New Wine in Old Bottles: The Swan Lake Problem

All major forms of the performing arts have their canon of "classics," the established central works of the repertoire which are continually being reimagined by artists in many countries.

 

Some works become classics because of their immense and enduring popularity, others because of the supreme challenges they pose to interpreters, and many fit into both categories. By and large, these classics also serve as mighty get-pennies for the professional artists who perform them. Classical music has its Beethoven 5 and 9, Schubert Unfinished, or Dvorak 9 for the orchestra, and such beauties as Schubert's Trout Quintet or the Brahms G Minor Piano Quartet in the chamber repertoire. Pianists must keep revisiting the named Beethoven sonatas and almost anything by Chopin. Choral singers are all too familiar with the essential annual Christmastime performances of Messiah.

  

In the world of opera there are Carmen, Tosca, Traviata, really just about anything by Verdi or Puccini, and the huge music dramas of Wagner.

Where would the world's great theatres be without the taut tragedies of Shakespeare (Hamlet and King Lear in particular), such classic comedies as The School For Scandal or The Importance of Being Earnest, or the plays of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller?

In the world of ballet you have to count Giselle, Romeo and Juliet, and the three great ballets of Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and the eternal Christmas go-to, Nutcracker.

 

Among all these central classics, Swan Lake suffers from a unique and inescapable difficulty that is shared by no other piece I've mentioned in this list. Swan Lake carries with it a bigger load of traditional baggage than any other classic ballet, in the form of the world-renowned choreography by Marius Petipa and his assistant Lev Ivanov, originally staged for the Imperial Ballet in the revival production at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1895 (the original production at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow had flopped in 1877). 

 

This choreography must not on any account be changed or replaced. Ignore this stricture at your peril! The hordes of classical ballet fans are ready to descend on you and rend you limb from limb, scattering swan feathers everywhere, if you dare to discard Ivanov's masterly white scene in Act II, especially the famous Dance of the Little Swans, or Petipa's showstopper Black Swan Pas de Deux with its infamous 32 fouettés for the prima ballerina in Act III. 

 

A side note: oddly enough, the role of Odile was never danced as a black swan until a 1941 production in New York by the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, but the concept quickly spread from there throughout the ballet world.

 

As a point of comparison, imagine what Hamlet would be like if every actor assuming the role was required by tradition and convention to give an exact imitation of Sir Laurence Olivier in presenting the famous "To be or not to be..." soliloquy.

 

The only way a choreographer can avoid this pitfall is to follow the lead of Matthew Bourne in his radical revisioning of the work first staged in 1995. By moving wholesale into a modern dance vocabulary with only the slightest references to the poise and grace of classical ballet, Bourne shifted the entire debate away from sticking to Ivanov and Petipa and onto much broader ground -- to say nothing of his wholesale rewriting of the story.

 

Then there's the music for the Petipa/Ivanov version, which is itself rather a mixed bag. It's believed that Tchaikovsky had planned to revise the scoring of the original Swan Lake, but never got to work on that project before his death in 1893. Riccardo Drigo, ballet composer and conductor of the Imperial Theatre, stated many years later that he had received Tchaikovsky's authorization to orchestrate several of the master's piano pieces and incorporate them into a revised score of Swan Lake for 1895. He did just that as well as composing a couple of numbers himself but, for obvious reasons, his statement remains stubbornly unprovable.

 

Drigo's score as a whole, though, reveals the traditional disregard for the music as music which was so deeply rooted in the ballet world of the 1800s. The carefully-planned key sequences of the original score were both truncated and mutilated by the usual shuffling of individual numbers to different locations, and by Drigo's insertions -- which, for me, offer no benefit.  Drigo's radical surgery was done in accordance with the instructions of Petipa, and proceeded with the approval of Tchaikovsky's younger brother, Modest (for whatever that's worth). I've always felt that the piano pieces in question were not out of Tchaikovsky's top drawer anyway, and the numbers actually composed by Drigo himself are even less rewarding. So the musician in me finds live performances of Swan Lake a frustrating experience and would rather sit down to listen to a complete recording of the original score.

This problem with the music is intimately tied into the previously-stated issue with the choreography, since some of the most drastic changes and additions from Drigo's pen are found precisely in the Act II white scene and in the Act III Black Swan Pas de Deux. Thus, it's become virtually inescapable that any new production of Swan Lake in classical style will use the Drigo score of 1895 rather than the original of 1877. This original version can normally be found only in audio recordings, where any recording of the 1895 score is a rarity -- the reverse of the situation with live ballet performances.

 

Both musically and choreographically, any new classical-ballet version of Swan Lake is likely to become a case of trying to pour new wine into old bottles.

This brings me up to the new version created by Karen Kain for the National Ballet of Canada, which premieres tomorrow night (June 10) at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto.

 

Kain had stated in advance that she intended to stage a new version largely based on the choreography of Erik Bruhn, whose 1967 version for the National Ballet of Canada was last danced in the 1990s. I was particularly relieved to see, from advance publicity, that Kain was not pursuing the one serious misfire in Bruhn's staging: the replacement of the evil Rothbart by an enigmatic Black Queen, a character role representing the evil force in the story, but whose main purpose and activity seemed to be physically blocking Prince Siegfried from getting near Odette. With little in the way of choreography, purpose or intention to build upon, the character artists who performed this role, from Celia Franca to Victoria Bertram and beyond, struggled with making sense of her. This production will restore the traditional demonic figure of Rothbart. Another question is whether this new staging will use Bruhn's own modifications to the running order of the Drigo score.

A final feature which has made me curious is that this staging will combine portions of Bruhn's 1967 choreography with additional new choreography by Christopher Stowell and Robert Binet. Sorting out who has done what, when, would be challenging unless the viewer remains intimately familiar with Bruhn's version. Not many people outside of the company and its alumni would, I think, be able to make that claim. Certainly, I cannot.

 

The good news? Despite these restrictive limitations forced on artists by audience familiarity and the popularity of certain sequences, there is still ample room in Swan Lake for the individual and distinctive stamp of the creators to be accommodated. I will look forward with anticipation to the particular vision of Karen Kain and her collaborators which awaits when I see the show on Saturday afternoon.