As the curtain rises on George Balanchine’s “Serenade,” we’re plunged into a drama about selflessness. Seventeen young women are all facing front, all dressed alike, all slowly going through a ritual that strikingly resembles that of religious devotees. In what follows — as we watch loners; connections between individuals; kernel-like groups of three, four and five; and suggestions of love, loss, consolation and transcendence — we constantly see how lives are absorbed in something larger than private concerns.

Dramatic interplay between self and selflessness occurs in many Balanchine ballets. On Tuesday night, New York City Ballet opened its six-week season at the David H. Koch Theater with three of his ultimate classics: “Serenade” (1934 ), “Agon” (1957) and “Symphony in C” (1947). The central dances of “Agon,” tense and dense, abound with radical style and peculiar incidents; but the opening and closing sections show that even the most singular of these performers is actually part of a large team. We enter the hive only to find it contains more than one queen bee.

Each of the four movements of the grandly imperial “Symphony in C” features a very different ballerina; the structurally startling event is how, in the finale, the ballet brings these dissimilar divas side by side to dance the same steps. In each of these three works, the women are dressed identically; likewise the men. The collective matters more than the star, and the fascination of the pattern that includes them all matters most.

Yet the human is never reduced to the status of a cog in a machine. Rather the opposite: Balanchine style and choreography maximize each dancer’s energy. His are realms in which each person makes intense claims upon life.