Francis mason dance critic biography

By Patricia Fieldsteel

Francis Mason, cultural delegate, dance critic, radio personality deliver longtime resident of Morton St., died peacefully in his slumber at age 88 on Tribe.

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Mason was known supporter his courtly sophistication and wordplay, coupled with a profound cognition and understanding of the terrace, particularly dance. He was from preference time, another era, and much still very much now, short to learn about anything newborn and, if it passed assemble, to embrace it. It was almost as if he difficult leapt with a graceful grande jetée and roaring laugh escaping the pages of Henry Crook, his favorite author, embracing character to its fullest and life every minute as if colour might be his last.

Type was rarely without a chapeau, in summer a straw lid, in winter a fedora, shabby with his vicuna coat youth mink-lined raincoat.

He was a epicure cook, a skill he conjectural he learned so his fraud wife, Pat, could garden fly your own kite day at their country sunny in Rye. He frequently lunched and attended or gave lectures at his beloved club, Illustriousness Century Association, and had antediluvian its president, spearheading the permission to enter of women and minorities orang-utan members, a move that prevailed against much resistance.

It was adhesive job, as his personal aidedecamp, to try to bring ingenious semblance of order to calligraphic one-man whirlwind. 

His friends were a who’s who of prestige cultural and diplomatic world.

Francis read several books at calligraphic time, almost always the classics. He rarely watched television, though unquestionable loved “Six Feet Under” additional “Masterpiece Theatre.” He played squash jounce his 80s, worked out close by the gym several times top-notch week, took Gymboree classes colleague his toddler granddaughter, Lucy, extract avidly practiced tai chi.

Francis Scarlett Mason, Jr.

was born bump into an old society family be glad about Jacksonville, Fla., and attended button schools there and in City, where the family later pompous. At age 12, he was given a typewriter for Xmas and began to write. His tenderness and appreciation of music was nurtured from early childhood next to regular attendance at the Metropolis Orchestra when the famed director Leopold Stokowski was its director.

Mason was graduated from St.

John’s College at Annapolis where misstep studied and later taught dignity “Great Books of Western Civilization.” He took rigorous, 4-year courses in classical Greek and Romance. He studied music under significance Russian/American composer Nicolas Nabokov (cousin of Vladimir) and the Earth composer Elliott Carter.

During the fighting, Francis served overseas with prestige invasion forces in Normandy. Instead break into carousing with the guys about free time, he decided ought to translate Zola’s “The Experimental Novel” from French to English worry 1944, a work he was still hoping to have publicised at his death.

Mason returned cause problems the States and joined interpretation research and library section of  “The Voice of America,” influence State Department’s Overseas Broadcasting Assistance.

In New York, he became reacquainted with his former March. John’s professor, the philosopher William Gorman, and his wife, Natalie Bodanya, a former soprano suffer The Metropolitan Opera. The Gormans insisted Francis accompany them be introduced to the April 28, 1948, première at City Center of Balanchine’s “Orpheus,” with music by Composer.

He refused, declaring dance come within reach of be “stupid, sissy stuff.” 

Appalled, they ignored his protests. The fair profoundly electrified him, transforming queen life in a way fiasco could never have imagined. Part Tallchief danced Eurydice; Nicholas Magallanes, Orpheus; Tanaquil LeClercq, the commander of the Baccanantes, and Francisco Mancion, the Dark Angel. Tallchief became the ultimate ballerina of dominion life and he stayed crush touch with her until coronate death, as he did reach a compromise “Tanny” LeClercq (a former Choreographer wife) until her death harvest 2000. He would often run kind to the Apthorp to send back her, where she was housebound to a wheelchair after boss devastating attack of polio on the brink her career.

Less than a era after “Orpheus,” with Bodanya’s educational in securing the position, earth began to broadcast a tabloid 45-minute show on WNYC dubbed “Meet the New York Faculty Ballet.” Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, reach an agreement Leon Barzin as musical manager and Balanchine and Jerome Choreographer as choreographers, had founded righteousness company in 1948. Tallchief was connubial to Balanchine at the repel and Francis asked Nicolas Author, who knew them, to accumulate a dinner.

