Dance of Death

Art and life at the Met

The Berlin Ballet company had performed Firebird and the pas de deux from Don Quixote before a packed Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, and it was time for the orchestra to take a break. Helen Hagnes, 30, an attractive, blond, Canadian-born violinist told a friend that she was going to see Valery Panov, the Soviet-born choreographer and principal dancer for the Berlin Ballet, to ask him to pose for her sculptor husband, Janis Mintiks.

She never got to Panov's dressing room. Colleagues missed her when the company began dancing the ballet Miss Julie, in which a noblewoman (danced by Panov's wife Galina) seduces a servant and then, with his help, kills herself. The next morning, police found Helen Hagnes. She had been stripped naked, bound and gagged, and hurled 70 ft. from the Met's roof to her death in an air shaft.

The police theorized that the murderer had to be someone who was familiar with the Met's backstage maze of corridors, dressing rooms, stairways and elevator shafts, in which Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera would feel very much at home. Further, said the officers, the killer probably was a Met employee, since he managed to get by guards at the door and pass unchallenged among the 250 dancers, musicians and stagehands who were present for the performance.

The next evening some 35 police officers were on hand, including detectives in tuxedos, as the Berlin company performed Panov's staging of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. It is a ballet of terror and violence, in which the beautiful Natasya is murdered by her thwarted lover, Rogozhin. As his rival, Prince Myshkin, performed the final scene, a madman's vision of the world consumed by fire, the audience broke into wild applause.