Commissioned for Martha Graham by the Ditson Fund of Columbia University, Samuel Barber’s ballet Medea received its premiere on May 10, 1946, in New York City—just two years after Graham had created the choreography for Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Based on Euripides’s play Medea, the ballet tells a simple, tragic, and gruesome tale: Jason marries Medea but leaves her for Glauce, daughter of Creon, the King of Corinth. To avenge Jason’s betrayal, Medea kills their children. Originally named Serpent Heart, the work was retitled Cave of the Heart in a 1947 revision. Considering the unsavory subject matter, it is unsurprising that Barber and Graham obscured the ballet’s relation to its source. As Barber explains, a literal reenactment was never part of the plan. 

These mythical figures served rather to project psychological states of jealousy and vengeance which are timeless. The choreography and music were conceived, as it were, on two time levels, the ancient mythical and the contemporary…As the tension and conflict between them increases, they step out of their legendary roles from time to time and become the modern man and woman, caught in the nets of jealousy and destructive love; and at the end resume their mythical quality. 

In addition to Jason and Medea, the ballet includes two other characters: the young princess for whom Jason leaves his wife and an attendant who essentially serves as a Greek chorus, commenting upon the action. 

A year after the ballet’s premiere, Barber distilled its music into a seven-movement concert suite. Seven years later, Barber whittled the work further, creating a single-movement tone poem called Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance (later simply Medea’s Dance of Vengeance). The work made its debut in New York on February 2, 1956, with Dimitri Mitropoulos leading the Philharmonic Orchestra.  As Barber describes Medea’s Dance of Vengeance, 

The present version, rescored for large orchestra in 1955, is in one continuous movement and is based on material from the ballet which is directly related to the central character, Medea. Tracing her emotions from her tender feelings towards her children, through her mounting suspicions and anguish at her husband’s betrayal and her decision to avenge herself, the piece increases in intensity to close in the frenzied Dance of Vengeance of Medea, the Sorceress descended from the Sun God.