In 1933, there was no ballet audience. It was something that had to be created and developed through every medium possible. I had a two-fold responsibility--because I loved ballet with a love that amounted to a passion, and because I had a tremendous financial burden which I carried single-handed, without the aid of any Maecenas; I had to make ballet successful; in doing so, willy-nilly I had the responsibility of forming a taste where no aesthetic existed. For two decades I have had criticism levelled at me from certain places, criticism directed chiefly at my policies in ballet; I have been criticized for my insistence on certain types of ballets in the repertoires of the companies I have managed, and for my belief in adaptations and varying applications of what is known as the “star” system. The only possible answer is that I have been proven right. No other system has succeeded in bringing people to ballet or in bringing ballet to the people. It will not be out of place at this time to note the repertoire of the de Basil company at the time of the breakdown of the relations between Massine and de Basil, which may be said to be the period of the Massine artistic direction and influence on the de Basil companies, from 1933 to 1937. There were, if my computation is correct, and I have checked the matter with some care, a total of forty works, with thirty-four of them actively in the repertoire. Of these, there were two sound classics stemming from the Imperial Russian Ballet, creations by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanoff: _Swan Lake_, in the one-act abbreviation; and _Aurora’s Wedding_, the last _divertissement_ act of _The Sleeping Beauty_ or _The Sleeping Princess_, both, of course, to the music of Tchaikowsky. There were three Russian works, i.e., ballets on Russian subjects: Stravinsky’s _Petroushka_; the _Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor_; and _Le Coq d’Or_, a purely balletic and entertaining spectacle, with the Rimsky-Korsakoff music rearranged for ballet by Tcherepnine. All of the foregoing were by Michel Fokine. Eight other Fokine works were included, all originally produced by him for Diaghileff: three, which might be called exotic works--_Cléopâtre_, to the music of Arensky and others; _Thamar_, to the music of Balakireff; and _Schéhérazade_, to the Rimsky-Korsakoff tone-poem. Five ballets typifying the Romantic Revolution: Stravinsky’s _Firebird_; _Carnaval_ and _Papillons_, both by Robert Schumann; _Le Spectre de la Rose_, to the familiar Weber score; that greatest of all romantic works, _Les Sylphides_, the Chopin “romantic reverie.” There were two works by George Balanchine: _Le Cotillon_ and _La Concurrence_, the former to music by Chabrier, the latter to music by Auric. A third Balanchine work, _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, was necessarily dropped from the repertoire because the costumes were destroyed by fire.