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What does one hope to get from taking ballet classes , anyway ? His ballets are mostly plotless , although the structure of a piece or of a pas de deux frequently has an emotional subtext that holds it together and gives it a meaning beyond merely beautiful dancing ( if beautiful dancing can be said to be " mere " ! Carlo Blasis , however , one of the great nineteenth-century masters , regarded adage as the very heart of ballet training . " It is clearly part of the reason why I never learned ballroom dancing ; it 's the reason why I - - and all the boys - - resisted the folk dancing they tried to teach us in grade school ; it 's the reason why I would have screamed bloody murder if anyone had tried to make me take ballet at , say , the age of 10 ; and it 's the reason for the stunned silence that greeted me once when I happened to let fall to my colleagues that I was taking ballet classes . It seemed to me that the dancing provided a commentary on the music , instead of just following it , except at the very end , in the last four measures , where the figures leading up to the final cadence were matched by great , travelling lifts that made it seem as if the music had been made for the dance instead of the other way around . I suppose that the music always comes first for me , too , and this ballet showed me Hindemith 's music in a new light . This ballet is now recognized as one of Balanchine 's finest achievements , and if it had n't won me over nothing could have .