After more than a month of “The Nutcracker,” marzipan and glace have been polished off, and what balletomanes often consider the “real” New York City Ballet winter season begins tonight, as the company launches into its eight weeks of repertory.

Many choreographers will be represented. Artistic director Peter Martins’s “Songs of the Auvergne” will be making a return after a decade’s absence, and a new Martins ballet receives a premiere on February 10, performed to a commissioned score by Christopher Rouse. Resident choreographer Christopher Wheeldon will present a new ballet on January 24, set to Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” piano sonata, and his “Scenes de ballet” will likewise return to the repertory after a long absence. The full and varied complement of Jerome Robbins’s ballets will include one of my favorites, “Mother Goose,” revived for the first time in more than a decade.

But New York City Ballet has always existed primarily to highlight the work of its founder, George Balanchine; thus his oeuvre has defined the company’s style more than any other. Tonight’s program will conclude with Balanchine’s “Symphony in C,” performed to the four movements of Bizet’s symphony, composed when Bizet was only 17, a student of Charles Gounod at the Paris Conservatory.

This ballet is one of the most rigorous tests of any company’s strength. Its first movement is crystalline with vivacious bravura; the second movement aglow with a dreamy adagio; the third movement a high-flying elaboration of the rounds of country dance. And in the concluding movement, the ballet spins itself into the most delirious of all-hands-on-deck crescendos.

Danced at NYCB’s debut performance in 1948, “Symphony in C” has rarely been out of the repertory since. It will be unusually prominent this NYCB season, though, performed a total of eight times. Next year, in fact, marks the ballet’s 60th birthday; it was actually created a year before there was a New York City Ballet, during a busy and perhaps perplexing time in Balanchine’s career.

After Diaghilev’s death and the dissolution of his Ballets Russes in the summer of 1929, Balanchine worked briefly at the Paris Opera, before being struck with tuberculosis at age 25. When he returned after his recovery, he found the doors of the opera literally barred to him; his former Diaghilev colleague Serge Lifar had become the company’s director. Four years later, Balanchine immigrated to the United States, where ballet hardly existed at all.

Balanchine choreographed many Broadway musicals and made new ballets for groundbreaking but transient ballet start-ups. By 1947 he was choreographing regularly for Ballet Society, a subscription-only organization performing in high school auditoriums around Manhattan. In the meantime, Lifar had been temporarily relieved of his duties due to charges of collaboration with the Germans, and Balanchine was invited to the Paris Opera for a six-month residency that began in February 1947.

Balanchine had grown up in the pre-revolutionary Mariinsky Theater of St. Petersburg, which boasted an enormous stage, lavish stage facilities, and a opulent auditorium, all kept going by the tsar’s patronage. A return to Russia was out of the question for Balanchine, making the magnificent resources of the Paris Opera all the more enticing.

Bizet’s score had been lost for decades when it was discovered in the conservatory’s library in 1933. It is a delightful bit of juvenilia, revealing the composer’s melodic gifts – as well as his adolescent dependence on repetition – and his studious appreciation of the symphonic form.

Titled “Palais de Cristal,” Balanchine’s new ballet had its premiere at the opera in July 1947, a salute to the effusive, sparkling, and audacious French style. A month later, Balanchine left Paris. According to Anatole Chujoy’s 1953 “New York City Ballet,” Balanchine was invited to return to the Opera, but later that year Lifar had been installed there once again. Had Balanchine re turned to the Paris Opera, the New York City Ballet might never have been formed and ballet’s landscape might be very different.

“For some reason that he never explained,” Chujoy writes, Balanchine was “hesitant to stage it for the Ballet Society troupe,” perhaps leery of the reduced facilities and smaller stages available to him in New York. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1948, now renamed for the piece of music to which it was created, “Symphony in C” received its American premiere by Ballet Society, which now performed at City Center.

In Paris the ballet had been performed alongside fanciful scenery and costumes by Leonor Fini. In New York there was instead only a spare blue cyclorama. In Paris each movement was distinguished by differently colored costumes for the dancers; in New York they wore black and white, which became the characteristic look of Balanchine’s ensembles.

None of this in any way detracted from the appeal of the choreography and the now-legendary performances it received from some of Balanchine’s greatest dancers. In the fall of that year, “Symphony in C” was on the opening night bill of the newly incarnated New York City Ballet, which transformed Ballet Society into City Center’s resident ballet troupe.

In 1958 “Symphony in C” provided the Soviets with an introduction to Balanchine choreography when the Paris Opera brought “Palais de Cristal” to the very same Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in which Balanchine had first been absorbed into ballet. Four years later, NYCB performed it there on its first tour of Russia. It fascinated the public, but “Symphony in C” nevertheless was not on the sanctioned side of the nonprogrammatic, non-narrative dogma of Soviet art.

Nevertheless, in 1967, Balanchine’s associate John Taras went to St. Petersburg to stage excerpts from it, which were performed somewhat below the radar at gala programs organized at the Leningrad Philharmonic by the indomitable Kirov prima ballerina Natalia Dudinskaya. Mikhail Baryshnikov and other great Kirov stars participated. It was not until 1996 that “Symphony in C” received its official Kirov premiere. “Symphony in C” is now in the repertory of major companies around the globe, including Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet, NYCB’s traditional rival, American Ballet Theatre, and many others.

When the Paris Opera brought “Palais de Cristal” here in 1996, it was fizzier and flirtier than we’re accustomed to. During its 1999 New York season, the Kirov performed it with a courtliness that was very lovely. NYCB does it their way, which is more laconic, less adorned, some would say less pretentious than the Europeans. The ballet will tolerate different interpretative imprints, but every role in it – from the leads to each member of the corps de ballet – must be rendered with the utmost in precision and elan to do “Symphony in C” justice.