Khachaturian's second ballet, Gayane, was premiered December 3, 1942, in Perm, whither the Kirov Ballet had been evacuated in the wake of the Nazi drive into Russia. The scenario, involving betrayal, love, and heroism in the setting of a collective farm called Happiness passed more easily in wartime than it would later—by 1957 a revision of the scenario was felt necessary for a new production by the Bolshoi Ballet. Happiness, in fact, was the title of Khachaturian's first ballet, staged in Yerevan in 1939, much of the music of which was recycled in Gayane, allowing the composer to enrich and perfect his "song of the earth" style, for, whatever the vicissitudes of plot, there is no denying Gayane's sheer visceral impact. A most disarming instance of its appeal is the adoption of the ballet's clincher, the Sabre Dance, in a vocal adaptation by the Andrews Sisters in 1947, topped the following year by Woody Herman's version taking sixth place on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade as the piece became a staple of the pops concert repertoire. In the context of the ballet, the Sabre Dance is but one of many felicitous numbers, for Khachaturian possessed the gift of abundant, compelling melody. If his richest vein is folk-inspired, it is only in passing that it is folk-derived. His use of the Armenian folk song The Vine as Gayane gets under way, for instance, is an exception, for his achievement is to have continued the series of orientalizing evocations initiated by Balakirev, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov with a broadness of effect one associates with film music—color may slip from rich to garish, orchestral glitter can turn tinsel, towering climaxes tumble into the brutal and bombastic. But the idiom is laced with genuine poetry, suavely ravishing and rhythmically piquant. Exuberance is another name for such magnificently generous—never less than effective—excess, though many of the numbers transcend the merely effective with an ineffable surefire touch in which slickness vaults into genius. Preparing suites from the ballet in 1943, Khachaturian was careful not to give everything away at once, the best pieces being distributed over three collections. In the upshot, the suites are seldom heard as the entities Khachaturian programmed, conductors more often than not making their own selection. In the composer's recension, Suite No. 1 makes up the "Introduction," "Girls' Dance," "Aisha's Awakening and Dance," "Mountaineers' Dance," "Lullaby," "Gayane and Ghiko," "Gayane's Adagio" (used in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey), and the "Lezghinka."

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