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It has been estimated that one out of every ten ballet performances given in Russia is of "Swan Lake." And yet this great favorite began as a failure, and its composer, Tchaikovsky, never lived to witness its vindication. His score was originally written for the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, where it premiered in 1877, with choreography by Julius Reisinger. The latter's uninspired work was soon recast by Joseph Hansen, and the ballet managed to hold a tenuous place in the Bolshoi's repertory until 1883. It returned only in 1901 when Alexander Gorsky again reworked its choreography.
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The final acceptance of "Swan Lake" as the classic we know today was due to the great father figure of Russian ballet, Marius Petipa, balletmaster of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. He felt there were untapped possibilities in the score and discussed a new version of the ballet with Tchaikovsky, who remained uncertain that his music could be saved. It was only following the composer's death that "Swan Lake" took the first step towards its current popularity, at a memorial evening at the Mariinsky in 1894. Act 2 was danced at the memorial in new choreography by Petipa's assistant, Lev Ivanov. So pronounced was its success that Petipa decided to stage the entire work the next year. He contributed the dances for Acts 1 and 3, and Ivanov added choreography for Act 4 to complete the ballet. For this new version, Tchaikovsky's brother, Modeste, helped revise the libretto and the score. (Some Tchaikovsky piano pieces were orchestrated by the Mariinsky's chief ballet conductor, Riccardo Drigo, and added to fit the new story line devised by Modeste; other pieces were deleted.) Modeste's libretto plays down the original psychological drama conceived by Tchaikovsky as a duel between good and evil. What Modeste came up with was more a fairy tale -- a mixture of magic and deceit. Although Petipa's divertissement in Act 3 had many attractive dances, he made Act 1 little more than a prologue to Ivanov's evocative and lyrical second act, which formed the basis of the real success of the Mariinsky "Swan Lake." |
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Yet, at first, the ballet's progress outside of Russia was surprisingly slow. The West was not yet conditioned to full-length ballets and, prior to World War I, "Swan Lake" was seen primarily in a two-act version staged in London by Mikhail Fokine that was later taken up by the touring Diaghilev company. |
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What finally turned the tide was a new production of the work in Russia in 1945 by Fedor Lopukhov; by then St. Petersburg had become Leningrad and the Mariinsky was known as the Kirov. A version of this full four-act staging was given in London in 1954, and for a long while it was the only complete "Swan Lake" in the West. Through the years there would be many others who would continue to make changes in the work (Yuri Grigorovich, Konstantin Sergiev, George Balanchine, and Oleg Vinogradov and Rudolf Nureyev, for starters), streamlining its mime and clarifying its plot, and, because of these many variations, there are those who view the ballet as more of a work in progress. Balanchine was one, and because he was so flexible when it came to reinterpreting the classics, it's possible he would have been highly intrigued by Matthew Bourne's new vision of "Swan Lake." In his book COMPLETE STORIES OF THE GREAT BALLETS, Balanchine writes that "'Swan Lake' is always changing. That is as it should be. Tradition in performance is, unlike teaching, discontinuous. . . . It is always interrupted, depends on shifts of directorship, changes of parts, whims of choreographers, dancers, designers, musicians and the public. . . . I suspect that artists will want always to change ['Swan Lake'], to remake it for themselves. That is what many of us have done, and I hope will keep on doing." Perhaps the best summing up of the power and importance of this seminal piece came on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of "Swan Lake"'s premiere. In the April 1952 issue of DANCE NEWS, dance historian Anatol Chujoy wrote that the ballet "stands at the highest point of the curve which represents the history of the source of all ballet as we know it today -- the romantic-classic era which began with 'Giselle' in 1841 and ended with 'Les Sylphides' in 1909." |
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