Last night (July 16) I sweated through an admirable performance of the Beethoven ninth, and it--the sweat --brought "Swan Lake" flooding back. No, I wasn't performing; the members of the Pittsburgh Symphony and conductor Sergiu Commissiona were doing that, and sweating even harder than I. We were all inside the Temple University Music Shed at Ambler, just outside Philadelphia. The Shed, appropriately built in a natural depression, effectively shields the concerts from the thundershowers that come through Ambler every hour on the hour of a summer's eve. It also effectively collects and intensifies the 90° wet heat of the daylight hours.
It was on the night of such a 90° + day that we--four of us--shed about 30 pounds observing through the steam an uncut '' Swan Lake'' in said structure. We had been drawn there by the presence of Dame Margot Fonteyn, then a mere child of 48, but even she, great artist that she was and is, could do little to offset the discomfort, which was augmented by a disgracefully amateurish performance by the corps de ballet of the Vienna State Opera-though the last several hundred minutes in which the male protagonist "swam" back and forth across the stage, vainly trying to escape the enchanted lake, menacingly overflowing with black gauze, had a certain--what shall I say?--interest.
Jesting aside, what can I say about the music? Everyone knows the big tunes (and what tunes they are!) , and if you don't, you should be ashamed! The ''complete'' work has a whole gaggle of smaller tunes that are almost as good, and in between there's some typical Tchaikovskyan filler that let's you go to the fridge for a beer without missing anything. Unquestionably, however, Piotr Ilyitch was one of the last great unabashed melodists and, though it's probably against the bylaws of Local 802 to say it, I've always felt that he was happier with ballet music than with the vaunted symphonies, if only because ballet has so little room for despair, self-pity, regret, remorse, guilt, navel-watching, angst, and other forms of Freudian solitaire.
Anyhow, I confess that whenever I hear "Swan Lake" I get a cold trickle along my spine, and I feel like lying down and rolling in the music. But the plot of the thing gives me the willies (which are normally found in "Giselle''). It's about this prince named Siegfried, a big musclebound fellow dressed in pretty blue clothes. It's his birthday and for a present he gets this tiny crossbow over which he goes absolutely loony, pretending to shoot magpies and ducks and things, until they calm him down by telling him it's time for him to choose a bride. This so depresses him that he takes his cross bow to the lake and falls starry-eyed in love with a swan! (What a pity Crazy Ludwig of Bavaria, who loved Siegfrieds and swans and got drowned in a lake, missed this one! And by the way, the ballet was produced in 1877, the year Tchaikovsky got married and discovered he didn't like girls, but it was written the year before, so it's more prophecy than autobiography.) In odd moments the swan turns into a Princess named Odette. (Tchaikovsky at first wanted her to be a bee, so at the transformation Siegfried could exclaim, "Odette, where is thy sting?" but they explained. that ''Bee Lake'' just would not do.) After this, the plot thickens to the consistency of silly putty, but you can't hear this on the records, so don't worry.
The ''completeness'' of any version of "Swan Lake" is arguable. Apparently the composer kept adding and subtracting numbers right up to curtain rise and perhaps beyond. Nineteen years later Marius Petipa reworked the thing, making radical changes that he said Tchaikovsky had authorized before he died three years earlier. The present recording represents the official Soviet '' original version.'' To anticipate your queries, yes, it has. circulated here before on another label.
