Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux

Music

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
(from Swan Lake, Op. 20, 1877)

Choreography

George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust

Staging

Francia Russell

Costume Design

Larae Theige Hascall

Lighting Design

Randall G. Chiarelli

Duration

10 minutes

Premiere

March 29, 1960
New York City Ballet

PNB Premiere

August 13, 1985
Aspen, Colorado

The music associated with the pas de deux we know today as the Black Swan was composed to be performed in Act I of Swan Lake in the first version of the ballet in 1877. For this unsuccessful production, the lead ballerina wanted to interpolate a pas de deux of her choosing into Act III. Not wanting another composer’s music performed in the context of his own, Tchaikovsky hastily composed an alternative pas de deux, which was added shortly after the Moscow premiere. The ballet had a short stage life, and when Swan Lake was revived in a much-edited production by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov for the Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1895, the music for the extra pas de deux had vanished. It was not until 1953 that the missing musical fragments were discovered in the archives of the Bolshoi Theater.

George Balanchine found the long-lost music enchanting and devised a duet for Violette Verdy and Conrad Ludlow, principal dancers of New York City Ballet. The critic P.W. Manchester praised the short ballet calling it “a little beauty, a kind of pastiche of a typical Bolshoi concert-program offering.” Over the years, Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux has become a favorite vehicle for generations of dancers and has been staged for ballet companies large and small all over the world. It is a frequent offering at ballet galas and celebrations.

Notes by Jeanie Thomas; edited by Doug Fullington, 2008.

Artist Biographies

George Balanchine

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, George Balanchine (1904-1983) is regarded as the foremost contemporary choreographer in the world of ballet. He came to the United States in late 1933, at the age of 29, accepting the invitation of the young American arts patron Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996), whose great passions included the dream of creating a ballet company in America. At Balanchine’s behest, the School of American Ballet was founded in 1934, the first product of the Balanchine-Kirstein collaboration. Several ballet companies directed by the two were created and dissolved in the years that followed, while Balanchine found other outlets for his choreography. Eventually, with a performance on October 11, 1948, New York City Ballet was born. Balanchine served as its ballet master and principal choreographer from 1948 until his death in 1983.

Balanchine’s more than 400 dance works include Serenade (1934), Concerto Barocco (1941), Le Palais de Cristal, later renamed Symphony in C (1947), Orpheus (1948), The Nutcracker (1954), Agon (1957), Symphony in Three Movements (1972), Stravinsky Violin Concerto (1972), Vienna Waltzes (1977), Ballo della Regina (1978), and Mozartiana (1981). His final ballet, a new version of Stravinsky’s Variations for Orchestra, was created in 1982. He also choreographed for films, operas, revues, and musicals. Among his best-known dances for the stage is Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, originally created for Broadway’s On Your Toes (1936). The musical was later made into a movie.

A major artistic figure of the twentieth century, Balanchine revolutionized the look of classical ballet. Taking classicism as his base, he heightened, quickened, expanded, streamlined, and even inverted the fundamentals of the 400-year-old language of academic dance. This had an inestimable influence on the growth of dance in America. Although at first his style seemed particularly suited to the energy and speed of American dancers, especially those he trained, his ballets are now performed by all the major classical ballet companies throughout the world.

Reprinted by permission of The George Balanchine Foundation.