Swan Lake and other Tchaikovsky ballets

The evening of February 20, 1877, Moscow, Bolshoi Theatre. The premiere is underway, the ballet Swan Lake, with music written by Conservatory Professor Pyotr Tchaikovsky, for whom this is a first venture into the ballet genre. Tickets are sold out, rumors of unprecedented music have been circulating around Moscow for months, and the boxes await the event. The audience leaves disappointed. Reviewers scold the production for poor scenery and a weak corps de ballet, while the music is criticized for being «too symphonic,» making it, they say, difficult to dance to. The performance runs to half-empty halls for a while and disappears from the playbill. Less than twenty years will pass, and the very same score will become the most performed ballet on the planet, and Odette's white tutu will turn into a symbol of Russian theatre in general. How the exact same music managed to be both a failure and a pinnacle is interesting to examine at leisure. At the same time, we will recall where the man who composed Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker came from, and why no opera house in the world can do without him.

A boy from Votkinsk and music in his head

There was no musical dynasty behind Tchaikovsky. His father, Ilya Petrovich, worked as a mining engineer and managed a plant in Votkinsk, a small town in the Urals; his mother, Alexandra Andreyevna, ran a large household. There were six children, and the younger twins, Anatoly and Modest, later became the people closest to him. Modest would write the librettos for his late operas and his first detailed biography. Music in the household had the status of a pleasant diversion. The living room housed an orchestrion—a mechanical organ that played, among other things, fragments of Mozart—and young Pyotr could listen to it for hours. The governess Fanny Dürbach, a Frenchwoman who left the most detailed memoirs of his childhood, called her charge a "glass child" based on those memoirs. She had a reason. The boy cried from the music that continued to sound in his head at night, complained that he could not get rid of it, and generally reacted to the world with a painful acuity.

When the family was leaving the Urals, eight-year-old Pyotr said goodbye to his governess with such difficulty that Fanny kept his childhood notebooks and letters. Half a century later, an elderly lady from Montbéliard, France, showed these notebooks to the world-famous composer who came to visit her; that 1892 visit is described in the composer's letters with rare tenderness. Afterwards, everything looked like the usual biography of a civil servant's son. At the age of ten, he was sent to the St. Petersburg School of Jurisprudence, a boarding school that trained lawyers. There he experienced the most difficult event of his youth: in 1854, his mother died of cholera. He carried this loss throughout his entire life, admitting a quarter of a century later that he could not speak about his mother without tears, and biographers associate the special tone of his slow music with this wound. Meanwhile, his first musical circle formed at the school; friends sang with him in the choir, and the singing teacher noted a rare ear for music, though no one envisioned a future in music for the young man, as such pursuits were not considered a respectable profession. Having graduated from the school, the young Tchaikovsky entered the service of the Ministry of Justice and for several years diligently went to the office, sorted through papers and, by his own later admissions, found every day of this life burdensome. He studied music in snatches, for himself.

The turning point happened in 1862, when Russia's first conservatory opened in St. Petersburg. Its founder, the pianist Anton Rubinstein, was enrolling the first class, and a twenty-two-year-old law clerk signed up as a student. A year later, he quit his civil service job for good. His relatives gasped in horror, and a remark made by one of his uncles about jurisprudence being traded for a squeaky pipe made the rounds of the family; only his father unexpectedly supported his son's choice without a single word of reproach. He studied with the voracity of a man making up for lost time. Rubinstein drove the students mercilessly, assigning them to write variations by the dozen, and the former official would spend nights working on counterpoint. With his graduation cantata set to Schiller's Ode to Joy, he earned a large silver medal. Tchaikovsky graduated from the conservatory with honors, and almost immediately Anton's younger brother, Nikolai Rubinstein, invited him to Moscow to teach at the newly established Moscow Conservatory. Thus, the erstwhile desk clerk became a professor of music theory, a man with a tiny salary, perpetual debts, and a growing stack of his own musical scores.

The Moscow years provided him with an environment he had previously lacked. Nikolai Rubinstein had the new professor stay at his home, introduced him to a circle of musicians and publishers, and performed premieres of his works. It was here that the first pieces appeared which the public remembered immediately: the overture «Romeo and Juliet,» the First Piano Concerto, and romances that spread into home music albums. His salary was not enough, so the professor earned extra money by translating textbooks and writing newspaper reviews. He grumbled about this drudgery in his letters, but in return he grew accustomed to formulating his thoughts on music quickly and clearly. By the mid-1870s, he already had symphonies, an opera, and the First Piano Concerto under his belt, and his reputation as a serious composer had solidified to such an extent that the Bolshoi Theatre administration dared to commission an unusual work.

