Swan Lake flopped in 1877—then Petipa and Ivanov made it immortal
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote Swan Lake in 1875–76; the Bolshoi premiered it on 4 March 1877 to chilly reviews that called the score too Wagnerian. Most companies now dance the 1895 Mariinsky revival by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, with Riccardo Drigo's revised score, not Reisinger's original.
Vladimir Begichev paid eight hundred rubles in May 1875 for a ballet about Odette, a princess cursed into swan form. Libretto authorship stays murky—Reisinger, Begichev with Vasily Geltser, press paraphrases, or even Tchaikovsky's own 1871 home ballet The Lake of the Swans for relatives Modest and Tatiana as Siegfried and Odette. Echoes of Giselle, Musäus's Stolen Veil, Auber's Le lac des fées, and Wagner's swan operas have all been proposed. Tchaikovsky studied specialist ballet scores by Pugni and Minkus, then confessed envy of Delibes's Sylvia and borrowed Adam's leitmotif habit from Giselle.
He recycled Undina's love duet and Voyevoda scraps; the Swan theme itself may predate the commission. By April 1876 the score was done, yet Reisinger shelved numbers as undanceable until protest restored them. Opening night featured Pelageya Karpakova as Odette and Victor Gillert as Siegfried; critics mocked story and choreography, but the run lasted six years and forty-one performances. Anna Sobeshchanskaya soon demanded a Petipa–Minkus pas de deux for act three.
Today one ballerina usually dances both Odette and Odile, a casting habit that grew later rather than at the nervous Moscow opening. Later landmarks include Gorsky's 1901 Bolshoi staging, Diaghilev's 1911 London production after Petipa–Ivanov, and Vic-Wells then Sadler's Wells premieres in 1934 and 1946. Rehearsal notes from 1876, identified in Moscow in 2015, finally reopen the sound of that first, imperfect lake and the haste that built it.
Source: Swan Lake
