In 1941, the American ballet director Lincoln Kirstein commissioned Ginastera for a "Ballet in One Act and Five Scenes, based on Argentine country life." The resulting work, Estancia, was to be performed by the American Ballet Caravan, a platform for young American choreographers whose aim was to move ballet away from Russian traditions (one of the company's biggest hits had been the 1938 ballet, Billy the Kid, with music by Copland). For Estancia, Kirstein planned to commission choreography from George Balanchine, and present the ballet in New York. It was not until 1952, at Argentina's Teatro Colón, however, that the complete Estancia would be performed, with choreography by Michel Borowski and sets by Dante Ortolani. The prior commission was abandoned after the Caravan suddenly disbanded after the troupe's Latin American tour in 1941.

In keeping with Kirstein's original request, the ballet takes place on the vast, grassy Argentine Pampas, on a farm or cattle ranch. Ginastera closely based his score on the great epic poem Martín Fierro by José Hernández (1873), which tells the story of the Argentinian cowboy, or gaucho. These downtrodden, nomadic, yet heroic individuals are the subject of much of the country's folklore.

Estancia represents the passage of a single day: dawn, morning, afternoon, night, and dawn. The ballet's action takes on an essentially symmetrical, arch-like structure, and simultaneously tells the story of simple love and symbolic resolution of the ways in which city life was encroaching on the old agrarian ways. Specifically, it tells of a city boy who watches, and falls in love with, a country maiden. After some initial contempt for him, her feelings turn to admiration after he proves his skill in taming wild horses. Romance, starlight and then the inevitable new day follow.

Employing a normal-size orchestra (though with extended percussion section), Ginastera evokes the earthy, evocative manner of Hernández's poetry with malambo rhythms, guitar-like sonorities and extracts (both sung and spoken) from the verse. Ginastera's music corresponds to the symmetry of the plot, with the horse-taming rodeo ("La doma") and the evening romance ("Idilio crepuscular") set as the central events. The two dawn scenes use versions of the same vivacious malambo-based material, while the central sequence of music is a vividly colored mosaic of dances evoking details of the activities of rural folk and visitors from the town.

In Estancia, Ginastera not only captures the rhythms of life on an Argentine ranch, but also provides a testament to the gaucho's now-vanished way of life; it also honors the spirit of Martín Fierro, "the unlucky gaucho, who has no one to call to, with no place of his own in all that space, and in all that darkness."

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