Swan Lake Studies 65-68

65, 66, 67, 68. (in the “Swan Lake Studies” series). These four photographs of Odette as portrayed by different ballerinas between 1908 and 1952 show not just a wide range of interpretations of the great role but its multiple facets too. First (65), in arabesque, Svetlana Beriosova, photographed by Baron at age nineteen; second (66), Alicia Markova, by Gordon Anthony, 1937 (her mid/late-twenties); third (67) Margot Fonteyn, photographed in 1952 by Baron (her early thirties); fourth (68),Tamara Karsavina (1908), photographed by Fischer in her early twenties.

Three of these - Markova, Fonteyn, Beriosova - were among the role’s greatest interpreters. Yet Markova shows us an Odette such as we seldom if ever see today: on guard, ice cool, with her eyes the only part of the otherwise mask-like face and seeming to hold others at bay. She was Fonteyn’s first Odette-Odile in 1934; with characteristic but still astounding generosity, Fonteyn, two years before her death, wrote of Markova as her first and greatest inspiration. Markova first danced Odette’s adagio and variation in 1925 as a baby ballerina for Diaghilev (who arranged for her to be coached by Mathilde Kschessinskaya); she then learnt the complete ballet in 1934 from Nicholas Sergueyev. She was an infrequent Odile after that, though she danced it at Covent Garden in 1948; Odette’s first lakeside scene was one she often danced in its own right, continuing in it into the early 1950s. Fonteyn, whose face so often played a vivid part in her performances, took from Markova her masklike facial composure for this role (only in the first lakeside scene), with only the eyes speaking (though not in this photograph). The beautiful grandiloquence of Beriosova’s arabesque was famous; she danced the role for approximately twenty years, making a profound impression on many in her teens with the Metropolitan Ballet, before becoming a permanent member of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet (and Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet) in 1951, at age seventeen. Throughout the 1960s, hers was the one interpretation of Odette-Odile widely thought to equal or surpass Fonteyn’s, when Beriosova was the company’s own prima and Fonteyn its illustrious guest star. The two women had great mutual respect; when Beriosova retired from ballet c.1974, she, knowing that Fonteyn insisted upon wearing silk tights in ballet, handed over all her own ones to the older ballerina, who continued dancing until age sixty in 1979. (Fonteyn mentions this In the second edition of her “Autobiography”, where she calls Berisova “most generous of ballerinas”.) Fonteyn danced the full-length Odette-Odile until 1973, aged fifty-three; she danced Odette’s adagio until 1976, aged fifty-six - an almost forty-year run in the same role.

The four photographs show us Odette’s winged amplitude; her pathos and vulnerability; her aloof froideur; her classically remote ideal quality. People often speak of the beauty they find in Odette’s swan imagery; they too seldom remember that swan form is what Odette hopes to lose forever rather than just for the nights. Odette is a woman when we see her (by night), a woman poignantly haunted by the swan status she has by day. So, when her steps and gestures include swan arabesques, wing-like quiverings, or other avian suggestions, it’s not enough to admire their beauty: we have to ask what they’re saying. Why does Odette, while finding in Siegfried her great hope of rescue and redemption, revert to swan-like movements and positions?

The answer, I believe, lies in Odette’s mixed feelings about Siegfried and her greatest need, which is the need of not love but freedom. Ballet people, including ballerinas, often speak of Odette’s love for Siegfried, but the choreography suggests something far more complex than that. Siegfried does indeed lose his heart to her; and he says so. She needs him to swear his love and to be true - but there is no mention in the story of her reciprocating that love. What the choreography shows us is her extreme diffidence about him - presumably, about trusting any man. The adagio shows her continually withdrawing from him, averting her eyes from him, swooning away from him. (And, in the original choreography, her swoons led her to fall into the arms not of Siegfried but of Benno, whom she never addresses and perhaps never sees.) We can’t doubt that Odette wants to reciprocate Siegfried’s affection; we can’t blame her for being reluctant to trust him.

You don’t need to be a Freudian to read the first lakeside scene as a psychodrama. The choreography abounds in gravitational pulls: Odette’s jumps and even her walks are weighted, while she often returns to Rothbart’s corner as if it were her place of safety. In her final entrance, in the coda, Ivanov’s choreography sums up her divided loyalties in a seamlessly classical phrase: she keeps advancing along a diagonal (to downstage right), but repeatedly pivots (fouetté) into an arabesque addressing Rothbart’s corner. Curiously, that series of arabesques facing upstage left is most expressive when it’s performed with maximum purity and minimum acting, so that we feel the drama of her repeated change of direction as deeply subcutaneous.

Rothbart here is the symbol of oppression and repression. When therefore Odette returns to his corner of the stage, she’s reverting to a zone that nonetheless means a certain kind of safety for her. To pursue the psychological point, it’s not too much to see Odette’s swan form as a symbol of female virginity. She wants to find a new life where she is not forever imprisoned by that virginity, and yet her dilemma is that of many prospective brides: how can she trust her future to a man who may prove false? The great subject or nineteenth century fiction - on stage as well as in the novel - was adultery; and adultery was seen from the point of view of both those committing it and those who became its victims.

“Swan Lake” is one of a family of dramas adapted from the 1811 fairytale novella “Undine”, by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. Others include Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale “The Little Mermaid” (1837), Henrik Ibsen’s play “The Lady from the Sea” (1888), Antonin Dvorák’s opera “Rusalka” (1900), and Frederick Ashton’s ballet “Ondine” (1958). In each of these, the heroine is poignantly caught between her longing for human form (and the hero’s love) and the attraction of the water, lake, or sea, with its fatal power. In several versions of the tale, the heroine must suffer torments if she abandons her mermaid/rusalka/naiad condition to join the human race: she will again both a soul and endless sorrow. For “Swan Lake”, Tchaikovsky used music from his own opera “Undine” (much of which he had destroyed): the most intimate part of Odette’s adagio is from the “Undine” love duet https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HTo0kmbGfxE

There’s more yet to say of Odette the swan maiden. But she is a divided soul; and within the classicism of her choreography is an expressionist impulse, alternating between straining one way and then the other. Odette veers between concave and convex shapes: she seems to fear what she most wants, and to take refuge in what she most dreads.

Friday 7 August