THE HISTORY OF SWAN LAKE

Over 145 years since Swan Lake was first staged in Moscow in 1877, it continues as the most universally popular of classical ballets, both for its music and its story. Its origins may have been in a children’s entertainment devised some years previously among the family and friends of Tchaikovsky’s sister, Alexandra Davidova. The four-act ballet was commissioned by the director of the Moscow Imperial Theatres, Vladimir Petrovich Begichev, who seems to have mapped out the scenario in association with the dancer Vassily Geltzer. It is this on which Tchaikovsky based his composition and Julius Reisinger his first choreography.

Nobody was credited with the story in the original programme, but it was familiar from collections of folktales and is very much of the Romantic epoch (though some nationalist objections were made to the use of Germanic names). The tale is in direct descent from those of earlier ballet classics like La Sylphide and Giselle, in which the universal theme of man’s quest for an ideal is illustrated in terms of a love that is unattainable in ordinary life.

Tchaikovsky was 35, a rather melancholy, introspective man who had written his first three symphonies and the B-flat minor Piano Concerto, as well as four operas; these included Undine and The Voyevoda, from both of which he borrowed musical ideas for Swan Lake. In 1875 he wrote to his fellow composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov that he had accepted Begichev’s commission, partly because he needed the money and also because he had ‘long wanted to try [his] hand at this kind of music’. That was unusual at the time, because music for ballet was customarily supplied by the theatre’s staff composers who readily adapted it to the needs of the ballet master in choreographing the dances. Other composers found this an unacceptable practice but, without actually setting out to ’reform’ ballet music, Tchaikovsky seems to have gone about his task as primarily a musical conception, treating the medium of ballet as worthy of a stronger and more imaginative musical element. Keys and their tonal opposition are related to character and situation, for instance, and identifying themes are repeated and transformed.

The score caused problems at the first performances, which were apparently poorly played and conducted. Tchaikovsky made himself amenable to some changes and wrote an extra Russian Dance as an addition to Act III.

Pelugia Karpakova was the first to dance the ballerina role, but when a more senior dancer, Anna Sobeshchanskaya, took it at the ballet’s fourth performance, she inserted a pas de deux made for her by Marius Petipa to music by Ludwig Minkus. This Tchaikovsky could not accept, so he composed his own music for it to steps already set (it is published as an appendix to the full score and is sometimes separately danced, as in Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky pas de deux).

In spite of Reisinger’s indifferent choreography, the first Swan Lake was not the flop mentioned in many accounts. Nikolai Kashkin, who made the piano score, noted that it ‘achieved a success, though not a particularly brilliant one, and held its place on the stage until the scenery was worn out, when it was never renewed’. That was after new choreography by Joseph Hansen in 1880 and again in 1882; but Kashkin also recalled: ‘not only the decor became ragged, but the music suffered more and more until nearly a third was exchanged with music from other ballets – and not necessarily good ones’.

After 41 performances up to 1883, Swan Lake remained unperformed again before Tchaikovsky died, though there is evidence to suggest that revivals were planned in the wake of his success with The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and The Nutcracker (1892). Following a new staging by Lev Ivanov of the Lakeside Act II in 1894, as part of a memorial tribute to Tchaikovsky in St Petersburg, the complete ballet was given what became the crucial historical version there with choreography by Petipa (Acts I and III) and Ivanov (the Lakeside scenes) early in 1895.

Modest Tchaikovsky, the composer’s brother, helped to modify the scenario and agreed to some musical changes, of which the most important involved the transfer from Act I to Act III of the music now known as the Black Swan pas de deux (where the new Odette/ Odile, Pierina Legnani, displayed the 32 fouettés she first achieved in an Aladdin at the Alhambra Theatre, London, in 1892). Other musical numbers were cut and three Tchaikovsky piano pieces orchestrated by Riccardo Drigo were added.

Most Soviet productions of Swan Lake descended from this Petipa–Ivanov version, with variations from one company to another. Outside Russia the first ‘complete’ staging (other than Act II on its own) was by Achille Viscusi at the Prague National Theatre in 1907. It is often forgotten that four years after this Sergei Diaghilev brought a two-act version by his Ballets Russes to Covent Garden, with choreography by Mikhail Fokine ‘after Petipa and Ivanov’, danced by Mathilde Kschessinska and Vaslav Nijinsky. Later in 1911 the USA saw its first full Swan Lake at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, staged by Mikhail Mordkin from the Moscow Bolshoi company, again ‘after Petipa and Ivanov’.

The next most historic production after 1895, however, was mounted on the fledgling Vic-Wells Ballet at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, on 20 November 1934, by Nicholas Sergueyev from his St Petersburg notebooks of the Petipa-Ivanov version. Alicia Markova and Robert Helpmann led the performances (with Margot Fonteyn among the corps de ballet). This Swan Lake became significant not only as the root from which all later Sadler’s Wells/Royal Ballet versions have flowered, but as a working basis for most other productions in Europe, the USA and, more recently, Japan and the Far East.

Birmingham Royal Ballet’s production of Swan Lake has been a popular part of the Company’s repertory since its premiere at the Palace Theatre, Manchester, on 27 November 1981. It was created by the Company’s then Director (now Founding Director Laureate of Birmingham Royal Ballet) Peter Wright and Galina Samsova, an outstanding Odette/Odile with many companies around the world, who took the role on the opening night. Galina Samsova was a Principal dancer and teacher with the Company when she collaborated with Peter Wright on this production. They augmented the Petipa-Ivanov choreography with some of Wright’s own and some dances from the version Russianborn Samsova learnt while she was a leading dancer with Ukrainian Ballet in Kiev, whence she returned to undertake research for this production.

The late Noël Goodwin was a freelance writer and critic with a special interest in the relationship of music and dance.