Drawing on documentary sources from the "late imperial period,"
Wiley (Music, U. of Michigan) offers detailed histories of the
first productions of Tchaikovsky's three great ballets - along with
technical musical analysis of the scores. Throughout, there's an
emphasis on context: an introductory chapter discusses the ballet
audience, the standards for late-19th-century Russian ballet music
(the emphasis on "dansante" melody, orchestration, timing): the
traditional collaborative roles of balletmaster and "specialist"
composer, and the prototype of La Bayadere (exotic setting, stage
machinery, massed scenes, widely varied choreography). Then come
close-up chapters on each ballet - the development of the libretto,
the composer/choreographer composition, the casting and designing,
the first-night reception (generous excerpts from reviews), the
music itself. With Swan Lake, Wiley speculates on Wagnerian
influences, on the collaboration between Tchaikovsky and
balletmaster Reisinger ("it seems that the two men decided on a
scenario and the type and placement of dances, then went their
separate ways"), and on the reasons for the ballet's
perhaps-exaggerated failure (to some extent Reisinger's "ineptitude
prompted the conclusion that Tchaikovsky was lacking as a ballet
composer"); the musical analysis focuses on its "carefully chosen
tonalities" - the changes of key (fully diagrammed) that provide
subliminal structure. After a bridging chapter on
theater-reformer/librettist Vsevolozhsky and balletmaster Petipa,
Wiley gives Sleeping Beauty - for him the greatest of the three
("never surpassed" in the whole Tchaikovsky oeuvre) - even more
minute examination: its thematic unity, sophisticated treatment of
variation music, and "metaphorical properties." The Nutcracker
receives less wholehearted appreciation: praise for the
orchestration's "special sound world," ambivalent reaction to the
"borrowed melodies" and "short-breathed" numbers (dictated, in
part, by the libretto). And finally, after appraising the revised
version of Swan Lake made after Tchaikovsky's death (a general
improvement, though "one wonders whether he would have agreed to
changes that sacrificed musical coherence to choreographic
expediency"), Wiley sums up Tchaikovksy's ballet-music
accomplishment: he "took ballet music out of the hands of Minkus
and delivered it into the hands of Stravinsky" - making ballet
composition "a fit occupation" for serious composers, with enough
authority to stand up to the previously imperious balletmaster.
Despite the sometimes-pedantic minutiae and some murkiness in
Wiley's more ambitious musico-thematic analysis: a valuable source
for specialists from the ballet/ music worlds. (Kirkus Reviews)
Tchaikovsky's Ballets combines analysis of the music of Swan Lake,
Sleeping Beauty, and Nutcracker with a description based on rare
and not easily accessible documents of the first productions of
these works in imperial Russia. Essential background concerning the
ballet audience, the collaboration of composer and ballet-master,
and Moscow in the 1860s leads into an account of the first
production of Swan Lake in 1877. A discussion of the theatre
reforms initiated by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Director of the Imperial
Theatres and Tchaikovsky's patron, prepares us for a study of the
still-famous 1890 production of Sleeping Beauty, Tchaikovsky's
first collaboration with the choreographer Marius Petipa. Professor
Wiley then explains how Nutcracker, which followed two years after
Sleeping Beauty, was seen by its producers and audiences in a much
less favourable light in 1882 than it is now. The final chapter
discusses the celebrated revival of Swan Lake in 1985 by Petipa and
Leve Ivanov.
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