Swan Lake at 100.

A Classic Ballet Revisited on Its Centenary

A historian brings twentieth-century insight to bear on the creation of a nineteeth-century classic.

Swan Lake premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow on March 4, 1877, and was a flop. Perhaps the failure was caused by Tchaikovsky's inexperience (it was the first ballet he had com- posed), and by the audience's not knowing what to expect. Maybe the choreography and costumes were not up to the Bolshoi's usual standards. Whatever the reason, the company directors soon removed it from the repertoire, and everyone more or less forgot about it. After Tchaikovsky died in October 1893, however, Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov reworked the ballet as a tribute to the composer who had been their collaborator and colleague on The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and The Nutcracker (1892). Their new and improved staging opened at the legendary Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg on January 27, 1895, and a masterpiece was born. As in the fairy tale, the ugly duckling had turned into a glorious swan, and we're celebrating the centennial of Swan Lake this year.

Was Petipa and Ivanov's success merely a demonstration of the precept that each generation must make the classics of the past new again if they are to remain classics? An application of some of the ideas in psychologist Howard Gardner's study of genius, Creating Minds, produces exciting new insights into Swan Lake, Tchaikovsky's career, and Russia's contribution to dance history.

Let's begin with talent, as it appears in the life of the individual artist. It's possible to interpret simple biographical facts in a way that goes beyond the usual concept of art as pure self-expression. Such factors as race, class, and gender have attracted much attention in recent academic studies of creativity; three others need to be considered: place of birth, birth order, and sexual orientation. Although nothing can ever completely explain the mystery of creativity, the combination of these six factors explains a lot about the forms that creativity takes in the life of a particular artist. Tchaikovsky is a case in point.

It is easy to forget that Tchaikovsky, like so many artists of the last 150 years, was a provincial. He was born in 1840, in Votkinsk, some six hundred miles east of Moscow. For many artists, growing up in the provinces motivates them to get to the big city to find the kindred spirits that their native environment lacks.

In nineteenth-century Russia race was not as important a factor as it is in twentieth-century America, but class was more important. It mattered a great deal that Tchaikovsky's father, an inspector of the mines, made enough money to give his children piano lessons. Later, he was able to send his son Pyotr Ilyich to an expensive school in St. Petersburg. This combination of living on the "margin" in the provinces and parental support appears again and again in the lives of creative people.

Gender, birth order, and sexual orientation also had great importance in Tchaikovsky's life and work. He was a second-born son, and second-born children are usually not as assertive as firstborns, who tend to model themselves on their parents. Birth order thus may have had something to do with Tchaikovsky's lifelong capacity to access his "inner child." We hear a lot these days about the inner child - often with regard to victimization, not creativity. It does appear that the ability to stay in touch with a childlike sense of joy and wonder is the wellspring of creativity. In Creating Minds, Gardner offers abundant evidence of this childlike quality in all the artists whom he discusses.

It is obvious that the composer of The Nutcracker possessed it. Moreover, Tchaikovsky was a second-born homosexual, perhaps the most important gay composer in music history, as well as the most important gay artist in Russian culture. We have reason to believe that Tchaikovsky's sensibility found expression in the libretto of Swan Lake, although this will probably always remain a matter of speculation. Vladimir Begichev and Vasily Geltzer usually get credit for the libretto, but they consulted the composer frequently. It may not be coincidental that Prince Siegfried shows no interest in the prospective brides who parade before him in Act II, or that the woman he falls for in Act III is a bewitching temptress.

The issue of domain, or the particular art form in which an artist works, is more complicated than it might seem. After a couple of decades of research on creativity, we can now say that different forms of endeavor show different patterns, which exhibit unexpected similarities and dissimilarities. For example, the careers of T. S. Eliot and Albert Einstein have quite a lot in common. This is because poets and physicists often start early, have an exceptional burst of creativity, and decline at a relatively early age.

In music and dance, however, the truly gibed people often started as prodigies and remained creative for much of their lives. Although Tchaikovsky did not grow up in a hothouse of music, as Mozart did, his musical genius manifested itself when he was still young. After he began piano lessons at the age of four, he was so deeply affected by the music that he was often unable to sleep. He composed his first known work at age fourteen.

