Stretch Your Wings with Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake
The Best Moments
Swan Lake, Op. 20, ballet in four acts (1877)
I'm Tchaikovsky, and I'm glad to welcome you to the best moments of Swan Lake. You'll hear the oboe's lonely Swan Theme rising over the lake, the tune I first sketched for a children's ballet in 1871, and I think it will stay with you long after the music stops. Here on this site my fellow composers and I also help you learn to recognize our pieces whenever they sound, so when you're ready, give the Trainer a go and see how many you know.
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The Oboe That Hushed the Room
I open the lake scene with one oboe playing the Swan Theme in B minor, and I don't know a more graceful way to make a whole theater stop rustling its programs. I first wrote that tune for a children's ballet in 1871, so the swans had been waiting quite a while for their big stage.
Four Swans, One Brain
Once the swans have settled in, I let four of them dance together in F-sharp minor, with the woodwinds tapping out short, clipped notes while the strings stay perfectly in step. It's meant to look like four dancers moving as one, which is a polite way of saying that nobody gets to be late for the next step.
The Guest Who Arrives on Beat Two
Now let me take you back to where the ballet begins, in the castle park, where I wrote a waltz in A major for the celebration of Siegfried's coming of age. It's in 3/4, and the melody doesn't barge in on the first beat but slips in on the second, like a guest who walks in just after the doors open and acts as if he'd been there all along.
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We've come to the end of our walk along the lake, and I hope a little of the music is still with you. It still moves me that Swan Lake started out so modestly, with a cool reception at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in 1877. I died in 1893, so I never saw the revival of 1895, when Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov gave the ballet a second life in Saint Petersburg. Today it's hard to picture a ballet stage without it. Did you enjoy this look at the best moments of Swan Lake? There is still a lot more to explore, from the story and its two very different endings to the way the orchestra builds the whole lakeside world. If you'd like to keep going, click on the links below and let the swans lead you a little further.