|
|
Swan Lake, the last of the great 19th-century Russian ballets, is a work of emotional intensity, inventive choreography and glorious music, a lyrical and moving musical/psychological dance drama. Although Swan Lake was also the last of the famed Tschaikovsky-Petipa-Ivanov ballets, it was actually the composer's first ballet score.
In 1875, Tschaikosvky had received a commission from the Moscow Imperial Theatre (now called the Bolshoi Ballet). He was paid 800 rubles for a new four-act ballet, a sum that was nearly half of what he earned during a whole year teaching at the Conservatory in St. Petersburg. Tschaikovsky, who thought that ballet was "the most innocent, the most moral of the arts," suggested the libretto for Swan Lake.
Years earlier, for a family entertainment, he had composed a short ballet based on a German fairy tale about a wicked sorcerer who turns young girls into birds. He expanded this story into Swan Lake, a moving ballet of romance and tragedy. Enchanted by sorcerer Von Rotbart, Odette, the Swan Queen, assumes her human form only between the hours of midnight and dawn. It will take the pledge of eternal love by a man who has forsaken all other women to break this spell. Prince Siegfried falls in love with Odette, but is tricked into proposing marriage to Von Rotbart's daughter, Odile. Although his betrayal seals the Swan Queen's fate, she forgives him. The lovers triumph over the evil magician by throwing themselves into the lake — their self-sacrificing love frees the Swan Maidens from the curse and destroys Von Rotbart's power forever.
Later versions of the ballet have had alternative endings: some are happy, with the lovers reunited on this earth; others leave a prince grieving for his lost Swan Queen. The first performance of Swan Lake took place in Moscow in 1877, and it was a dismal failure. The staging was done by an uninspired choreographer whose work was dull and routine. The conductor didn't like the music, and the ballerina who was to play Odette had declared that the score was too difficult to dance to, so she felt free to insert her favorite music and choreography from other ballets.
Swan Lake was soon dropped from the repertory, and Tschaikovsky, who blamed his music for the failure, would not write for the ballet for another 12 years. When he resumed, it was to compose the scores for The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and The Nutcracker.
Tschaikovsky died in 1893. He was by then a respected composer whose achievements were hailed around the world. He had also done more than any other composer to elevate the quality of ballet music in the 19th century, making it the equal partner of the choreography. For a special memorial service honoring him, the director of the Imperial Theatre and Marius Petipa (1822-1910), who knew just how wonderful the Swan Lake score really was, wanted to revive the ballet in a new production. There was, however, only enough time to prepare one act.
Petipa fell ill, and his assistant, Lev Ivanov (1834-1901) was given the task of choreographing "The Flight of Swans," the lakeside scene in which Prince Siegfried first encounters Odette. Czar Nicholas II was so impressed that he ordered the entire four-act ballet to be produced, specifying that Ivanov's choreography was to be kept for Act II and an added Act IV. Petipa would stage Acts I and III, set at the prince's court. The new Swan Lake premiered on January 27, 1895. It was evident that the ballet had been choreographed by two people with different ideas about dance, but this did nothing to detract from the ballet's beauty and magic.
Ivanov, who believed that ballet should be the "blossoming of music," used his interpretation of Tschaikovsky's score to extend the dramatic potential of the academic style. He created inspired lyrical dances filled with emotion for the Swan Queen and the corps of Swan Maidens. He gave Odette fluttering winglike arm and hand movements, tremulous foot beats, and preening gestures — she was truly a woman trapped in the body of a bird. He used the ballerina's arching arabesques to convey the yearning love of the Swan Queen for the prince. Ivanov's two lakeside scenes have a dramatic intensity and magical grace that links them to the ballets blancs of the Romantic era (La Sylphide and Giselle, for example), but his corps, rather than being a static backdrop, is an active and animated ensemble that interacts with the soloists.
Petipa's acts, set in the real world of a royal court, contrast sharply with the emotional poetic passages for the swans. Here the choreography follows the standard formula for Russian ballets of the late 19th century. The story is told through alternating scenes of mime and dancing, and the choreography includes technically brilliant solos, duets, trios, national dances (Spanish, Hungarian, Neapolitan and Polish) and divertissements.