Despite his ongoing musical studies, Tchaikovsky was not a mature composer when he graduated in 1865 from the newly opened Moscow Conservatory. In December 1867 he wrote some incidental music for a now-forgotten vaudeville, his first piece to receive a public performance in Moscow. Almost ten years elapsed between this minor work and Swan Lake, completed in April 1876. This fact supports Gardner's conclusion that it generally takes about ten years for an artist who has mastered the skills required by the domain to do world-class work in it.

During these years of apprenticeship, Tchaikovsky wrote mostly orchestral music, such as his first four symphonies. But Swan Lake was his first masterpiece for the stage, the breakthrough work that began his career as a great composer of ballets and operas. The best indication of the change that Swan Lake made in Tchaikovsky's career is that after completing it he wrote five operas in the next ten years (Eugene Onegin, The Maid of Orleans, Mazeppa, The Slippers, and The Sorceress). One has the impression that during his work on Swan Lake he discovered the possibilities of using music to express character. These possibilities continued to fascinate him throughout the rich middle period of his career.

The concept that reveals the most about any art in its social setting is the domain - that is, the people who practice and administer the form. The domain of ballet includes not only dancers and choreographers but also theater directors, boards of directors, and balletomanes. In prerevolutionary Russia the domain of ballet meant the intertwined legacy of Petipa and the Maryinsky. The glory days of the Maryinsky are taken so much for granted that one rarely considers how the company achieved its legendary status in the first place. When one place produces great achievements in a particular art form, it's usually because that place allocates substantial resources to it. That was true of painting and architecture in fifteenth-century Florence, and it was certainly true of dance in late-nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, when the last two czars, Alexander III and Nicholas II, supported dance very generously for a variety of reasons.

Oddly enough, the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, which traumatized Russian society as much as the assassination of President Kennedy did American society, had important implications for ballet. One result was the desire for entertainment that would avoid controversial social issues. Ballet also benefited from Nicholas II's affair with Mathilde Kschessinska, prima ballerina assoluta at the Maryinsky, that was an open secret in St. Petersburg society.

Assured of lavish subsidies from the imperial purse, the administrators of the Maryinsky ran the theater and its school like a Russian monastery. Only a small number of the gifted children who applied were admitted, and for the happy few who were, dance became a way of life. The all-embracing, strictly hierarchical structure of the Maryinsky replicated the class structure of Russian society as a whole. Its rules stipulated everything that was provided, down to the number of new pairs of shoes that each dancer received. The lavish productions of the Maryinsky eventually had the effect of educating audiences and thus creating the famous St. Petersburg balletomanes. They numbered only some two to three thousand, but they were so fanatically devoted to dance that fathers would bequeath subscription seats to their sons. (For more fascinating details about life at the Maryinsky, see Suzanne Massie's Land of the Firebird, on which I have relied here.)

Subsidies, dancers, and fans mean very little, however, without artists to write the music and choreograph the steps. In Tchaikovsky, ballet had the only major composer of the nineteenth century who wrote works of lasting importance in all the major genres of the time - ballet, opera, chamber music, and art songs, the concerto and the symphony. That the artistic prestige of ballet music had reached a low point in Europe by 1877 when he composed Swan Lake did not concern him. Because the Maryinsky's imperial subsidy freed the company from the need to cater to the whims of fashion, it could also go its own way to become a glorious anomaly. His attitude was summed up by Balanchine in Solomon Volkov's Balanchine's Tchaikovsky: Interviews with George Balanchine: "Now critics argue whether the end of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake should be happy or tragic, love conquers death or death conquers love. I don't understand any of that. It's all nonsense. And I'm certain that Tchaikovsky didn't care. He was given an assignment: we need so much music here, now we need a transition, then an Adagio."

Steeped as he was in the tradition of the Maryinsky, Balanchine was alluding to the role of the composer as master craftsman who took pride in skillfully writing music to order. But it is just this need for collaboration that prevented virtually all of the musical titans of the day from writing ballet music. One can readily imagine the reaction of Romantic individualists such as Beethoven or Wagner if someone had demanded that they write a specific number of bars for a pus de deux! But Tchaikovsky not only did so, he did so eagerly and repeatedly. To explain why he, alone of his great contemporaries, was willing to tailor his music to the demands of choreographers is to explain something essential about the origin of Swan Lake.