The lake that was not noticed right away

The order sounded routine: a ballet, a fee of eight hundred rubles. By comparison, an annual professor's salary was a little more, so the interesting work came with much-needed money as well. For the theater of that era, ballet music was considered a craft commodity; it was supplied by staff specialists who knew how to write strictly for the dancers« feet, one bar per movement. The invitation of a symphonist to this guild seemed a caprice. Tchaikovsky agreed quickly; the money was needed, and the genre itself had long enticed him. The plot about an enchanted swan-girl was formed from German fairy-tale motifs; a few years before the commission, the composer had written a domestic little ballet, »The Swan Lake," for his nephews at his sister's estate in Kamenka, and some of that music, according to researchers, migrated into the score.

He worked with pleasure and wrote music the ballet stage had not heard before. Later, he confessed in letters that he took up the genre partly out of a long-standing affection for ballet, and partly from a desire to prove that a serious composer had something to do there. The proof turned out to be convincing, even if it was not appreciated right away. Instead of a set of interpolated numbers, the result was a continuous symphonic fabric where the characters have themes, and the themes have destinies. The listener does not need to understand theory to feel this; it is enough to notice how the anxious melody from the second scene returns in the finale, now changed, having grown up and doomed. The famous oboe swan melody appears, grows, and by the finale thunders with the full orchestra as a true tragic resolution. Here the orchestra spoke in an operatic manner, with continuous development and genuine climaxes, the waltzes grew into symphonic pictures, and later authors, from Glazunov to Prokofiev, would date serious ballet music precisely from this point. Trouble came from the side of the production. The libretto was written by Vladimir Begichev and Vasily Geltser, and the reviewers did not like it either. Ballet master Wenzel Reisinger staged the performance dully, the orchestra struggled, and the audience of 1877 heard a great score in a very mediocre performance. The direction showed no interest in the failure, and until the end of his life, the composer considered his first ballet unlucky.

One episode from that Moscow story says a lot about the author's character. The ballerina Anna Sobeshchanskaya, preparing for her debut in the production, commissioned an interpolated number from an outside composer, a common practice of those years. Tchaikovsky, upon learning of this, flew into a rage and declared that only his music would sound in his ballet, after which he wrote a new piece for the dancer himself to fit the already established choreography. The craft genre had known no such attitude toward the score; composers used to endure interpolations in silence.

That same year, 1877, turned his personal life upside down. A hasty marriage to a former student turned into a disaster within a matter of weeks, and the composer left for abroad on the verge of a breakdown. Nadezhda von Meck, a wealthy widow and passionate admirer of his music who had first written to him in December 1876, became his main source of support during those months. Starting in 1877, she provided the composer with a stipend, and this support soon allowed him to give up teaching and devote himself entirely to composing.

After the Moscow performances, the score was shelved, and it never made it back to the stage during the composer’s lifetime. The way forward was paved by a memorial evening for the composer in early 1894, for which Lev Ivanov staged the second scene, the “Swan” scene. The success of this excerpt sealed the deal, and the theater commissioned a full production.

The actual premiere took place without him. The Mariinsky Theatre took the score seriously in the 1894 season, and the full production reached the stage in January 1895. The work was divided between two men. Marius Petipa took charge of the palace acts, while Lev Ivanov got the lakeside ones. Ivanov's white scenes, where the corps de ballet breathes as a single entity, have been analyzed in every choreographic school ever since. The global life of the ballet begins with this production. Odette and her deceitful double Odile, Prince Siegfried, and the evil sorcerer Rothbart have since been established at all latitudes, and any theater person understands the phrase «swan act» without translation.

Sleeping Beauty and Theater as a Luxury

His second foray into ballet came thirteen years after his first, under entirely different circumstances. By the late 1880s, Tchaikovsky was already famous; he lived on a pension from the emperor and his performance fees, and conducted frequently. The initiative came from Ivan Vsevolozhsky, director of the Imperial Theaters, who set out to elevate ballet from mere entertainment to a grand courtly art form. He devised the plot himself, based on a fairy tale by Charles Perrault, sketched the costumes himself, and assembled a dream team: music by Tchaikovsky, choreography by Marius Petipa.

