In 1875, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky received an offer to write the fabulous ballet The Lake of Swans. By that time, the 35-year-old composer was already quite famous, he wrote three symphonies and several operas, but he had not yet tried his hand in the ballet genre. This fact does not seem surprising: at that time, primas and choreographers were considered the main ones in the ballet world, and music played a purely applied role in the performance, serving as a background accompaniment for dances. Therefore, for composers, this genre was considered “low”, second-rate, and rarely any of the prominent authors took it up.
Being a great admirer of ballet art, Pyotr Ilyich was not a supporter of the snobbery of his colleagues and with great zeal set about a new order. He took an active part in the creation of the libretto of "Swan Lake" (whose true author still cannot be established by researchers). The composer took the study of the specifics of ballet dance very seriously. Tchaikovsky's friends noted with surprise how scrupulously he tried to understand all the subtleties of this or that “pa”, trying to understand what kind of music would be convenient for the dancers. In 1877, Swan Lake was released on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. Alas, almost everything in this production turned out to be unsuccessful: critics called Reisinger's choreography "gymnastic exercises", due to an absurd quarrel, instead of the talented prima ballerina Sobeshchanskaya, her understudy Karpakova performed at the premiere, and the orchestra, led by the inexperienced conductor Ryabov, was completely powerless in front of the innovative score of Swan. The performance was not successful, and Tchaikovsky could only hope that the music of the ballet would be appreciated in the future.
Shortly before the composer's death, the legendary Marius Petipa and his talented student, the Russian nugget Lev Ivanov, decided to stage a new production of Swan Lake in St. Petersburg. The choreographers significantly revised the libretto, changed the order of the numbers, removed the ridiculous wings from the dancers' costumes, creating a stage performance worthy of Tchaikovsky's music. Their production at the Mariinsky Theater in 1895 became the classic basis for all subsequent interpretations. With the advent of each subsequent generation of choreographers, Petipa-Ivanov's Swan Lake is revised and enriched with new nuances, providing an example of an amazingly long life on the stage. Spectators of the Primorsky Stage can see their favorite ballet in one of its canonical versions, edited by Konstantin Sergeev and legendary scenery by Simon Virsaladze.
