That was a
quote from the early 20th century tenor Leo Slezak, and refers to a
comment he made the time he missed his swan-boat entrance during a performance
of Wagner’s Lohengrin. This doesn’t refer much to the ballet Swan Lake, but I love it as a lead-in.
Swan Lake was the first ballet I knew
when I was a kid. I used to sit
underneath my grandparents’ dining table and listen to an old 78 rpm. (pre-vinyl),
recording of it, and even if I didn’t yet know its story, the drama and the
pathos of the music really got to me. I
didn’t see the ballet until about 10 years after that, and then it was only the
second act. I think I finally saw the
whole time when the British Royal Ballet did it in New York somewhat later. The story is the usual preposterous 19th
century balletic fairy tale: a princess (Odette), enchanted by evil magician (von
Rothbart) to be a swan by day and only assume her real form at night, finally
believes she will be able to be totally human again after a handsome prince (Siegfried)
vows true love. That happens, but it
doesn’t end well: the magician tricks the prince by having his own daughter
(Odile) take on her form, and it is she whom he chooses at a ball for
prospective brides. He realizes his
mistake and rushes out to Odette’s lake, but it is too late. She dies, and maybe he does too. As Gordon Lightfoot put it in the early
1970’s, “heroes often fail.”
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| Odette and Odile |
20th
century productions made it easy to tell who was who: Odette, the girl/swan
wore white, Odile the imposter dressed in black. The other two characters besides Siegfried
and the real and unreal swan in the mix were Siegfried’s mom, the queen, and
the evil von Rothbart. Why the latter
wanted to enchant the girl is never really made clear, I guess he was just an
evil villain. He could morph from owl or hawkman to a very sexy nobleman when he brought in Odile at the grand ball.The triumph of evil and death often happened
in folk and fairy tales, but in our present day fantasies, we expect the hero
to win.
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| Rothbart as Hawkman or something similar |
The
endurance of this good-and-evil parable, expressed in the stylized art of
ballet, owes at least a good part to Tchaikovsky’s wonderful score, which
combines symphonic pathos and menace in its opening music and stormy end, with
wonderful dance music ranging from over-the-top romantic yearning to lively
variety, including a bunch of “national” dances, in the first and third third
act (Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Polish and sometimes Russian), enabling
ballet stars to show off their superb technique.
The
canonical version of the 20th century had its roots in the 1895 St.
Petersburg production of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov for the Russian Imperial
court ballet. The full ballet was
brought to western Europe and first popularized in the 1930’s England by the Sadlers
Wells (later Royal) Ballet, quickly spreading all over that continent and the
Americas, Canada and Australia too. This is what I saw growing up.
But
Tchaikovsky actually composed his score for an earlier version, for the Bolshoi
Theater in Moscow between 1877 and 1883.
The story was somewhat different too, with princess changed into a swan
by a vengeful wicked sorceress-stepmother, and involved the protection of a
magic crown. Von Rothbart shows up in
the third act too, as the sorceress’s ally, whose main role is to be Odile’s
escort at the big ball. The hero and
heroine are destroyed by a malevolent act of witchcraft-induced nature when, in the last act, the prince throws away Odette’s protective crown, and a huge typhoon drowns everyone. Tchaikovsky
said that he took the commission for the money and because he never had done a
ballet score before. Recent research has revealed that one of the
main promoters of the production was the chief stage designer and special
effects man, Karl Volts, who wanted to stir up that spectacular storm--and did
it so well that Tchaikovsky’s dramatic music was practically obliterated by
manufactured wind, water and thunder.
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| Anna Sobeshchanskya and her Magic Crown (1877) |
After 1883,
the Moscow version pretty much vanished, and when Petipa and Ivanov took it
over, they revamped the story, and, Tchaikovsky having died, got their house
ballet composer Riccardo Drigo to abridge and doctor the score to the version
that we knew in Europe and America, with its good girl/bad girl dichotomy taken
to its ultimate trajectory in the recent film, Black Swan.
Then, in
the early 1950’s, Tchaikovsky’s original score surfaced, and recently, very
recently, the violin rehearsal score with production notes. Most of this new information was synthesized and
discussed by Simon Morrison in his recent book, Bolshoi Confidential, Secrets of the Russian Ballet From the Rule of
the Tsars To Today.
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| Pierina Legnani as Odette/Odile (1890's) |
The first
complete recording of the original Tchaikovsky score came out in vinyl in 1953,
with Antal Dorati and the Minneapolis Symphony (it was a three-disk set with a
sky blue satin cover). We had a copy and
I listened to it endlessly. What Tchaikovsky wrote in 1875-77 was unlike any
previous ballet score--a two-hour dramatic tone poem with dances. It was no surprise that it confounded the
original choreographer, Julius Reisinger, and early soloists Pelagia Karpakova
and Anna When Petipa
and Ivanov got ahold of it, they made the story easier to follow, but they also
cut up and abridged the original score, transposing a first act pas de deux (duet) into Odile’s hot
seduction number in act three, with their reigning Prima Ballerina, Piera
Legnani’s athletic prowess in mind.
During the
20th century, there were various solutions to the ending, from the
Soviet tradition of having Siegfried win and by killing Rothbart, he and Odette
live happily after. More often though,
the ending is still tragic, with Rothbart triumphing and one or the other
surviving while the other one dies, both sometimes rising, after jumping into
the lake in a visionary apotheosis.
