With this scathing critique André Levinson, the most prominent defender of the nineteenth-century balletic canon, assessed George Balanchine's Le Bal (The Ball, 1929). As anyone familiar with Balanchine's career knows, this is a surprisingly harsh treatment of the choreographer who has come to epitomise the resuscitation of classical ballet in the twentieth century. scholars invariably place Balanchine within an “apostolic succession” of ballet masters “extending back in time through Petipa, and Didelot before him, to Noverre and Lully”, the founding fathers of the genre. Often, his irreverent attitude towards classicism in his early work is dismissed as lacking the mature, pure-dance approach of his later years. Balanchine himself set the tone of this interpretation by allowing more unorthodox works, including Le Bal, to fall out of repertory – and by altering the choreography of such early ballets as Apollon musagète (Apollo, Leader of the Muses, 1928) in order to stress their continuity with the classical tradition.