The first Swan Queen was Pierina Legnani (1863-1923), an Italian prima ballerina assoluta (a title awarded in Russia only to the very best ballerinas). She had made her Russian debut two years earlier, amazing the audience with a technical feat they had never seen before: Legnani was the first ballerina to execute a series of 32 consecutive fouettés. She had amazing strength and could remain steadily in one place on one leg while performing these whipped turns. Petipa knew a crowd-pleaser when he saw one, so he inserted the 32 fouettés into the third act "Black Swan" pas de deux in which the prince, thinking that Odile is Odette, proclaims his love for the evil imposter.
The dual role of Odette-Odile is considered one of the most challenging in the ballerina's repertory, not only because of its technical difficulty but because the dancer must, in alternate acts, display both purity and evil with equal skill. Among the great ballerinas who have interpreted the role of the Swan Queen are Anna Pavlova, Maya Plisetskaya, Margot Fonteyn, Maria Tallchief, Natalia Makarova, Cynthia Gregory, Darci Kistler, and Kyra Nichols.
An abbreviated Swan Lake was first performed in the United States in 1911 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. The first full-length American production was presented by the San Francisco Ballet in 1940. Today Swan Lake is danced by major companies around the world. Many productions of the ballet exist (in one-, two- and four-act versions), most influenced by the Ivanov-Petipa work.
George Balanchine's one-act Swan Lake (Act II) was created for New York City Ballet in 1951, the first traditional ballet to enter the Company's repertory. (In 1940, Balanchine had created a capsule version of Swan Lake, starring Vera Zorina and Lew Christensen, for the film I was an Adventuress. Balanchine can be seen as the orchestra leader conducting the ballet.)
Four-act versions of the ballet include Frederick Ashton's adaptation for England's Royal Ballet, Rudolf Nureyev's staging for the Vienna State Opera (1964), Erik Bruhn's production for the National Ballet of Canada (1967), and John Cranko's version for the Stuttgart Ballet (1963). In 1996, the Royal Danish Ballet commissioned a new full-length Swan Lake from alumnus Peter Martins.
While retaining the well known set pieces from Ivanov and Petipa, Peter Martins has imbued his ballet with the speed and clarity of the Balanchine style as well as his own choreographic hallmarks: complex step combinations and intricate partnering that extend the vocabulary of classical dance. He has also given the ballet an innovative ending which critics, in reviewing the Danish production, have called "intellectually provocative."
The scenery and decor for this new production of Swan Lake were commissioned from one of Denmark's leading painters, Per Kirkeby, and the costumes were designed by Kirkeby, based on original costumes for the Danish version by Kirkeby and Kirsten Lund Nielsen.
Peter Martins, Ballet Master in Chief Danish-born, has spent more than 30 years with New York City Ballet as a dancer, choreographer and Ballet Master. Mr. Martins' association with the Company began in 1967 when, as a Principal Dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet, he was invited to dance the title role in George Balanchine's Apollo during its appearance at the Edinburgh Festival. He performed as a guest artist with New York City Ballet for three years before joining as a Principal Dancer in 1970; he retired as a dancer in 1983.
In 1981, Mr. Martins assumed the position of Ballet Master, a title he shared with George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins and John Taras. From 1983 to 1989 Martins and Robbins served as Co-Ballet Masters in Chief. In 1990, following Robbins' decision to leave New York City Ballet to pursue other projects, Mr. Martins assumed sole directorship of the Company, which includes approximately 90 dancers and more than 100 works by Balanchine, Robbins, Martins and others in its active repertory.
Mr. Martins choreographed his first ballet, Calcium Light Night, set to several pieces by Charles Ives, in 1977. He has since created more than 60 ballets — primarily for New York City Ballet — ranging from pas de deux to large-scale pieces, set to music by composers as diverse as Tschaikovsky, Stravinsky and George Gershwin; he has also commissioned music from contemporary composers such as Michael Torke, Charles Wuorinen and Wynton Marsalis. His works include: Barber Violin Concerto, The Waltz Project, Fearful Symmetries, Jazz (Six Syncopated Movements), The Sleeping Beauty and Stabat Mater.
A number of Mr. Martins' works have been taped for broadcast by the PBS "Dance in America" series. One of his projects away from New York City Ballet was the choreography of the Dance portion of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Song and Dance, which opened on Broadway in 1985. He was made a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark in September 1983.
