Alberto Alonso’s most successful ballet came about because Maya Plisetskaya, the chief ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, had long wanted to dance the character of Carmen. She had devised a scenario, following the pattern of Bizet’s opera, and had tried to persuade Shostakovich to write a score, then, when he refused, afraid of comparison with Bizet, turned to Khachaturian, again in vain. At last her husband, the composer Rodion Shchedrin, said he would write something, but was first busy with other projects.
At that point Plisetskaya’s mother took her to a guest performance in Moscow by the National Ballet of Cuba and she saw a ballet by Alberto Alonso that seemed exactly in the manner she wanted. She went straight backstage and to her question: “Would you like to do Carmen? For me?”, received the answer: “That is my dream.” To get permission for him to work at the Bolshoi she had to pull rank, helped by the Lenin Prize she had just received. Alonso had his own concept, which Plisetskaya saw as “a fatal confrontation of a willful person — born free — and a totalitarian system”. The only way to get it on within the limited time allowed was to choose bits of Bizet which Shchedrin, night by night, arranged and supplemented.
Even then the early performances in 1967 were censored because politicians thought Carmen’s skirtless costume and an erotic duet to be inappropriate. But the ballet, devised for a small cast and named Carmen Suite, survived. Plisetskaya herself danced it about 350 times, restoring what had been deleted (the full version of the duet was first seen during a tour to London); and Alonso further staged it for other companies worldwide. Among them was the National Ballet of Cuba, where Carmen became one of the most noted roles of the company’s founder-director and ballerina Alicia Alonso.
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Born Alicia Martínez Hoyo, she had acquired the name under which she became an international celebrity from her first husband, Fernando Alonso, the elder brother of Alberto and himself also a ballet dancer.
Alberto Julio Rayneri Alonso was born in Havana in 1917. He first studied locally with Nikolai Yavorsky, then in Europe with Tchernicheva, Preobrajenska and Idzikovsky among others, making his debut in 1935 with Colonel de Basil’s Ballet Russe. Later engagements included a year as a leading soloist with American Ballet Theatre, where his roles included the title part in Petrushka and the First Sailor in Fancy Free, indicating both virtuosity and expressiveness.
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Subsequently, Alberto danced with Ballet Alicia Alonso, from which grew the National Ballet of Cuba. His work as ballet master and choreographer began in 1941 for Sociedad Pro-Arte Musical and he produced there, for the National Ballet and other troupes quite a few ballets including Espacio y movimiento, to music by Stravinsky, which was awarded the best choreography prize at the Varna international ballet competition in 1968. Quite often he put together music by different composers as the basis of his ballets, as in Concerto (Vivaldi and Bach), Romeo and Juliet (Berlioz and Pierre Henry), A Santiago (Almeida and Ferrer) and Conjugaciones to a music collage. Additionally, he turned to Sibelius besides various lesser-known composers. The Ensemble Experimental de la Danse made use of him, also films and television. One of his more recent creations was for Ballet Hisp?nico in New York.
Alberto abandoned Cuba in 1993, aged 76, and settled in Florida where he was engaged at Santa F? Community College as master artist-in-residence, continuing to work there until the middle of last month. He died of heart failure in the North Florida Regional Medical Centre, and is survived by his wife, Sonia (also a dancer from Cuba), their son and two daughters.
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Alberto Alonso, ballet master and choreographer, was born in May 1917. He died on December 31, 2007, aged 90