Music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Ballets

Ballets

"Tchaikovsky was made for ballet," writes musicologist David Brown Before him, musicologist Francis Maes writes, ballet music was written by specialists, such as Ludwig Minkus and Cesare Pugni, "who wrote nothing else and knew all the tricks of the trade." Brown explains that Tchaikovsky gifts for melody and orchestration, his ability to write memorable dance music with great fluency and his responsiveness to a theatrical atmosphere made him uniquely qualified in writing for the genre. Above all, Brown writes, he had "an ability to create and sustain atmosphere: above all, a faculty for suggesting and supporting movement ... animated by an abundant inventiveness, above all rhythmic, within the individual phrase." In comparing Tchaikovsky to French composer Léo Delibes, whose ballets Tchaikovsky adored, Brown writes that while the two composers shared similar talents, the Russian's passion places him in a higher league than that of the Frenchman. Where Delibes' music remains decorative, Tchaikovsky's touches the senses and achieves a deeper significance. Tchaikovsky's three ballets, Maes says, forced an aesthetic re-evaluation of music for that genre.

Brown calls Tchaikovsky's first ballet, Swan Lake, "a very remarkable and bold achievement." The genre on the whole was mainly "a decorative spectacle" when Swan Lake was written, which made Tchaikovsky's attempt to "incorporate a drama that was more than a convenient series of incidents for mechanically shifting from one divertissement to the next ... almost visionary." However, while the composer showed considerable aptitude in writing music that focused on the drama of the story, the demand for set pieces undercut his potential for complete success. The lengthy divertissements he supplied for two of the ballet's four acts display a "commendable variety of character" but divert action (and audience attention) away from the main plot. Moreover, Brown adds, the formal dance music is uneven, some of it "quite ordinary, a little even trite." Despite these handicaps, Swan Lake gives Tchaikovsky many opportunities to showcase his gift for melody and, as Brown points out, has proved "indestructible" in popular appeal. The oboe solo associated with Odette and her swans, which first appears at the end of Act 1, is one of the composer's best–known themes.

Tchaikovsky considered his next ballet, The Sleeping Beauty, one of his finest works, according to Brown. The structure of the scenario proved more successful than that of Swan Lake. While the prologue and first two acts contain a certain number of set dances, they are not designed for gratuitous choreographic decoration but have at least some marginal relevance to the main plot. These dances are also far more striking than their counterparts in Swan Lake, as several of them are character pieces from fairy tales such as Puss in Boots and Little Red Riding Hood, which elicited a far more individualized type of invention from the composer. Likewise, the musical ideas in these sections are more striking, pointed and precise. This characterful musical invention, combined with a structural fluency, a keen feeling for atmosphere and a well-structured plot, makes The Sleeping Beauty perhaps Tchaikovsky's most consistently successful ballet.

The Nutcracker, on the other hand, is one of Tchaikovsky's best known works. While it has been criticized as the least substantial of the composer's three ballets, it should be remembered that Tchaikovsky was restricted by a rigorous scenario supplied by Marius Petipa. This scenario provided no opportunity for the expression of human feelings beyond the most trivial and confined Tchaikovsky mostly within a world of tinsel, sweets and fantasy. Yet, at its best, the melodies are charming and pretty, and by this time Tchaikovsky's virtuosity at orchestration and counterpoint ensured an endless fascination in the surface attractiveness of the score.