Swan Lake, op. 20

In the summer of 1871, Tchaikovsky went to stay with his sister Alexandra Davydova on her estate at Kamenka, in the Ukraine. For the children, to whom he was devoted, he wrote a little domestic ballet which he called Swan Lake. Everybody was involved, including his brother Modest as the Prince, and the entertainment was long remembered with pleasure by the family. Tchaikovsky himself retained a fondness for the subject, and it seems that the idea of a larger-scale ballet on it was discussed at some of the meetings held by the circle of artists, composers and writers who frequented the flat of one of the Directors of the Moscow Imperial Theatres, Vladimir Begichev. He was not alone in his fondness for fairy tales, and most educated Russians were familiar with versions of them, especially in Musäus´s Volksmärchen der Deutschen. By the end of May 1875, Tchaikovsky had received the commission for a full-length ballet on Swan Lake. He accepted, he told Rimsky-Korsakov, "partly because I want the money, but also because I have long had the wish to try my hand at this kind of music." He set to work studying other ballet scores, little though there was in Russia itself to provide a stimulating example, and by the end of August he was able to tell his colleague and pupil Taneyev, "I have sketched out two acts of The Lake of Swans." Some numbers of Act 1 were in rehearsal by the following April (1876) and the complete score was ready by the 10th.

Matters now proceeded to go less smoothly. Lacking a proper musical tradition to give expressive sbustance to its ballet tradition, which had hitherto depended largely upon the purely decorative and virtuoso, the Russian theatre was not ready for so ambitious a score, and innovations were suspect. The first to rebel were the orchestral players. Bemused by the unprecedented difficulty of the score, they found little help from their conductor, Stepan Ryabov - Modest Tchaikovsky described him as "a semi-amateur". The dancers, required to act out a dance drama rather than merely show their paces in a set of pretty numbers of exhibitionist turns, were at a loss. The décor was feeble, as contemporary drawings show, and was prevented from achieving any kind of expressive unity by being parcelled out between three designers: probably the most talented of them was a man who had worked at the Bolshoi since 1861 chiefly as an electrician and machinist, also taking a hand as a décor artist. The first Odette was Pelagaija Karpakova, a dancer not really ballerina standard and in any case a weak mime, her replacement, Anna Sobeshchanskaya, was more responsive, but at 34 had begun to pass her prime. Siegfried was danced by Stanislav Gillert, Rotbart by Sergei Sokolov, the Princess by Olga Nikolayeva, Benno by Sergei Nikitin, and Wolfgang by Wilhelm Wanner. One of the original reviews reported that the choreographer, Julius Reisinger, merely showed " remarkable skill in arranging gymnastic exercises". It was not long before the theatrical butchers set to work, dismembering Tchaikovsky´s score and adding music by nonentities, cutting certain numbers as too difficult, regardless of their dramatic relevance. The history of Swan Lake as a succesful ballet really dates from the 1895 revival of the complete work with choreography by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, at the Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. Tchaikovsky did not live to see it, but already soon after the original premiere he was viewing his score with characteristic gloom. "Swan Lake is poor stuff compared to Sylvia", he wrote. "Nothing during the past few years has charmed me so greatly as this ballet of Delibes, and Carmen."

Posterity has not found much to agree with in this low estimate. Among the gifts which Tchaikovsky brought to the then rather primitive art of ballet music was a capacity for symphonic organization. Just as in the symphonies of his maturity there is a reconciliation of dance elements with the demands of symphonic form, so in his ballet music he was able to use his understanding of large-scale musical structures to lend greater strength and coherence to the organization of dance sequences. Some of the dances are, delightfully, pure divertissement: they lie outside the main course of the plot and provide no more than a point of repose and of entertainment for the characters as well as for the audience. Other dances are structural, in that they are set numbers which at the same time further the action: such is the famous Waltz at the birthday celebrations, at which the reluctant Prince must choose a bride. These are set in passages which carry the action and drama and which are more "symphonically" composed, with perhaps some thematic development and use of motivic reference.