Wendy Whelan of New York City Ballet in Balanchine's Swan Lake. Photo by Paul Kolnik.
Swan Lake, with its plangent Tchaikovsky score and choreography by Jules Reisinger, premiered at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater in 1877. It was a patchy job, unsuccessful with the public, but it remained in the rep, Chujoy’s Dance Encyclopedia instructs us, “as long as the scenery lasted.”
The version of the ballet we hold sacred—if only in our imagination or from its reasonably faithful descendents—was created in 1895 for St. Petersburg’s Maryinsky Theatre, with Marius Petipa responsible for the outline of the whole and for choreographing the ebullient Acts 1 and 3, and Lev Ivanov for choreographing the poetic “white acts,” 2 and 4. The gifted and the incompetent have been making their own versions ever since. “Whatever you choreograph,” Balanchine is said to have remarked, “call it Swan Lake, and people will come."
Most of the whatevers—and there are dozens of them—that are really supposed to be Swan Lake, include many ultimately unfortunate vagaries. To cite just a few:
Amateur-Freudian interpretations with brooding Hamlet-like heroes designed to persuade you that Siegfried is gay, hence his inability to choose any of the ravishing foreign princesses that his imperious mama summons to his coming-of-age party so that he can choose a bride, settle down, and father an heir to the dynasty.
Added virtuoso allegro and adagio dancing for Siegfried so the role can mirror the technical range displayed by the ballerina or ballerinas playing Odette (local lovely, kidnapped by the evil magician von Rothbart, who collects such maidens and transforms them into swans, with only brief, nightly human-form reprieves) and Odile (his equally wicked daughter, who seduces Siegfried into believing she’s Odette and swearing she’s his true love, with the disastrous consequences that accompany such “mistakes”).
Elimination of the mime to all but a few essentials, so you’re lucky if you get even “You are beautiful,” “I swear that I love you,” “Dance,” “Marry,” and (my favorite, from Odette), “My mother’s tears formed this lake.” Replacing the mime with dancing ruins the balance of contrasting modes intrinsic to nineteenth-century story ballets (as does balleticizing the national dances of Act 3, another unfortunate ploy) and, in both cases, contradicts what Tchaikovsky’s score is telling us.
All sorts of endings, diverging from the logical double suicide of hero and heroine (though the jumping off a high, rocky cliff onto an unseen mattress is almost always muffed), with or without an apotheosis (the protagonists at peace together in a golden afterlife) to the upbeat resolution at one point politically required by the Soviets, where, presumably, after the curtain calls, the courageous loving couple will go off to Ikea to furnish their first home.
Odd displacements, like setting the ballet in a madhouse or having men dance the feathered swans’ roles.
Today, artistic directors of major companies, aware of the general public’s preference for multi-act story ballets—or simply ambitious—create their own Swan Lakes. Both American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet have their “new” versions, choreographed, respectively, by Kevin McKenzie and Peter Martins. Both are disasters.
All the wrongheaded versions I’ve seen over the years haven’t destroyed my love and admiration for Swan Lake. I have enjoyed many a production, from the third quarter of the 20th century, especially—the Kirov’s, and the Royal Ballet’s well-tempered version centering on Margot Fonteyn’s sublimely soulful performance, even though she insisted on attempting Odile’s 32 fouettés, which made her zigzag precariously toward the orchestra pit.
Back in 1951, however, George Balanchine, born and bred in Russia, trained at the Maryinsky’s school and eventually a member of its company, blended his heritage and his genius for enriching it as he renewed it, created a one-act Swan Lake for his New York City Ballet. Against expectation, given the existence of Martins’s version, it has just been revived for the company.
With its roots in a production Balanchine revised when he was freshening up Diaghilev’s classical repertory, it’s at once an homage to and a revitalizing of Ivanov. Musically, it draws upon Act 2 and a bit of Act 4, though upping the tempi. According to Nancy Reynolds’s Repertory in Review, when Balanchine eventually composed his one-act Lake for the City Ballet, he retained Ivanov’s adagio for Siegfried and Odette, Odette’s variation and coda, and the linked-arms unison quartet for the cygnets, though its show-biz nature detracted from the overall lyric effect. Two of his innovations were especially distinctive, a poignant “valse bluette,” and a blazing pas de trois led by the feisty Patricia Wilde that glorified her assertive energy. Most important, he completely redid the group sections to the point that the female ensemble became the real focal point of the production. Down the years, he revised his work extensively, discarding or transmuting some of Ivanov’s material and readjusting his own.
In the current version, the cygnets are, mercifully, gone, but so is the air-slashing pas de trois. The work for the ensemble is innovative in its intricately shifting patterns. But the present generation of dancers is surprisingly weak in its effect. The corps de ballet of the fifties, perhaps in its effort to reconcile traditional classical style with the neo-classical one Balanchine had developed, were striking, dramatic. And Balanchine’s coaching gave them an avian wildness; they became a flock of powerful birds in flight. The music seemed to pour out of these women as they danced not so much in visual unison—Balanchine always preferred the arms of a female group to look like a casually beautiful bunch of wildflowers—but in musical unison. Just now it seems as if the ensemble doesn’t even hear the music, except as a metronome-like time-keeper.
As Siegfried, Charles Askegaard looked less uncomfortable in his skin than he usually does and partnered skillfully enough. His dancing is passable, though far from outstanding. (Where was Philip Neal at casting time? Where were the Angle brothers?) Still, Askegaard’s main lack is in acting, in mere presence. If only he didn’t look—in Lake as in just about every ballet he dances—as if he didn’t know who or where he was.
In blatant contrast, Wendy Whelan was magnificent as Odette. Her many admirers over her long career know that she was born to dance the quirkier, more angular roles in the modern ballet repertory—because of anatomy and perhaps temperament. As time passed, she grew softer and registered more emotion (very delicately). But her Odette is a triumph because she was not made for it or it for her, and yet she looks as if she has minutely studied and absorbed the interpretations of her predecessors in a variety of distinctive productions and instinctively added some of her own touches. The result is everywhere beautifully executed, right in its intent and feeling, and in no way ballerina-ish, as if her experiences were something that could happen to any sensitive girl sufficiently romantic enough to wander by lakes at dusk. The last moments of the ballet, her farewell to Siegfried as von Rothbart draws her back into her horrible enchantment, was so exquisitely calibrated, subtle, and genuinely tender that, for the first time, she brought tears to my eyes.
The current decor, by Alain Vaes, is decidedly peculiar. The ballet has been subjected to climate change and geographic amnesia. It’s now set in a misty, icicle-framed nowhere, with the huntersoddly cut outfits matching the wimpy pale pastel water of a lake that wants to be traversed by small recreational rowboats, not by those huge old-fashioned plaster swans that are pulled cross-stage, presaging a mysterious danger. Vaes’s dressing all the swans other than Odette in black is an idea blamed on Balanchine, who apparently bought 400 yards of jet tarlatan for the purpose before his death. (I’m willing to take this on faith, but one must remember that Balanchine occasionally revealed an ironic sense of humor.)
This Swan Lake is surely a Go To, for the sake of the ballet’s history and, more immediately, for the sight of Wendy Whelan showing us that one mark of a ballerina is to work wonders in roles that are in no way her cup of tea.
