Swan Lake

In search of old tales and legends

The motif of the swan, which serves as a basis for the storyline of Swan Lake, appears in a number of myths, legends and tales all over the world. The white feathered, noble-looking bird with a long, gracefully curved neck is a symbol with numerous meanings people of earlier times would have frequently encountered, just as audiences exploring the literary and artistic works of modern times do. With its unique appearance, this bird came to be used as the symbol of feminine grace and allure when the goddesses Aphrodite (Venus) and Artemis (Diana) were depicted in the company of swans. The swan is also known as the sacred bird of Apollo. When the god was born on the island of Delos, swans surrounded the island to hide it from Hera, and it was also a swan that pulled the carriage of the sun-god Apollo to the island of eternal spring. According to the first-century Greek historian, Pausanias, swans have mastered the arts of the muses, and even Homer refers to the voice of the wild swan in his 21^st Hymn. Aeschylus praises the beauty of the swan, and also mentions its peculiar behaviour: feeling its approaching death, the bird expresses its sorrow with marvellous singing. This is how the phrase swan song was born. Greek mythology has also taught us that Zeus approached Leda in the form of a swan, and their love spawned not only later mythological works, but a great number of literary and artistic works, ranging from Michelangelo to Mihály Munkácsy, and from Rilke to Baudelaire.

Germanic peoples believed that virgins can turn into soothsaying swans. This belief seems to be preserved in tales where swan girls from some supernatural realm remove their feathery garments and assume human shape. The same element is found in tales of the Arabian Nights and in the folk tales of several other cultures. All of these motifs – shapeshifting, birds who are really human girls – take us closer to the storyline of our ballet, in which the symbol of metamorphosis plays an important role. Celtic and Germanic folklore also abounds in shapeshifting characters. A particularly beautiful Celtic saga tells us about how the young fairy prince Aengus seeks happiness and yearns for a fairy-girl who has turned into a bird. The story of the 150 white birds floating on the Lake of the Dragon’s Mouth on All Saint’s Day (1 November) and the young man seeking to become one of them has a happy ending: the prince, finally able to marry his love, turns into a swan. One also recalls the famous Wagner opera, Lohengrin, in which the title role belongs to the Knight of the Swan. The sight of the knight clad in gold and white, leaning against his shield in his golden boat drawn by swans suggests immortality, but it is rarely noted that the original tale – adapted by Wagner for his opera – features a knight who has himself turned into a swan.

In Hindu mythology, the swan is the symbol of those sages who have succeeded in living their lives without clinging to earthly goods. In Sanskrit language, the word hamsa or hansa means swan – several deities, including Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of music and arts, were believed to use swans as a means of transport. Swans are present in Vedic literature, where a man with great spiritual force is called a Supreme Swan, or Paramahamsa. According to Vedic teachings, swans are the symbol of purity and transcendence. An Indic legend tells us that a swan is capable of separating milk from a mixture of milk and water. The swan symbolises the self-fulfilled soul which is able to discern reality from illusion. At the same time, it is also the symbol of the independent soul completely liberated from all earthly bonds and allowed to ascend to the gods and be absorbed among them.

Irish mythos is not devoid of the figure of the swan, either. According to the legends, Lir (Llyr, Lear), the sea god, turned his stepchildren into swans for a period of 900 years. In another legend, the king of the sídhe (supernatural creatures who live underground) and Etain, the most beautiful girl in Ireland, changed into swans to flee the king’s wrath and the soldiers of the king. As we can see, shapeshifting, i.e. turning into a swan, is a common motif in these stories. In one German legend, a hunter is about to kill a swan, but it unexpectedly turns into a beautiful girl. She promises to be the hunter’s wife if he can keep their meeting a secret for a year. The hunter, however, is unable to keep his vow, and thus loses the swan girl. This story might sound somewhat familiar... Slavs have a similar story about a wanderer or tramp called Mikhail Ivanovich. He also wants to shoot a swan, but it warns him not to do so, lest he suffer misfortune for the rest of his life. Mikhail Ivanovich lowers his weapon, and the swan turns into a beautiful girl. The story has various possible endings: according to Slavic Christians, the young man takes the swan girl to Kiev to be baptised, then marries her. We do not know if they are allowed to live happily ever after in other versions of the story.

Swan knights, swan princesses, and magic shapeshifting are thus frequent occurrences in tales and legends. From the Grimm brothers, through Andersen, to the Hungarian Elek Benedek, many tales involve various forms of swans. What is really beautiful and exciting about these stories is that they contain a variety of motifs, elements, as well as mythical, historical and fantastic layers, which can be and often have been used as a source for the librettos of theatre plays. But of all these many stories, which one served as the basis for the ballet Swan Lake, and who wrote the libretto to the original version?

