Camille Saint-Saëns: Carnival of Animals – The Dying Swan (Le Cygne) – Dancer, Svetlana Zakharova
Inspired by swans that she had seen in public parks and Alfred, Lord Tennyson‘s poem “The Dying Swan”, Anna Pavlova (who had just become a ballerina at the Mariinsky Theatre) asked Michel Fokine, who had also read the poem, to create a solo ballet for her for a 1905 concert being given by artists from the chorus of the Imperial Mariinsky Opera. Fokine suggested Saint-Saëns’s cello solo, Le Cygne (which Fokine had been playing at home on a mandolin to a friend’s piano accompaniment) as the work’s musical basis and Pavlova agreed. A rehearsal was arranged and the short dance completed very quickly. Fokine remarked in Dance Magazine (August 1931):
It was almost an improvisation. I danced in front of her, she directly behind me. Then she danced and I walked alongside her, curving her arms and correcting details of poses. Prior to this composition, I was accused of barefooted tendencies and of rejecting toe dancing in general. The Dying Swan was my answer to such criticism. This dance became the symbol of the New Russian Ballet. It was a combination of masterful technique with expressiveness. It was like a proof that the dance could and should satisfy not only the eye, but through the medium of the eye should penetrate the soul.
In 1934, Fokine told Arnold Haskell, author of Balletomania :
Small work as it is, […] it was ‘revolutionary’ then, and illustrated admirably the transition between the old and the new, for here I make use of the technique of the old dance and the traditional costume, and a highly developed technique is necessary, but the purpose of the dance is not to display that technique but to create the symbol of the everlasting struggle in this life and all that is mortal. It is a dance of the whole body and not of the limbs only; it appeals not merely to the eye but to the emotions and the imagination.
The Dying Swan was first performed at a gala in the Noblemen’s Hall, St. Petersburg, Russia on Friday, 22 December 1905, and first performed in the United States at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York on 18 March 1910, with Pavlova in the role. American dance critic and photographer Carl Van Vechten noted that the ballet was “the most exquisite specimen of [Pavlova’s] art which she has yet given to the public.” Pavlova performed the role some 4,000 times and, on her deathbed in The Hague, reportedly cried, “Prepare my swan costume.”
Fokine’s granddaughter Isabelle notes that the ballet does not make “enormous technical demands” on the dancer but it does make “enormous artistic ones because every movement and every gesture should signify a different experience” which is “emerging from someone who is attempting to escape death”. She notes that modern performances are significantly different from her grandfather’s original conception and that the solo today is often made to appear to be a variation of Swan Lake—”Odette at death’s door”. The ballet is not about a ballerina being able to transform herself into a swan, she states, but about death, with the swan simply being a metaphor for that.
Please go to the following website for more information on this music and the ballet – http://wapedia.mobi/en/The_Dying_Swan
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