Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake

Just work, work, work, work. Literally, you work until you’re worn away. We actually give of ourselves until we’re dead. … And I’m asking myself, … what kind of a mark will you leave?

So muses Tara, the Bar of Soap  in an episode of Radiotopia’s Everything is Alive. “Mildew. A soap stain,” she concludes in a darker moment of her “sliver-life crisis.” In each episode of this mind-bendingly delightful podcast, host Ian Chillag interviews an actor or comedian posing as a different inanimate object. These conversations are at times comical, at times profound — and always compelling.

As a Grain of Sand, Chioke takes a longer perspective: “I would say that it’s hard to have anxiety when you count time in geologic ages. Like I say, I was a boulder once upon a time and I’m part of sand now.”

Like Tara and Chioke, the protagonist of Sofia Gubaidulina’s Fairytale Poem is shrinking as its life progresses. The tone poem was composed to accompany a radio program telling the story of “The Little Piece of Chalk” by Czech writer Miloš Macourek. The chalk in Macourek’s tale dreams of drawing fantastical scenes, but each day it dwindles away, forced to scratch out words and equations on the blackboard. Just as it thinks its time is up, it is rescued by a child who whisks it off to create pictures on the pavement — its final marks finally bringing it contentment.

Gubaidulina was drawn to the way this story seems to perfectly capture “an artist’s fate.” Her music opens with a sense of lament tinged with anxious dissonance. As the music continues, Gubaidulina uses different instruments to capture the monotonous nature of the chalk’s day, but also the frenetic energy of the students and teachers using it. A slow duet between the flute and bass clarinet represents the chalk’s darkest hour, before sweeping harp and piano scales launch it into the delight of fulfilling its dreams. As the chalk gets to realize its true potential, the orchestra trembles with joy. But it is not destined to last. Nearly as soon as it has begun, the exuberant music tapers and the chalk disintegrates into a dusty memory.

While it tells no defined story, Max Bruch’s First Violin Concerto contains as much fantasy as Gubaidulina’s tone poem. A concerto in instrumentation, it feels much more like a solo fantasia. Indeed, Bruch himself toyed with calling it a “fantasia” early on in his composition process. Its three movements chart a linear path, rather than standing as discrete musical statements.

“We’re the same thing,” asserts Sebastian, the Russian Doll, “You stack us, but we’re individuals.”

The first two movements, Prelude and Adagio, flow together without pause, connected by a lamenting solo cadenza. The rollicking Finale is the most recognizable part of the concerto. Its persistent popularity (at the expense of later compositions) would haunt Bruch for the rest of his life. While the second and third movements are not knit together like the first two, the emergence of the pianissimo pulsing violas makes the beginning of the Finale feel more like a continuation than a new beginning.

“I had no intention of staying in your ear / But I got a little turned around and now I’m stuck here,” taunts Lillian, the Song stuck in Ian Chillag’s head.

If the final movement of Bruch’s concerto is a hummable favorite, melodies by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky are downright earworms. His exceptional ability to invent and transform melodies through lush orchestral textures has earned him an immortality rare among classical composers. Over a century and a half later, his three ballets — Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker — remain inescapable fixtures of pop culture.

Though a perennial favorite today, the premiere of his first ballet, Swan Lake, was coldly received. All parties seemed to share the blame: From weak choreography to poor dancing to distaste with the German storyline, critics found little to praise in the production. While some recognized the brilliance of Tchaikovsky’s score, others found it too overpowering for a ballet setting. Nevertheless, the production ran for years and, in various versions, the ballet has garnered much praise in the decades since.

Tchaikovsky himself created a suite of music from the ballet in 1882, but it is hard to select just a few “greatest hits” from a ballet so full of transcendent music. As such, many other performers and conductors have compiled their own suites over the years. The one featured in these performances was compiled by conductor Elim Chan.

Chan’s suite begins with the ballet’s most iconic music, the swan theme from Act II, Scene 10. During this famous oboe solo, Prince Seigfried watches Odette, the Swan Princess, and the other swans glide on the lake before they transform into beautiful maidens. The haunting drama of this scene is contrasted by an upbeat waltz from the palace ball that opens the ballet. Chan then excerpts two dances from the end of Act II: the bouncing dance of the cygnets followed by Odette and Seigfried’s luxuriant pas de deux. The suite closes as the ballet does, with the pulsating Finale, darkly recasting the romantic swan theme — Seigfried’s run-in with the Black Swan Odile has doomed Odette forever. Unlike Gubaidulina’s story, this fairytale does not have a happy ending.

“I’m grateful to the geese or goose,” says Dennis, the Pillow. “I hope that their feathers are taken and they’re still left alive but I know, now that I’m saying it out loud, that’s definitely not what happens.”

— Ellen Sauer Tanyeri

Ellen Sauer Tanyeri is The Cleveland Orchestra’s Archives & Editorial Assistant and is a PhD candidate in musicology at Case Western Reserve University.