A ballet with unceasing appeal, The Four Temperaments references the medieval concept of psychological humors through its classically grounded but definitively modern movement.

The score for this ballet was commissioned by George Balanchine from Paul Hindemith in 1940. The ballet, together with Ravel’s opera L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, constituted the opening program of Ballet Society (the direct predecessor of the New York City Ballet) on November 20, 1946. In Complete Stories of the Great Ballets, Balanchine wrote of the ballet that it “is an expression in dance and music of the ancient notion that the human organism is made up of four different humors, or temperaments. Each one of us possesses these four humors, but in different degrees, and it is from the dominance of one of them that the four physical and psychological types — melancholic, sanguinic, phlegmatic, and choleric — were derived …. Although the score is based on this idea of the four temperaments, neither the music nor the ballet itself makes specific or literal interpretation of the idea. An understanding of the Greek and medieval notion of the temperaments was merely the point of departure for both composer and choreographer.”

An accomplished pianist, Balanchine commissioned the score because he wanted a short work he could play at home with friends during his evening musicales. It was completed in 1940 and had its first public performance at a 1944 concert with Lukas Foss as the pianist.

Set in an elegantly appointed ballroom to 33 Brahms waltzes with onstage singers, Liebeslieder Walzer is a lyrical and intimate two-part ballet that finds its four couples in the midst of their affection – an intimate joy for waltz lovers and classical music devotees.

For this two-part ballet of waltzes for piano duet and vocal quartet set to poems by Friedrich Daumer and one, the last, set to a poem by Goethe, the dancers are joined on stage by the musicians and singers. The first set of Walzer (Opus 52) was composed by Johannes Brahms when he lived in Vienna in 1869. The success of the first series caused a second (Opus 65) to be created in 1874, utilizing some materials which were left over from the original set. Balanchine used the entire two sections, and the atmosphere reflects the social dance of Vienna during the mid-century. There is a difference in mood between Opus 52 and Opus 65, with the former being more intimate and domestic, and the latter more theatrical.

The dancers and musicians are all dressed in period ballroom costumes, and during the first set of 18 waltzes, the four couples dance in interweaving combinations in an intimate, elegantly appointed ballroom, with the women wearing dancing slippers. After a brief lowering of the curtain, the couples return to dance the second set of 14 waltzes, with the women now wearing ballet dresses and pointe shoes. They then leave the stage and return in the original costumes and pause to listen to the final waltz set to Goethe’s words: “Now, Muses, enough! You try in vain to portray how misery and happiness alternate in a loving heart!” Of Liebeslieder Walzer, Balanchine said, “In the first act, it is the real people who are dancing. In the second act, it is their souls.”