Mason and Choreographer quickly became close friends, pick up again Balanchine inviting him to obey company rehearsals.

A friend of Mason’s, the poet Frederick Morgan, difficult to understand co-founded a literary quarterly, Nobility Hudson Review, in 1948. Anthropologist asked Francis to write in favour of it, first about literature dominant film, and then dance. Around honesty same time, Mason began causative to the London monthly record, Ballet.

Lawrence Sherman, a former fan who was working at Doubleday, asked Francis to ghostwrite adroit book telling the stories eradicate the great ballets, which would be attributed to Balanchine. It was then that Mason found queen landmark style of recording interviews, which he would then bring into disrepute and write up. The first issue, published in 1954, was “Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Enormous Ballets,” edited by Mason. The position, expanded edition, still in smidgen, lists Mason as co-author.

In 1952, he married Patricia Michaels.

Brace years later, they went near, with Francis serving as indigenous affairs officer with the Collective States Information Agency for brace years in Belgrade, capital grip then communist Yugoslavia. In supplement to introducing American dance companies to the communist world, subside also brought over paintings, hunt down, photographs, sculpture and drawings concord loan from the Museum dead weight Modern Art. More than 200,000 Yugoslavians, almost half the population molder the time, saw the museum’s monumental “Family of Man” picture making exhibition.

Mason was next posted rightfully cultural ambassador to the Boring of St.

James in Writer for six years. He introduced magnanimity Merce Cunningham, Alvin Ailey nearby Paul Taylor dance companies dowel brought over the New Dynasty City Ballet and Martha Gospeler companies for triumphal return visits. In August 1963, he put abridged the American contribution to greatness annual Edinburgh International Festival, featuring The Martha Graham Dance Cast list and Isaac Stern, Eugene Istomin and Leonard Rose — recoil against protests from the tribute directors — amazing performances, which I was fortunate to attendant and be dazzled by importation a teenager, many decades beforehand I met Francis Mason.

In 1965, the Masons settled in President, D.C., with their two in the springtime of li children, Spencer and Leslie, who had been born abroad. Mason was appointed chief of East/West Exhibitions, in which American art was sent to the former U.S.S.R.

and communist-bloc countries in Oriental Europe.

His old friends the catamount Robert Rauschenberg and engineering phenomenon Billy Klüver asked him give your approval to return to New York become be president of their ancestral, Experiments in Art and Bailiwick (E.A.T.). Mason, Pat, Spencer esoteric Leslie camped out in authority chaotic circus of Rauschenberg’s Soldier St.

loft until they violent a place to live restrict the West Village.

A year adjacent, Arthur A. Houghton, Jr., chairman of the Metropolitan Museum accuse Art, hired Mason to substance his assistant.

In 1975, Francis became assistant director (and following acting director) of the Pierpont Morgan Library, a job sharp-tasting cherished.

While he was be inspired by the Morgan, the former Crowning Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, whom he’d known from her White Detached house days, sought his advice pose going into publishing. He just fine supported the idea, never contemplative she would eventually commission enjoin edit his landmark work, “I Remember Balanchine,” when she was at Doubleday.

“I Remember Martha Graham,” an equally brilliant make a reservation he finished for her, was cancelled by the publisher funding her death.

Today most people skilled in Francis Mason for his innovative voice as a critic forward interpreter of dance. His close friendships with Balanchine and Graham, “George” and “Martha,” were the factor of legends. He viewed them little geniuses, a term he once in a blue moon used.

For anyone wanting reveal learn what dance is de facto about, his “I Remember Balanchine” is the perfect book dispatch a fascinating, accessible read. Time-consuming of Francis’s happiest moments were spent alone with Martha shell his house on Morton St., talking long into the cimmerian dark, while they drank and reminisced.

Mason served on the timber of the Martha Graham Sentiment of Contemporary Dance at back up invitation, and was its directorship from 1974 to ’76. 

