Under the influence of a genuine creative urge, Massine’s directions of the new Monte Carlo Ballet Russe for two seasons richly fulfilled the promise it held at the company’s inception. The public grew larger each season. At the same time, slowly, but none the less surely, that public became, I believe, more understanding. The ballet public of America was cutting its eye-teeth. It was during the early seasons that Massine added three more symphonic ballets to the repertoire, with Beethoven’s _Seventh Symphony_; _Rouge et Noir_, to the brilliant First Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich; and _Labyrinth_, a surrealist treatment of the Seventh Symphony of Franz Schubert. Christian Bérard provided scenery and costumes for the first of them; Henri Matisse, for the second; Salvador Dali, for the last. The Shostakovich work was the most successful of the three. Regrettably, all these symphonic ballets are lost to present-day audiences. The outstanding comedy success was _Gaîté Parisienne_, the Offenbach romp, originally started in Boston before the company as such existed. The most sensational work was Massine’s first surrealist ballet, _Bacchanale_, to the Venusberg music from Wagner’s _Tannhauser_. A quite fantastic spectacle, from every point of view, it was a Massine-Dali joke, one that was less successful when the same combination tried to repeat it in _Labyrinth_. There were lesser Massine works, produced under frantic pressure; examples: _Saratoga_, an unhappy attempt to capture the American spirit of the up-state New York spa, to a commissioned score by Jaromir Weinberger; _The New Yorker_, which was certainly no American _Gaîté Parisienne_, being Massine’s attempt to try to bring to balletic life the characters, the atmosphere, and the perky humors of the popular weekly magazine, all to a pastiche of George Gershwin’s music. A third work was one of his last Monte Carlo Ballet Russe creations, _Vienna--1814_, an evocation of the spirit of the Congress of Vienna, to music by Carl Maria von Weber, orchestrated by Robert Russell Bennett. _Bogatyri_, a colorful Russian spectacle, designed as a sort of successor to Fokine’s _Le Coq d’Or_, had spectacular scenery and costumes by Nathalie Gontcharova, and was a long and detailed work utilising a movement of a Borodin string quartet and his Second Symphony. In cooperation with Argentinita, Massine staged a quite successful Spanish _divertissement_ to Rimsky-Korsakoff’s _Capriccio Espagnol_, using for it the set and costumes Mariano Andreu had designed for Fokine’s _Jota Argonesa_.