Per KirkebyPainter, geologist, writer, poet, sculptor, professor, performance artist, filmmaker, scenic designer — Per Kirkeby (born 1938 in Copenhagen, Denmark) might be called a "Renaissance man." He has published more than 60 books of poetry, essays and novels, and has exhibited his paintings and sculptures throughout the world. Although always interested in art, he enrolled at the University of Copenhagen to study geology as a way to make a living if he could not support himself through painting.
In 1958 and in 1962 he participated in expeditions to Greenland and has subsequently made extensive visits to Australia and Central America; these experiences have influenced his paintings and sculptures throughout his career. He completed his studies in geology in 1964 with a dissertation on Arctic quaternary geology. Kirkeby's first appearance as an artist came in 1961, in the literary magazine Grain of Wheat, with an essay on Greenland accompanied by a woodcut. In 1962, while still attending the University of Copenhagen, he began studies at the Experimental Art School in Copenhagen, an alternative school to the traditional Royal Academy of Art. This avant-garde school allowed Kirkeby the freedom to experiment in various media, including performance art ("Happenings") and to meet the most influential European artists of the time. Although his paintings had appeared in group exhibitions in 1963 and '64, in 1965 he had his first one-man exhibition and the first exhibition of his sculptures.
He explored the vocabulary of the most common of Danish building materials, brick, in his sculptures which reflect his travels to Central America and the central theme of walls, both figuratively and literally. These layers of structuring — walls, caves and elemental landscapes also occur in his paintings. In 1965 he also published his first book of poems, and published his first novel, 2.15, in 1967, consisting of a collage-like "collection of fragments" (Lasse B. Antonsen, Exhibition notes, 1994). Since 1982 he has been a member of the Danish Academy of Literature.
Mr. Kirkeby's paintings, sculptures and graphic works have been exhibited at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, the Biennale Venice, New York City's Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and Michael Werner Gallery, the City Art Museum, Helsinki, the National Gallery, Prague, the Dallas Art Museum, London's Tate Gallery and the Barbican Art Gallery, and the Musee d'Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, as well as in numerous other galleries and museums throughout the world. He has also designed stamps for the Danish post and wine labels for Chateau Mouton Rothschild.
Mr. Kirkeby considers himself a painter. "I am a painter because that is how I see the world." (Interview with Eddy Devolder in Cologne, 1990) He feels that an artist reacts to and interprets the world in which he lives and that the "only true reality is that which people create in paintings. The so-called 'true reality' cannot be relied on, is a contourless materiality. A materiality we use to create a reality we can live in, like paint in a tube for painting pictures. That is why paintings are so important, magical, all paintings, for they all give us something real to live in." (1982, Selected Essays from Bravura, Van AbbemuseumColor is uppermost in importance; it predominates over form. It is the color of emotion, "not colors such as we find in tubes or the names we give to them, red, blue, yellow, etc.... but colors that are connected to things that have happened, a sinking ship, or your wife leaving you or things like that.... I register a set of colors. After that I look for a form, a motif.... Then begins the long journey of painting." "when I paint I like to think of myself as a gardener. My canvas is the plot of land and my colors — that is, the matter of the paint itself — are the soil, the flower beds, with their different components and varying textures." (Eddy Devolder interview, 1990.
His paintings are never signed; he writes his name on the back in block letters. He feels that "signing is so pretentious. Nature signs nothing. You know, I dream that my paintings will end up by returning to something absolutely normal." (Eddy Devolder interview, 1990In 1996 the Royal Danish Ballet commissioned a new full-length Swan Lake from Peter Martins. Mr. Martins commissioned the scenery and decor for this new production from Mr. Kirkeby, his first stage design for a ballet. Mr. Kirkeby also collaborated on the costumes with Kirsten Lund Nielsen. On April 29, 1999 this collaborative Swan Lake premieres at New York City Ballet.
Per Kirkeby currently lives and works in Copenhagen, Laeso and Karlsruhe.
Peter Ilyitch Tschaikovsky (1840-1893) studied at the Conservatory in St. Petersburg where Balanchine later studied piano in addition to his studies in dance. Tschaikovsky is one of the most popular and influential of all romantic composers. His work is expressive, melodic, grand in scale, with rich orchestrations. His output was prodigious and included chamber works, symphonies, concerti for various instruments, operas and works for the piano. His creations for the ballet, composed in close partnership with Marius Petipa, include Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and The Sleeping Beauty.
|
