Further Up and Further In: Introducing a New Classic

Raffaella the Ballet Comes to YouTube in March

It’s going to take a while for “Raffaella” to make its way into the “invisible museum” of music (the “repertory”), but it’s already starting to happen. The producer, Duncan Stroik, tells me that there will soon be performances at Hillsdale College and in San Francisco. (If you want to help me bring it to Kansas City, please let me know!) But for now, you can get a glimpse into the future and see and listen to what your grandkids will be studying forty years from now in Great Books programming by tuning into the YouTube performance on March 7 (see link above).

On June 29 of last summer, I was at a party in South Bend, waiting for a friend who was late. He and dozens of others associated with the Notre Dame architectural school had come back into town for the world premier of the ballet Raffaella, created to commemorate the life and untimely death of Raffaella Stroik, who, off on her own to spend some time in peaceful contemplation, accidentally drowned in Mark Twain Lake in Missouri in 2018. After the inevitable and gut-wrenching grief, the Stroik family decided to respond by creating something, not only to celebrate their daughter’s life but to make a work of art in which they could, iconically, try to think through the disaster. To this end, they built an elaborate, collaborative network of artists, friends, supporters, and dancers to produce a C. S. Lewis-esque fairy tale/ballet, with original music (by Michael Kurek) and original choreography.

When I texted my friend: “dude, are you still coming?”

He wrote back: “still at the theater. No one wants to leave.”

I have this feeling that my grandchildren will be studying Raffaella in Great Books programs fifty years from now.

The story is of a pure-hearted, peaceable girl from an idealized Italian village, which sits on the bank above something like the Lago di Como. As a girl, Raffaella (Leah McFadden) falls in love with a magnificent prince, whom no else can see. The idyllic village is too small for Raffaella, and so she sets off for the big city, where, for the first time, she is drawn into the midst of urbane worldly bustle and moral ambiguity: it is a city of multiple paths and ways, represented by the multiple vanishing points of the painted scene. While in Rome, Raffaella acquires great skill as a dancer, but also the obsessive attention of a dark “Prince Ombroso” (which translates, Prince of Shadows or Prince of Darkness) who, rather than wooing her, wants to possess her, forcing her to dance with him. The score throughout the scene is cluttered with modernist-based, percussion-driven sound, and to seal this coercive pact, he wants her to put on a pomegranate-colored crown, but in this fairy tale, Persephone doesn’t eat the seed, because her true love—the prince dressed in white and accompanied by forces of good—arrives to repel the darkly dressed pseudo-lover and his attendants. It’s a powerful moment, in which the score returns triumphantly to the “neoromanticism” for which Kurek has won recent fame. And this happens at the same time that we watch a clash of dancing styles: the diabolical attendants dance in a modern style, hiding their faces, while the prince and his celestial attendants, who have nothing to hide, take their large strides and great leaps in the classical fashion. Raffaella is liberated, and in her freedom she chooses the prince because he is good and beautiful.

Schoenberg, at a Grieg piano concerto once, leaned over and told a friend: “this is the sort of music I wish I could have composed.” But he felt he couldn’t. Kurek, though, has found a way to do something not just traditional but neo-traditional, with modernist elements and new combinations of old instruments. I had never heard a harp and cello duet before, but the union of two very different instruments—the low, earthy, mellow tones of a cello being elevated by the high, celestial tinkling of the harp—provide the accompaniment for the final pas de deux that represents the sacred romance. In the snow. This is South Bend, after all.

Within the score, you can also hear snatches of the “Salve Regina” and “Pange Lingua” (Wagner-esque leitmotifs), but those melodies are pulled up and into a swelling and moving music that feels, though inspired by Tchaikovsky, also very new. Augustine spoke of God’s beauty as “ever ancient, ever new.” This is what that feels like in 2025.

But for me, the whole point of the ballet has to be understood against the painted setS that make the backdrop (designed by Raffaella’s sister, Gabrielle Stroik Johnson). In the very first scene, we see—appropriately—an idealized Italian oratory, like what you can find in Raphael’s Betrothal of the Virgin. Raphael’s painting is famous for its perfect circular composition (Vasari said that Raphael was the only man who had the divinely given talent of drawing a perfect circle free hand). At the same time, all of the depth lines within that Renaissance painting disappear at the vanishing point, which turns out to be the door of the temple, opening up on the other side onto an infinite horizon. That’s already good craftsmanship. It’s as if the figures in the Betrothal came alive and began to dance in front of the temple. But when, after the first scene change, the temple is raised and we now look from the perspective of the terrace of the palace, we see what the temple had obscured: a glacial lake surrounded by mountains. But our eye is directed toward a single vanishing point, which stands “further up and further in” on a hazy and infinite horizon. And all throughout the final scene, both Raffaella and the Prince keep ecstatically gesturing toward this vanishing point in the mountains, the one we couldn’t see when our vision had been obstructed. It’s as if Raphael and Till We Have Faces and the end of Last Battle and Wagner and Tchaikovsky had all been mixed together.

Gadamer once reflected on Hegel’s assertion that for us “art is a thing of the past”: “[H]e meant that art was no longer understood as a presentation of the divine in the self-evident and unproblematical way in which it had been understood in the Greek world. There the divine was manifest in the temple, which in the southern light stood out against the natural background, open to the eternal powers of nature” (“The Relevance of the Beautiful”). In an unexpected way, Raffaella has come full circle: art returns to is origin in worship; art returns to its primordial desire for the Vanishing Point. And it was for this reason the audience just wanted to applaud and applaud and applaud. It was a new story that no one knew just a few days beforehand, but it was also ancient, or perhaps, archaic, or better, timeless, because the artistry of Raffaella intended to approach the vanishing point of worship. It was for that reason that the audience had McFadden (Raffaella) come forward to take five solo bows in the performance I saw (seven, the night before), applauding, it seemed, not just for her technical achievement, but as if sending their love and admiration, iconically, to her namesake. And maybe also applauding for the very idea of a soul loving something elusively divine which beckons to us in our freedom by means of beauty.

“No one wanted to leave.”