Swan Lake Studies 1, 2
1, 2. Has a year of my life gone by in the last forty-four years without further research into “Swan Lake”? I doubt it. That’s a ballet we never fully know: its text, its style, and its meanings stay elusive. Now I’m back in the trenches, researching the ballet again, partly but not only in preparation for July 30, when I (in London) introduce the City Center Studio Five Live@Home session in which Nina Ananiashvili (in Tbilisi) coaches Sara Mearns (in New York) in four of Odette’s solo passages.
I was lucky that I came to “Swan Lake” in a superb Royal Ballet production whose details had evolved over decades; inevitably I only realised my luck when I began to watch other productions. The critic David Vaughan used to say “The worst ‘Swan Lake’ is the one you are watching” - but he, profoundly moved by a great “Swan Lake”, wrote in 1974 that one performance in this production that year, led by Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell, was the greatest “Swan Lake” he had ever seen. His point was that the greatness was not achieved by those two stars alone but by the production and the company.
The Royal Opera House used to sell a group of nine colour slides of the Royal Ballet’s “Swan Lake”. The Odette-Odile is Alfreda Thorogood, who ceased to dance the role before I arrived. (I used to see her in the Act One pas de trois, and perhaps once in the Act Three Ashton pas de quatre.) Her husband, David Wall, is the Prince Siegfried, who at this time had the reputation of being the role’s single greatest interpreter: I remember how, even when I had seen Rudolf Nureyev and Anthony Dowell, that reputation seemed justified - he, Wall, gave the Prince a detailed reality and inner life that brought the whole ballet into keener focus. Can anyone help me to identify the precise date of these photographs?
For years, though, I avoided buying these slides: what use did I have for any slides then? Fortunately, the theatre went on selling them when the production changes; now I bought them as a memento of the production I had loved. I reproduce them today, more for what they tell us of Leslie Hurry’s poetically Romantic-mediaevalist design. He had been the main designer of the Royal Ballet “Swan Lake” since the Second World War, making successive adjustments over the decades. These photographs, which I have just had transferred from those slides, record the way it looked in 1971-1976; the backdrop for the lakeside scenes (certainly the first) was subtly revised in 1976.
The production is best known now from the 1979-1986 production, which was filmed for television (and DVD) in July 1980 with Natalia Makarova and Anthony Dowell. The filming is superb, but Hurry had died around the time of the 1979 production, whose colour schemes are far less successful than those in these photographs. The 1979-1986 production looked immediately old-fashioned, indeed dated, as its precursor had not.
These first two pictures show Wall/Siegfried with the crossbow, and Frederick Ashton’s waltz pas de douze (it became a pas de treize when Siegfried joined it). Neither of these are “authentic” “Swan Lake”, be it noted. In Marius Petipa’s 1895 production of Act One, the Queen did not give her son a crossbow as a present - that was a 1963 touch. And Petipa’s choreography of the Waltz was never danced in the West until Alexei Ratmansky staged it in 2016 for his Zürich production. (Yes, Nicholas Sergueyev never included the Waltz in his Western stagings: it requires large forces.) Nonetheless Wall and other Siegfrieds made the acquisition of the crossbow so vital a coming-of-age moment that it mattered greatly; and I miss the romance and compositional felicities of Ashton’s 1963 waltz (itself an expansion of his 1952 pas de six to the same music) every time I hear this music.
Thursday 9 July.