If you
really think about the plot, in whatever version, it’s pretty silly. Siegfried is more or less a not-very-bright
hero, easily duped, and generally not successful. Odette is a cipher for von Rothbart’s power,
in the tragic tradition of the Sylphide or Giselle: not quite earthly and
always doomed. True, Odette/Odile and
Siegfried get the best solos, but the real mover of the story is von Rothbart,
whatever his motives. Oh, and one other
thing: “Rothbart” means “Red Beard” in German; seldom does the character have
one.
In the 21st
century, choreographers began to mine Tchaikovsky’s original score, as they
have begun to be more and inventive and revisionist about this iconic
ballet. Some have really pushed the
envelope, such as Matthew Bourne’s version featuring male swans in feathered
knee-pants (1995) to the Royal Danish ballet’s 2015 version with CGI sets. In the latter version, Von Rothbart is not
only a wicked magician, but the queen’s prime minister too, and his real motive
is to seize power, using In this production, poor
Siegfried eventually marries Odile, von Rothbart’s daughter.
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| Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake: The Swans |
Another recent Swan Lake, the production of Alexei Ratmansky for Zurich, goes in the opposite direction, attempting to evoke the Petipa-Ivanov original. I haven't seen this one, but check out Alistair Macauley from The New York Times article whose link I provide below.
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| Royal Danish Ballet |
Gentle reader, are you confused
yet? To try to make sense out of all
this, I recommend you watch at least two or three versions of the ballet, the
whole thing is available in numerous full-length productions, including those
of the Bolshoi, the Kirov (numerous versions going back to Soviet times right
up to the present), the American Ballet Theater (with the sexiest von
Rothbart), Nureyev’s version for Vienna, and the Royal Danish Ballet’s
revisionist one. All of these are on YouTube.
Then listen
to the 1877 full-length score by the Moscow Radio Symphony conducted by Gennady
Rozhdestvensky (also on YouTube). It’s
almost two and a half hours long, but if you have the patience, you can feel
the dramatic flow. This is particularly heard in the third act, which contains
the Ball where Siegfried is given the uniquely Russian custom of a royal
prospective bride show, with fanfares for each candidate. Odile and von Rothbart enter to the same
fanfare after all the other would-be-brides dance, and then the music goes
really menacing and a warning of Odette’s theme from Act II comes through too. Then Odile participates in a much stranger
and exotic set of tunes than the Act I’s transposed music. It’s much more symphonic, and it apparently
was intertwined within an ensemble for six dancers (this was shortly
substituted, it seems, by a more conventional duet with Siegfried at the
insistence of one of the original ballerinas, Anna Sobeshchanskaya). With all
of this--in either version--why doesn’t Siegfried get the clue? But no, national dances, a fixed group of set
pieces traditional to Russian ballet at that time intervene. Then Siegfried dances with Odile to part of
the same waltz that the other would-be brides did. The minute he vows his love, the waltz cuts
off and the music gets really menacing when he realizes what he did and sees
the real Odette out the window. Chaos!
Villainy!
I guess
Petipa and Ivanov decided to shorten things up; Tchaikovsky’s act three as
written is pretty long. When Tchaikovsky
subsequently composed ballets directly for them
(The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty), they micromanaged
every bar he was writing to fit their own choreographic ideas. Shortening the Swan Lake action made it easier to digest for the casual audience. And
putting Odile in a black costume or at least something darker, instantly marked
her out as an imposter. Their solution certainly worked for over a century, but
it’s only in recent years that some of that act three music has been explored
and incorporated into some of the later riffs on the story. There’s more to be mined from the original
score, but I’m not suggesting that the original 1877 plot be reinstated--save
me from the wicked stepmother and the fatal crown!*
Meanwhile,
I hope that the sourcing and using of Tchaikovsky’s original music, which was
so far ahead of its time continues with modern choreographers, and if you have
two and a half hours some day to listen to the full original score, do it, and
let your imagination run.
*And save me from Barbie
Swan Lake and Swan Lake on Ice too!
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Simon Morrison, Bolshoi
Confidential, Secrets of the Russian Ballet From the Rule of the Tsars To Today
(Liveright Publishing, 2016).
For an earlier take on the ballet’s history, see:
Cyril W. Beaumont, The
Ballet Called Swan Lake, , London, Beaumont, 1952.
For a sampling of the many varieties of Swan Lake viewable in New York in 2014, See Phil Chan in the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phil-chan/birds-of-a-feather-three-_b_5623929.html
Alistair MacCaulay “’Swan Lake’ Discoveries Allow For a
Deeper Dive Into Its History:
NewYork Times Oct 13, 2015:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/14/arts/dance/swan-lake-discoveries-allow-for-a-deeper-dive-into-its-history.html
Performance YouTubes:
A Kirov Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rJoB7y6Ncs&t=1451s
Nureyev's Vienna Version:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhtHZCO684I&t=6125s
American Ballet Theater:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhtHZCO684I&t=6125s
Royal Danish Ballet (in 2 parts):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHtNhh3WjYY
Tchaikovsky's 1877 ballet (all of it, including both the original Act III and Sobeshchanskaya's
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