The plot is based on Perrault’s story. Princess Aurora falls asleep for a hundred years after being pricked by a spindle; the fairy Sireni guides Prince Désiré through time; and in the finale, characters from other fairy tales—from Puss in Boots to Little Red Riding Hood—appear at the wedding. The production proceeded with a harmony rarely seen in the theater world. Petipa provided the composer with a detailed plan, down to the number of measures and the character of each number, and Tchaikovsky, instead of taking offense at the dictation, embraced the rules of the game with enthusiasm. The result was a festive spectacle: three hours of music, the court of the French king on stage, fairies, hunts, and a wedding divertissement featuring fairy-tale characters. Vsevolozhsky deliberately crafted an homage to the era of Louis XIV, and the rays of this Versailles sun are evident in the score, in the stylized period dances, and in the ceremonial marches. The stage machinery operated at the limits of what was possible at the time. In the scene depicting the prince’s journey, the set glided along the ramp as a moving panorama, and it seemed to the audience that the boat was truly gliding down the river. The fairies in the prologue bore names that sounded as if they came from a jewelry catalog, and their costumes, based on Vsevolozhsky’s sketches, were sewn from truly expensive fabrics. The premiere took place at the Mariinsky Theatre in January 1890 and stunned the public with its grandeur; the production cost a sum that newspapers wrote about with bated breath. Over time, *Sleeping Beauty* came to be called the encyclopedia of classical dance; to this day, any company’s training is judged by it. Ballet dancers are taught the Lilac Fairy variation or Aurora’s adagio with four cavaliers just as rigorously as pianists are taught Chopin’s études.

For the composer himself, The Sleeping Beauty meant a great deal. His first ballet experience was chalked up as a defeat, and now it became clear that the genre had finally been conquered. Vsevolozhsky, pleased with the result, immediately commissioned the next production.

The Nutcracker and the Long Road to Fame

The new commission was a two-part production: a one-act opera and a ballet, all in one evening. For the ballet, they chose Hoffmann’s fairy tale about The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, as retold in French by Dumas—the story of a girl named Marie, whom Russian adaptations more often call Masha, her strange Christmas gift, and her journey to the land of sweets. At first, Tchaikovsky found the plot irritating; he complained in letters that the confectionery kingdom failed to inspire him, and the work was going slowly, interrupted by a major tour. Petipa was supposed to do the choreography, but the master fell seriously ill, and the production was completed by his assistant Lev Ivanov—the very same man who would later be entrusted with the swan scenes.

The premiere in December 1892 at the Mariinsky Theater was met with mixed reviews. The opera *Iolanta*, which was performed that same evening, received more praise. The ballet was criticized for its libretto, for the children on stage, and for the fact that the main dance numbers did not begin until the second act. The music, however, stood out immediately; the suite from *The Nutcracker* was performed in concerts even before the theatrical premiere and quickly became a favorite with the public. Ivanov also created scenes that companies have carefully passed down from one production to the next to this very day. The Snowflake Waltz at the end of the first act, where the white corps de ballet whirls amid a blizzard accompanied by a children’s choir offstage, is considered a foreshadowing of his future swan scenes. And Drosselmeyer, the godfather with his mechanical toys, gave the theater one of its most enigmatic characters; every director must decide anew whether he is a benevolent wizard or an unsettling visitor from a child’s dream. Then something rare happened: the production survived its own initial failure. A century later, *The Nutcracker* has become the world’s premier family ballet and an essential part of December, from Moscow to Tokyo. For many theaters, the December box office revenue from this production sustains the repertoire for the rest of the year; no other ballet has transformed its fortunes so decisively. In the United States, a distinct tradition has even taken root; for millions of American families, attending *The Nutcracker* means roughly the same thing as a New Year’s tree does for Russians.

There is also a detail in this story that is fun to tell children. For The Nutcracker, the composer brought a celesta from Paris, a keyboard instrument with a crystal-like bell sound. A year earlier, it had sounded in his symphonic ballad The Voyevoda, but in ballet theater it was heard for the first time precisely in the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, and this timbre puzzled the audience of 1892.

The Composer's Last Fall

The early 1890s seemed like a well-deserved triumph. Tchaikovsky conducted throughout Europe, stood at the podium for the opening concert of Carnegie Hall in New York, and was hailed at home as the nation’s foremost composer. In the summer of 1893, he was invited to England to receive an honorary doctorate. The degree was conferred at Cambridge on several musicians at once; Saint-Saëns was honored alongside him that day, and Russian newspapers reported on the ceremony in a tone usually reserved for state news.

