The final performance by New York City Ballet principal dancer Kyra Nichols on Friday night offered three Balanchine ballets in which Ms. Nichols projected themes of loss, rupture, and reflection. It was all but inevitable, then, that the audience would cross-reference the content of these ballets with the personal narrative unfolding before them.

Ms. Nichols eagerly illustrated the many ages of ballerina-dom represented in “Serenade,” the opening ballet, in which she danced the Waltz ballerina who looks for her place amid the serried ranks of the corps de ballet. As she has in the past, Ms. Nichols deliberately acted out this vignette as a search for inclusion and discovery of identity. The absorption of the solo dancer in “Serenade” into its ensemble makes a perfect metaphor of an individual’s entry into a larger institution, and this indeed was the first Balanchine ballet Ms. Nichols ever performed. In the closing movements of “Serenade,” the same ballerina loses a beloved to another woman — a romantic rival or a symbol of fate — and is then carried off into eternity by a cortege of men.

Even the most momentous occasions are not immune to the vicissitudes of live performance. As Balanchine’s ballet approaches its lushest passages, the ballerina’s hair is meant to cascade out of her chignon, but Ms. Nichols’s instead resisted coming down the way it was supposed to. The men who conveyed her final transport off the stage also had some trouble holding her as starkly erect as she’s meant to be. But of course these glitches were minor, and Ms. Nichols was unfazed by them. Her dancing was so spry and pristine that she suggested everything but a candidate for retirement. In addition to Ms. Nichols, the cast of “Serenade” included Ashley Bouder, Philip Neal, and Sara Mearns, all of whom rose to the occasion.

Next on the program was Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze.” The ballet is danced by four couples, and the roles danced by Ms. Nichols and Charles Askegard are most clearly branded with the existence of Schumann and his wife, Clara, left bereft by the composer’s descent into madness. But the distribution of roles is by no means totally schematic: All the dancers have darker and lighter moments. Ms. Nichols shone in her hushed solo, in which she enacted what seemed like recollections of steps. In their final encounter, Mr. Askegard points to some destination offstage, and retreats; she is bereft, her head bowed. Ms. Nichols and Mr. Askegard respected the full sentiment of this tragic separation without resorting to sentimentality.

In addition to Ms. Nichols and Mr. Askegard, the cast consisted of Jared Angel, Nilas Martins, Jenifer Ringer, and Jennie Somogyi, each of whom helped moved the ballet forward to Ms. Nichols’s dénouement.

The evening ended with the concluding movement of “Vienna Waltzes,” performed to Richard Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier: Erste Walzerfolge,” a concert treatment Strauss prepared in 1946 that not only dilates upon the familiar waltz heard fleetingly throughout the opera, but also includes snatches of the Marschallin’s Act I monologues, in which she muses on the passage of time and its recurring cycles. In this ballet, Balanchine depicts a Marschallin alone in a ballroom, mirrored so that the audience becomes part of the onstage décor. She engages with a dance partner who suggests a figment of her imagining, perhaps someone from her past. A crowd of waltzing couples rushes in and jostles her from her reverie, or perhaps completes it. Then they are gone and she is alone again, dancing more and more rapturously with her remembered escort, until she and he dissolve into the full ensemble of waltzing couples.

Partnered again by Mr. Neal, Ms. Nichols danced this exquisitely, managing to seem at all times both this woman’s younger and present selves. She fully conveyed the poignance and grandeur of Balanchine’s text and the way it is subsumed by the rushing lilt of the music. Just as they would in a full performance of “Vienna Waltzes,” the leading dancers in the ballet’s preceeding movements joined Ms. Nichols and Mr. Neal for the finale. When the curtain fell, they, as well as the audience, remained to applaud her.