The birth of the ballet music

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) began the composition of Swan Lake in August 1875, while simultaneously also working on other pieces. He liked ballet, and he wrote to his brother as early as 1870 that he was contemplating an idea for a ballet of a story in four acts. According to his letters, this would have been Cinderella. Although this plan was not implemented, Tchaikovsky was commissioned in 1875 specifically to compose ballet music. The request came from Vladimir Petrovich Begichev, director of the Imperial Ballet in Moscow, who was to be one of the librettists of the ballet. Thus, Swan Lake was the composer’s first ballet music. Although, in terms of form, Tchaikovsky followed contemporary principles of ballet music, his work went beyond the customary formula. He composed lyrical music which was also dramatic, featuring the conflict between good and evil, as well as the application of a returning musical motif to characterise the protagonist.

In the field of composing ballet music – which was not accorded terribly high esteem in official musical “circles” of the day – Tchaikovsky admired such composers as Léo Delibes and Adolphe Adam, and later Ricardo Drigo. He was certainly fascinated by Delibes. In a letter he sent to one of his young disciples Sergei Taneyev, he wrote the following: “I listened to the Delibes ballet Sylvia. What charm, what elegance, what wealth of melody, rhythm, and harmony. I was ashamed, for if I had known of this music then, I would not have written Swan Lake…” In Adam’s Giselle, he was impressed by the use of the leitmotif. He himself applied this tool in the swan motif, which is first heard at the end of the first act, and then recurs on several occasions in the ballet. He had finished composition by April 1876. Interestingly, the composer used some excerpts of his early opera The Voyevoda, which he finished in 1869 and then destroyed due to its lack of success. This was the source for the music of the pas de deux in the second act and the introduction to the fourth act. Hardly had Tchaikovsky submitted the score than rehearsals began in Moscow with Julius Reisinger. We do not know exactly what kind of collaboration developed between the choreographer and the composer, but the reviews suggest that they did not really understand each other’s intentions.

The world premieres

The conception of the ballet Swan Lake can be linked to two dates in the history of dance. The first premiere was held in Moscow in 1877; the choreographer of the production was Czech-born Julius (Wentzel) Reisinger (1828–1892), who used the music material that Tchaikovsky had finished slightly earlier. According to some reports, Reisinger’s choreography was a failure at the Bolshoi Theatre, and contemporary reviews contained more criticism than praise for the performance. But the fact that it remained on stage in Moscow for seven years, with more than 30 performances, is still cause for thought. In any case, the surviving libretto, the first version of which bears no unambiguous claim to authorship, reveals that the plot was very similar to the story that would be used later. The characters of the prince, the enchanted swan princess and the tutor, as well as the motifs of betrayal, deceit and the unhappy ending were already present in the first version.

According to some encyclopaedias, the literary basis of the story could have been the popular German author Johann Karl August Musaus’s (1735–1787) tale The Stolen Veil (Der geraubte Schleier). This hypothesis is supported by the German names of the characters (Siegfried, von Rothbart, and Benno von Sommerstern). Another possible source is the folklorist and writer Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev (1826–1871), who collected nearly 600 Russian folk tales. The collection contains a tale that tells the story of the enchanted swan girls. It is probable that it was the composer Tchaikovsky himself who created the story based on these sources. At the very least, he greatly contributed to the development of the plot. However, with his German cultural background, Reisinger could also be considered to be the librettist, as he would have gained some practice when compiling librettos for other pieces earlier. Another version of the libretto has the names of the director of the Imperial Theatre in Moscow Vladimir Petrovich Begichev and the dancer Vasily Geltzer on the cover page. These latter two followed the traditions of 19^th-century ballet librettos.

This “original” version of the ballet was criticised by contemporaries mainly because the music and the dancing were unable to develop a real synergy, and they blamed the composer rather than the choreographer for this. “Too noisy, too Wagnerian, and too symphonic!” critics declared. No one could know that later on it would be the music that would become one of the “guarantees” for the poetic beauty of Swan Lake.

