A Month in the Country is a one-act narrative ballet made by Frederick Ashton in 1976 for the Royal Ballet, set to three Chopin works for piano and orchestra arranged by John Lanchbery, and based on Turgenev's play of the same title. It compresses a subtle Russian domestic drama - a bored wife's infatuation with her son's young tutor - into roughly forty minutes of continuous dance, built around a chain of pas de deux rather than dialogue or mime-heavy exposition.
What it contains
- Classical Ballet · the whole ballet, structured as a chain of duets — the drama is carried entirely by a sequence of classical pas de deux between shifting pairs of characters, rather than by mime or ensemble scenes Source: "The ballet contains a series of pas de deux (dance of two people) which carry the action forward"
What is danced
The article's clearest statement about the choreography's construction is that the ballet 'contains a series of pas de deux ... which carry the action forward': Natalia and Rakitin, Belaiev and Vera, Belaiev and Katia, and finally Belaiev and Natalia. This tells us the dramatic architecture is danced rather than mimed - each relationship in Turgenev's play is translated into a duet with its own emotional colour, so a performer moving between roles (Natalia, Vera, Katia) is effectively dancing a set of contrasting partnering studies within one short work. The action was reportedly built to fit the Chopin score closely - Ashton credited Martyn Thomas with helping 'construct the action of the ballet to correspond with this music' - which implies the phrasing of the choreography follows the musical structure of the Variations, Fantaisie and Andante spianato et grande polonaise brillante quite tightly.
Context
The article situates the ballet within Ashton's post-directorship career at the Royal Ballet: he had carried the idea since seeing Turgenev's play in the 1930s, and only settled on Chopin after a conversation with Isaiah Berlin in the late 1960s. It premiered in February 1976 at Covent Garden and entered repertory immediately, being danced every season through 1979, which the article gives as evidence of its quick establishment as a repertory piece rather than an occasional revival.
Staging history
The Royal Ballet gave the premiere on 12 February 1976 with Lynn Seymour and Anthony Dowell, and performed the work every season from 1976 to 1979, with regular revivals at Covent Garden afterward and touring dates in New York and Havana. Later interpreters named in the article include Merle Park and Sylvie Guillem as Natalia, and Michael Coleman, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Bruce Sansom and Ivan Putrov as Belaiev. In 1995 Anthony Dowell mounted it for the National Ballet of Canada, with Karen Kain and Robert Conn in the leads - the first time, per the article, that any company other than the Royal Ballet had staged it.
How to watch it
Follow the shifting partnering rather than a spoken plot: the ballet's tension is carried through who dances with whom and how the holds and phrasing change between the Natalia-Rakitin, Belaiev-Vera, Belaiev-Katia and Belaiev-Natalia duets. The final wordless image - Belaiev leaving Natalia the rose she had given him, unseen and unheard - is the ballet's one purely theatrical (non-danced) gesture and worth watching for how it closes the emotional arc built by the preceding duets.
Credits
- composer: Frédéric Chopin