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A Sumptuous Swan by the Paris Opera Ballet
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20525 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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11 / 1992 |
2,016 Words |
| Author
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Bruce Merrill
Bruce Merrill, currently based in Paris, is a dance writer,
critic, and teacher. |
The Paris Opera Ballet has remounted its original version of Swan Lake, staged by Vladimir Bourmeister in 1960. Bourmeister, the first Russian choreographer to work in the West, had presented this version with his own company, the Stanislavsky Ballet of Moscow, in 1956 at Paris' Theatre Chatelet. This summer's program was to be the first full-length version for the Paris Opera. Swan Lake, perhaps the most famous of all classical ballets, originally debuted in 1877. Strangely enough, it was not a success. The critics found Julius Reisinger's choreography uninteresting, the conductor inexperienced, and Tchaikovsky's score not very danceable.
In 1895, one year after the composer's death, the ballet was remounted in the famous version by Marius Petipa and his assistant, Lee Ivanov. Petipa, who was ballet master of St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre from 1862 until 1903, created approximately fifty ballets during his career. After his success with The Sleeping Beauty and Nutcracker to scores by Tchaikovsky, Petipa convinced the director of the Imperial Theaters to let him mount his own version of Swan Lake, using Tchaikovsky's beautiful score. In his Swan Lake one finds, for the first time, music that has been associated with symphonic works, and there are tonal themes for the different characters, minor tones for the Prince and Odette and major tones for Rothbart and Odile.
Petipa himself choreographed Acts I and III and supervised the overall choreography. He delegated the Czardas and Mazurka of Act III, and the total of Acts II and IV, to Ivanov. It is the two acts done by Ivanov that are now considered among the most beautiful lyrical passages in all ballet. The use of the arms and back, which never stop, suggest not only the
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