Swan Lake: Raising The Bar For Ballet Music

Description
Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky is now one of the most popular ballets of all time. It’s remarkable, then, that when Swan Lake premiered in 1877, the reception was lukewarm at best. Take a minute to get the scoop!

Fun Fact
When most of us think about Tchaikovsky, we think of his ballets — Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, the latter as ubiquitous at Christmastime as Handel’s Messiah. Between the 1877 premiere of Swan Lake in Moscow and the debut of The Nutcracker in St. Petersburg in 1892.
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About Steven, Host
Steven is a Canadian composer & actor living in Toronto. Through his music, he creates a range of works, with an emphasis on the short-form genre—his muse being to offer the listener both the darker and more satiric shades of human existence. If you're interested, please check out his music website for more. Member of the Canadian League Of Composers.
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Transcript

Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky is now one of the most popular ballets of all time. It’s remarkable, then, that when it premiered in 1877, the reception was so so.

Tchaikovsky’s magical ballet tells the story of the doomed love of Prince Siegfried and Princess Odette. Spoiler alert…it doesn’t end well, with them dying together and throwing themselves in the lake.

First off, the dancers who performed in the ballet’s premiere declared Tchaikovsky’s music to be simply too difficult to dance and not appropriate for traditional ballet moves. The conductor even began choreographing dances to other composers' music, but Tchaikovsky protested and his pieces were reinstated. 

Tchaikovsky actually really enjoyed composing the music for Swan Lake, writing way more material than was needed.  As such, he certainly raised the bar for ballet music at the time with inventive melodies and daring harmonies.