When Tchaikovsky began Swan Lake, he confronted the tension between, on the one hand, the low esteem in which contemporary composers held ballet music and, on the other, the great prestige of ballet in Russia at the time. The term "fruitful asynchrony" is used by people in creativity research to indicate a challenge such as this that confronts major artists at a critical stage in their maturation process. Such artists must feel like saying, with Hamlet, "The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right." In science, asynchrony often takes the form of a problem in the field that current theories will not explain; in the arts asynchrony usually means a decline in achievement or a style that has outlived its time.

Along with innate musical genius, two factors equipped Tchaikovsky to resolve this tension in ballet. First, as a second-born, he probably felt more comfortable in the give-and-take of collaboration than most firstborns usually do. Second, and much more important, as a homosexual he was not only deeply in the closet but guilt-ridden about it. His sense of uncertainty about his social identity and his obsessive fear of being revealed surely made him amenable to taking what his contemporaries would have considered a subservient role. Even so, his willingness to create in this way resulted in masterpieces only because imperial patronage gave ballet an importance in Russia that it had nowhere else in Europe.

All of the factors of Tchaikovsky's musical personality thus meshed with the way the field of ballet was constituted in Russia. Thirteen years after the premiere of Swan Lake he was open to collaboration with a domineering figure such as Petipa. Sleeping Beauty and Nutcracker, which were written to Petipa's exacting specifications, and eventually the posthumously revised Swan Lake were the glorious results.

When an artistic genius encounters an asynchrony in a field and overcomes it, as Tchaikovsky did, this achievement changes the field. Tchaikovsky's three ballets greatly increased the prestige of writing dance music, in part because the young Igor Stravinsky was growing up in St. Petersburg when the works premiered at the Maryinsky. This is the explanation for one of the most remarkable facts in dance history: Two of the greatest composers who have written extensively for ballet were Russian. Stravinsky understood what collaboration with great choreographers and designers could produce because of Tchaikovsky's example.

Every era of greatness, however, such as the one that the Maryinsky experienced in the 1890s, contains the germ of decay. That germ of decay took the form of the annual pension of 6,000 rubles that Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a railroad baron, offered Tchaikovsky in October 1877, after Swan Lake had premiered in February of that year. The inability of even so eminent a composer as Tchaikovsky to support himself with performance fees suggests a problem with the patronage system itself. Indeed, by the 1880s, the imperial arts bureaucracy in St. Petersburg was becoming more and more like bureaucracies elsewhere. Petipa was able to work within it because he had seniority. Newcomers did not fare so well.

Von Meck's generosity to Tchaikovsky thus forms part of a larger change within Russia from government patronage of the arts to private patronage. Another part of this change was that the center of artistic innovation shifted from St. Petersburg to Moscow in the 1880s. In Moscow, this change culminated in the creation of the Moscow Art Theater, which opened its doors in 1897.

In St. Petersburg, however, the Maryinsky was too powerful and too well-financed an institution to allow for the appearance of an upstart rival in the performing arts. Thus, as Lynn Garafola points out in Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, the Ballets Russes never performed in Russia. The Maryinsky continued to train great dancers, of course, but it produced no more great dances. (Gorsky's Don Quixote premiered at the Bolshoi, not the Maryinsky, in 1900. The 1902 production at the Maryinsky was widely criticized as departing from the Petipa style.) Then, too, many of the dancers whom the Maryinsky trained spent most of their careers in the West. These dancers and the dancers who became choreographers (Fokine, Nijinsky, Balanchine) made an incalculable contribution to twentieth-century dance.

A great ballet can come into being only if the right artists come together at the right time and the right place. Tchaikovsky's talent, the domain of music, and the prestige of ballet in Russia all worked to create the 1895 Swan Lake, a score that was Tchaikovsky's first ballet and a ballet that was the Maryinsky's last great triumph.

James M. Curtis is professor of German and Asian studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia.