Le Lac des Cygnes - Swan Lake - The Original Score

Le Lac des Cygnes Swan Lake Piotr Tchaikovsky Antal Dorati Minneapolis Symphony

It does not happen on many occasions that an original score of a well known musical opus remains obscure to the world. It has happened in the case of the original score for Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ballet. Today, Swan Lake has come to be recognised as the queen of all traditional ballets, no one realises the tumultuous time it had during its earlier years, forcing the composer to keep, revising it neurotically. It all began in 1875, when the director of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, V. Begitchev, commissioned Tchaikovsky to write a score for a ballet and the libretto was provided by the director himself in collaboration with Vasily Geltzer. The story is actually inspired by a German fairy tale and it got Tchaikovsky attracted to it. Tchaikovsky composed feverishly, giving an almost symphonic stature to the score for the ballet and when it was finished, the entire staff of the Bolshoi Theatre felt that it was too orchestral and difficult to perform. The first performance took place on 4th March 1877 and it turned out to be a dismal affair; even the audience not showing too much enthusiasm. The production did not include tasteful and imaginative choreography to match this kind of a symphonic score. The management of the Bolshoi Theatre then decided to tell Tchaikovsky that some sections of the score for the ballet were not danceable at all. They wanted to interpolate dances from other ballets in a similar fashion to how some productions in the earlier part of this decade have inserted Tchaikovsky’ First Winter Dreams Symphony into a ballet arrangement for Snegurochka or the Snow Maiden. So, Tchaikovsky’s original score for Swan Lake collected dust till 1883 and a performance was given at the Maryinsky Theatre at St. Petersburg with revisions and deletions edited by the composer. Another performance also resulted in a disaster. Tchaikovsky never had the fortune of watching his great opus performed as he intended any time after that. The ballet was first appreciated in 1901 when Alexander Gorsky produced it for Bolshoi Theater and took up the challenge admirable, albeit eight years after the composer had long left his earthly abode at a young age of fifty three. He died of cholera. This performance gave the ballet its immortality. What we see choreographed today is the version stamped by the artistry of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, whose partnership finally saved Swan Lake from extinction. Antal Dorati with Minneapolis Symphony and Mercury Recordings presented the first recorded score of this famous ballet. It deserved a world premiere merit at the time it came out in December 1954. The performance was recorded in the Northrop memorial Auditorium at the University of Minnesota with a single Telefunken microphone hanging fifteen feet above, slightly behind the head of Mr. Dorati. The orchestra was arranged in a normal concert performance set up to achieve a natural balance among the featured solo instruments and the orchestral ensembles. This recording can be considered as an important milestone in the disc literature of this ballet master work.