John Cranko resident choreographer for Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet's 1950–51 season. For the company's Festival of Britain season in 1951 Cranko choreographed the comic ballet "Pineapple Poll", to the music of Arthur Sullivan (newly out of copyright) arranged by the conductor Charles Mackerras. Another collaboration with Mackerras followed in 1954 with "The Lady and the Fool", to music by Verdi. In January 1954 Sadler's Wells Ballet announced that Cranko was collaborating with Benjamin Britten to create a ballet. Cranko devised a draft scenario for a work he originally called "The Green Serpent", fusing elements drawn from "King Lear", "Beauty and the Beast"
The Four Temperaments (ballet) The Four Temperaments (ballet) The Four Temperaments is a ballet made by New York City Ballet co-founder and ballet master George Balanchine to music he commissioned from Paul Hindemith (the latter's eponymous 1940 music for string orchestra and piano) for the opening program of Ballet Society, immediate forerunner of City Ballet. The work is divided into five parts, a theme and four variations, which reflect the temperaments of Galen's tradition. Balanchine downplayed the references to medieval "humors" that were believed to determine a person's temperament, saying the four personality types—melancholic, sanguinic, phlegmatic, and choleric—were merely points of departure for the