Tschaikovsky’s stirring melodies usher in the season with a one week run of Swan Lake. A stunning romantic tragedy, this seminal ballet is shaped by Tschaikovsky’s heartbreakingly beautiful score and the central role of Odette/Odile, an interpretation that is both technically and emotionally demanding.
In 1996 the Royal Danish Ballet presented Peter Martins’ new full-length version of Swan Lake, the last of the enduring 19th-century Russian ballets. Although it was also the last of the famed Tschaikovsky-Petipa classics, Swan Lake was actually the composer’s first ballet score. It was commissioned in 1875 by the Moscow Imperial Theater, now the Bolshoi Theatre.
Tschaikovsky, who thought that ballet was “the most innocent, the most moral of the arts,” suggested the libretto. Years earlier, as 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.
