REVIEW: The Critical Rehabilitation of Tchaikovsky's 'Swan Lake'
Crafting a children’s ballet for his family in the summer of 1871, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was unaware that even 150 years after its composition, it would grow into and remain the most famous and recognizable ballet and one of the most celebrated classical compositions in the world.
What once baffled critics and was met with heavy criticism has become a timeless, praised piece treasured for over a century.
This is Swan Lake.
When it was first premiered in 1877 at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow critics dismissed it as “too complex, too noisy, and too symphonic." During this time period, ballet musical compositions were usually simple rhythms to help dancers keep time rather than to be able to breathe life into a story. Thus, Swan Lake was treated as too extravagant and overwhelming for the theatre despite its masterful composition.
Tchaikovsky spearheaded the transformation of the medium, infusing dance alongside a symphony filled with expression, emotion, and ultimately bringing life to a tragic fantasy tale. Unfortunately, he never got to see the success of his composition and the ballet, as it became massively popular two years after his death, with Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov restaging and completely changing the choreography to better match the composition.
The 'color' of music
To accurately judge a musical composition, critics often consider the piece’s cohesion and melodic development, orchestration and “color," as well as expressiveness and depth.
Tchaikovsky’s composition’s cohesion was famously due to the leitmotifs (recurring musical themes) that he assigned to specific characters and themes to weave the story together. For example, whenever the White Swan (Odette) appears, the key B minor is used, but when Rothbart appears, it changes to a lower key, F minor. This illustrates that a composition is not just a collection of notes, chords and scales, but a form of art and storytelling that must be mastered to truly breathe a story to life.
The orchestration, the art of assigning certain musical notes or themes to certain instruments, is like the “paint palette” of a composer, hence the name musical "color." Tchaikovsky utilized a large and diverse orchestra, isolating specific instruments for certain pieces and scenes to convey different emotions and moods in different parts.
Beyond technical conventions, music is meant to evoke a human response of feeling and emotion. Swan Lake captures a diverse range of immense emotion on the psychological spectrum, from the joy of major chords to the sorrow of minor chords, balancing court waltzes and the haunting despair of sorrow and doom. The composition does not simply act as a background for the choreography, but accompanies it and guides it through emotion and expression.
The weight of expectations
However, when viewed strictly as a stand-alone piece of musical composition, it does suffer from flaws in musical structure. While the leitmotifs utilized encapsulate the emanated atmosphere and impressions of different scenes and characters, the complexity of the symphony and how it was seen as “repetitive” is what made it so controversial to viewers and critics. This was also the reason why it was originally so challenging to follow for the original 1877 dancers.
The third act occasionally drags under the pressure of the expectations of the Imperial Theatres to have four acts, therefore the narrative focus of tension is occasionally broken to accommodate the strict demands of 19th-century theatre. The plot completely halts to include a repetitive block of national folk dances including a Hungarian Czardas and a Spanish Bolero. Modern orchestrations often resolve this by removing the meandering folk divertissements entirely to preserve the symphonic and structural flow.
Despite these minor structural limitations and padding from historical requirements, the score’s flaws are surpassed by the ultimately masterful composition and storytelling achieved in the ballet; taking decades to perfect into the most well-known ballet and one of the most famous compositions in the world today.