The version that brought success and even immortality to the story of the enchanted swan maidens was staged at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg on 27 January 1895. The choreography was created jointly by French-born Russian dancer, ballet master and choreographer Marius Petipa (1818–1910), the founder of Russian classical ballet and Moscow-born dancer and choreographer Lev Ivanov (1834–1901). Tchaikovsky, however, would not live to see this, as he had died in 1893. The immediate precursor to the 1895 premiere was a concert dedicated to the memory of Tchaikovsky in 1894. This was the time when the first white scene of Swan Lake (choreography by Lev Ivanov) was performed, and its positive reception inspired the creation of a new version of the entire ballet whose first and third acts were choreographed by Petipa, and the second and fourth acts by Ivanov. In the 1895 version, the choreographers adjusted Tchaikovsky’s music to their own concepts. Ricardo Drigo (1846–1930), who was to conduct the premiere later, helped them in this. Drigo, recognised as an experienced ballet music composer, not only arranged Tchaikovsky’s music, but also supplemented the original score with three piano pieces by Tchaikovsky (L’Espiegle, Valse Bluette and Un poco di Chopin). This version with elements both old and new, and with a libretto written by Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest (1850–1916), did not entail significant modifications to the content. It is relevant, however, that the tragic ending was changed to a happy one, and the four acts were condensed to three.

In the white scenes of the production, Ivanov was able to arrange the swan maidens into beautiful and diverse spatial arrangements (circles, semicircles, diagonals of poetic lyricism and virtuosity; at the same time, Petipa satisfied his ambitions as a choreographer by creating character dances from various nations. These too belonged to the ballet tradition of the 19th century, and audiences were especially fond of these interludes. This is why Hungarian, Spanish, Russian, Neapolitan and Polish dances were included in the third act in characterised, stylised forms.  The 1895 choreography of Swan Lake presented all the advances in dance technique in their totality, but, at the same time, it also became – especially the “white scenes” created by Ivanov – a unique monument to the Romantic style, in spite of the fact that this was already in decline.

Rudi van Dantzig’s Swan Lake

With Swan Lake, Dutch dancer and choreographer Rudi van Dantzig (1933–2012) did not want the stage to be a museum piece, but rather a version that could speak to 20th century audiences in the language of classical ballet. In order to achieve this, he gave “real personalities” to the characters of the ballet: the fairy-tale heroes were replaced by characters filled with emotions and depicted with a psychological dimension. He strove to give the story a fundamental basis that would be valid in the 20^th century as well. He attributed psychological motives to the main character, Prince Siegfried, who thus became the protagonist of the ballet. It was no longer the story of a girl changed into a swan, but now the focus was much more on the fate of a naïve, day-dreaming young man who cannot find ideals to live by in his own environment.

This Siegfried cannot find his place in his world: he does not want to be a ruler, does not want to stand awkwardly at ceremonies, but would rather chase the figures of his dreams with his best friend, Alexander. But the expectations that his strict tutor Von Rasposen repeatedly remind him of weigh on him heavily. The tutor is able to become a much more negative figure in this version than in the original because the choreographer presents the other characters from the Prince’s perspective. The strange figure of Benno von Sommerstern was already present in the first version of the ballet in 1877. He appeared on the stage as a friend of the Prince and his only ally in the court, but he did not have much significance in the ballet. Later on, the character became unnecessary, as younger princes could cope with both the story and lifting their partners. In van Dantzig’s adaptation, Benno returns as Alexander, Siegfried’s close friend. Alexander is always present at events and leaves his friend “alone” only with Odette or Odile. He arranges a birthday party for him, consoles him in his despair, persuades him to wander in the forest and it is he who finds Siegfried’s dead body. As a kind of mysterious “third man”, he is incessantly present in the life of the troubled Siegfried.

The visual aspect of the ballet was a splendid one thanks to co-choreographer and set and costume designer Toer van Schayk, who brought the pomp and beauty of 17^th-century Dutch-Flemish style and taste to life on the stage, with colours and inspiration from Rembrandt and Vermeer adding a bit of national flavour to the choreography. However, Van Dantzig, out of respect for the formal and musical traditions of the original ballet by Petipa and Ivanov, rejected neither the use of Classical dance techniques nor the recollection of famous excerpts from the choreography. It is perhaps the white scene in the second act that most carefully preserves the traditional elements of the choreography, but van Dantzig changed the choreography more drastically elsewhere. Such a change is the “revision” of the character dances in the third act, which Toer van Schayk (collaborating with Dantzig as a modern Ivanov) reinvented according to his own vision. As a whole, this Dutch version of the ballet uses strong visuals and richly staged scenes hovering on the border between fairy tale and actual history to ask the audience the same question posed in traditional versions: is it possible to preserve some sense of ideals in the world, or do we have to give up on those dreams that confront the values of distant worlds, tales and legends with the realities of our own times?

Rita Major