That same summer, the Sixth Symphony was completed. The composer considered it the best of all his works, writing directly about this to his relatives, and he took the conductor's podium himself at the St. Petersburg premiere on October 16. The public received the symphony politely and with bewilderment, as it ended too unusually, with a slow fading out instead of a triumphant finale. The title «Pathétique» was suggested the next morning by his brother Modest. Nine days later, the composer was gone. According to the official version, the cause was cholera, the same disease that took his mother, and the infection was linked to a glass of unboiled water. Around this death, people have argued ever since; the versions have multiplied for decades, and no one has put an end to the dispute. All of St. Petersburg buried Tchaikovsky. The funeral service at Kazan Cathedral gathered so many attendees that entry tickets had to be issued for the memorial service, thousands of people walked behind the coffin, and the emperor covered the expenses.

Then began what is known as the legacy. Petipa and Ivanov brought *Swan Lake* back to the stage, and at the turn of the century, three ballets set out to tour the world. They were brought to the West by Diaghilev’s company and by dancers who had scattered across the globe after the revolution. George Balanchine, a graduate of the St. Petersburg school, planted the seeds in American soil. His 1954 production of *The Nutcracker* in New York spawned thousands of imitations across the country, from university troupes to school auditoriums. Among Russian composers, Tchaikovsky’s name appears on playbills more often than any other. The phrase «Swan Lake» fills theaters on every continent, and there are so many December performances of *The Nutcracker* worldwide that no other production in any genre can rival it. Its impact within the profession is no less significant. Stravinsky, for all his reputation as a destroyer of the old ballet, held this music dear, and for Diaghilev’s 1921 London production of *The Sleeping Beauty*, he orchestrated several numbers that were not included in the published score. Another thread leads to Moscow. The Bolshoi’s reputation as a ballet company was built on the productions of Yuri Grigorovich, including his own versions of *Swan Lake* and *The Nutcracker*, which have been performed on that stage for decades. And then the music left the theater altogether—moving into films, cartoons, and figure skating routines—and people most often recognize a melody from *The Nutcracker* even if they’ve never been to a ballet.

For families living between two languages, this serves as a convenient cultural bridge. Ask your child after the performance how Odette differs from Odile, and you’ll get a ready-made explanation about goodness, pretense, and why, traditionally, both roles are danced by a single ballerina. A child raised in America will most likely hear this music for the first time at a local theater, in English, and the conversation about how «nutcracker» in Russian means “to crack nuts,” and that *Swan Lake* begins with the word “swan,” comes up naturally.

Theater starts with a conversation

The great thing about ballet is that you can talk about it before you can read about it. Parents get the role of first tour guide here, and this role is easier than it seems. A preschooler has enough with the plot about an enchanted bird and a wooden soldier, while a teenager is already interested in why the white act is considered the pinnacle of choreography and how the orchestra tells a story without words. Along the way, words that are not used in everyday speech naturally pop up: score, corps de ballet, divertissement, premiere. At our school, such topics are used constantly; in class, children retell performances, compare characters, argue about endings, and the Russian language grows along with their cultural baggage. At Palme School, we accept children from four to seventeen years old, and the program is tailored to the child, from their very first words to serious conversations about art. You can try it out at two free lessons. The first is with a methodologist who will talk with the family, assess the level, and suggest a group suited to their ability; the second is in a mini-group with a teacher, during a real class. After it, the child will decide for themselves whether they want to continue.

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Tchaikovsky came to ballet as an outsider, from the world of symphonic music, and the genre changed after his arrival. His first attempt was unsuccessful. The 1877 Moscow production of *Swan Lake* was not well received by the public; the ballet found its true form eighteen years later under Petipa and Ivanov, and has remained the world’s premier production ever since. The 1890 production of *Sleeping Beauty* elevated ballet to the level of courtly luxury and became the benchmark for any company. «The Nutcracker» (1892), which received a lukewarm reception, grew to become the world’s premier family ballet. The composer himself died in 1893, at the height of his fame, nine days after conducting his Sixth Symphony, and his death remains a subject of debate to this day. His ballets are performed wherever there is a theater, and very often they mark a child’s first encounter with classical music, regardless of the language in which the program is printed.