Billy the Kid (ballet)

Billy the Kid
Billy the Kid
Choreographer	Eugene Loring
Music	Aaron Copland
Based on	the story of Billy the Kid
Premiere	16 October 1938; Civic Opera House (Chicago)
Original ballet company	Ballet Caravan Company
Setting	Wild West

Billy the Kid is a 1938 ballet written by the American composer Aaron Copland on commission from Lincoln Kirstein. It was choreographed by Eugene Loring for Ballet Caravan. Along with Rodeo and Appalachian Spring, it is one of Copland's most popular and widely performed pieces. It is most famous for its incorporation of several cowboy tunes and American folk songs and, although built around the figure and the exploits of Billy the Kid, is not so much a biography of a notorious but peculiarly appealing desperado as it is a perception of the "Wild West", in which a figure such as Billy played a vivid role.^[1]

It premiered on 16 October 1938^[2] in Chicago by the Ballet Caravan Company, with pianists Arthur Gold and Walter Hendl performing a two-piano version of the score. The first performance in New York City occurred on 24 May 1939, with an orchestra conducted by Fritz Kitzinger.

^ Walter Terry, Ballet Guide, 1976, p. 57
^ This premiere date is persistently but incorrectly listed as October 6 in many standard reference works and Copland biographies, but contemporary advertisements and reviews in Chicago newspapers confirm October 16 as the correct premiere date.

[1] Walter Terry, Ballet Guide, 1976, p. 57

[2] This premiere date is persistently but incorrectly listed as October 6 in many standard reference works and Copland biographies, but contemporary advertisements and reviews in Chicago newspapers confirm October 16 as the correct premiere date.

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