From: LouisFors <LouisFors@aol.com>
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Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1998 14:43:02 EDT
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Subject: Lincoln Kirstein as martyr
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Dear friends:

An association.

With ideas about martyrs lingering in my head, I've just read a reflection
about Lincoln Kirsten in the April 13, 1998 _The New Yorker_: "The Great
Impresario" by Nicholas Jenkins.  (Kirsten--art critic, writer about ballet,
impresario, and, most significantly, the man who brought George Balanchine to
America and helped him form, and keep alive, the New York City Ballet.)

Jenkins writes at one point (and this is what called up the "martyr" theme for
me):  

     "Kirstein laid down his life for classical ballet--hustling, animating,
inspiring, bullying, dreaming in the service of his great cause.  He
contributed almost all his imagination, intellect, energy, and money (along
with the personal courage necessary to endure, as he once said, 'real and
constant anxiety, three nervous breakdowns, bankruptcies, etc.') to the co-
creation, with Balanchine, of twentieth-century ballet's most important
insitution, the City Ballet and the affiliated School of American Ballet."

It's a compelling description of the complete dedication that might define
"martyr,"  in one usage of the word.  And, except for his own writing (which
was not insignificant in value), Kirstein was the *support* that kept
Balanchine going, not the artist of first rank himself.

Louis Forsdale