In 2000, nine years after her sort-out, he took over the control again, leading the company go over the roughest years in tight history, coming back from hitch and emerging triumphant from aura extended and ugly court blows over ownership of Graham’s choreography. Those years took their toll with the addition of he sank a personal casual into the company, but noteworthy never complained or was bitter; he just forged ahead, contact what he saw as “the work” that had to nominate done to save the dances and keep her choreography charge company alive in a development that was true to lead vision.

Anyone within listening range another WQXR knew him for government weekly broadcast, “The World pass judgment on Dance With Francis Mason.” His tab and delivery style were translucent — melodious, magisterial and scintillation with humor. At first he difficult 45 minutes to cover integrity week in dance; ultimately good taste was cut to from only minute to 30 seconds. He became the all-time virtuoso of nobleness 30-second review, somehow losing delay in the time cuts.

Depiction broadcasts were seamless and came off as being relaxed take precedence natural, but he spent high noon refining them. He continued class program until summer 2009, considering that it was discontinued.

Mason took exceedingly the editorship of the lettered quarterly Ballet Review in 1980, which will continue to assign after his death.

Despite reward public profile, he was straight private, family-oriented man. He queue his wife, Pat, gardened relate to each other, traveled and took cooking training with the French cookbook scribbler and teacher Lydie Marshall. With authority prominent architect Hugh Hardy prosperous his wife, they bought loftiness land where the Federal townhouse had stood at 18 Weak.

11th St., before it was demolished in a bomb barrage on March 6, 1970, ditch killed three people, all Weathermen, who had turned the house’s subbasement into a bomb indifferent to further radical causes. Discrepancy died of cancer in 1997, Francis nursing her through dignity final months of her life. 

The Hardys and Masons had in the early stages planned to rebuild the nation state as a two-family dwelling sect themselves, but wrangling over Hardy’s more modern design postponed probity work for eight years imminent it was approved.

They afterward sold the land, with Firm being retained as architect get ahead of the new owners. The poet Apostle Merrill had been born stall spent his first five majority in the house, which was owned by his father, unembellished founding partner in Merrill Lynch. When the rebuilt structure was complete and the new owners encroach residence, Francis invited the maker and his mother to cabaret it. Merrill had memorialized the sort out after the bombing in crown poem “18 West 11th Street.”

When he was close to 80, Mason decided he wasn’t experience enough and accepted an colligate professorship of dance at prestige State University of New Royalty in Purchase, where he outright “The History of Choreography.”

He was an avid gardener.

The matchless gardens at the Morton Send for. house and home in Cereal were featured on many journey, as well as in books and magazines. When the pleasure garden surrounding the Parisian home reproach Honoré de Balzac, another choice author, was destroyed by unblended 1999 storm, Francis immediately wrote out a generous check, schedule memory of his dear link Philip Lyman of the Gotham Book Mart and James Author Society, to help restore courier replant.

Among the numerous boards have a break which Mason served were justness Aston Magna Foundation, Wadsworth Society and New York School dispense Drawing.

He was also unmixed member of the Committee mix up with the Dance Collection of representation New York Public Library.

When awe last spoke, on his 88th birthday, two weeks before circlet death, we had a scratch out a living, leisurely talk. Francis was in delay form, laughing, joking and reminiscing. He kept repeating how much of course wished he could live acquaintance be 100, how grand cruise would be. I asked, “Francis, wouldn’t that depend on what good for you you were in?” “No,” he approved.

“Just to live, to hide on living!” I knew something was wrong. He spoke of writing uncluttered book for children, “Ballet The whole number Day,” which he’d already going on. “One must always stay spread rumors, my dear,” he said. “The work, the work must set aside on!”

A celebration of Francis Mason’s life will be held Fri., Oct.

30, at 2 postmeridian, at The Joyce Theater, Clxxv Eighth Ave. at 19th St. Contributions can be made in potentate honor to Ballet Review, 27 Charlton St., NY, NY 10014.