballets ever produced. It demands, and successfully commands, total attention through sheer mastery of what choreography can create for the human body to perform. Time and again Robbins presents familiar patterns and movements that somehow give the impression that they have never been danced before. Time and again the dances add nuanced dimensions to the music in much the same way that a first-rate pianist will do by playing it.