50 Fun Facts About Swan Lake

What is Prince Siegfried celebrating with his tutor, friends and the peasants as Act 1 opens?

His birthday, the day he comes of age. As the party winds down a flock of swans passes overhead and the young men set off to hunt them, which is how he finds the lake.

In Swan Lake, the spell lets Odette and her companions take human form only when?

At night. By day they are swans, on a lake said to be made from the tears of Odette's mother, which is why Siegfried's hunting party meets her there by moonlight.

When Soviet television suddenly switched to Swan Lake in August 1991, what did viewers take it to mean?

A crisis at the top. The ballet ran on a loop as tanks rolled in during the 1991 coup against Gorbachev, and it has been shorthand for political upheaval in Russia ever since.

The 1895 Petipa–Ivanov revival of Swan Lake, the basis of most modern productions, was first staged where?

The Mariinsky, St Petersburg. Moscow had dropped the ballet years earlier; here Petipa staged the court scenes and left the lakeside ones to Lev Ivanov, the company's second balletmaster.

Which conductor revised Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake score for the 1895 revival?

Riccardo Drigo also conducted the premiere. He slipped several of Tchaikovsky's piano pieces into the ballet in his own orchestrations, and it is his version, not the 1877 original, that most companies came to play.

In the 1994 animated film The Swan Princess, based on Swan Lake, what is Prince Siegfried renamed?

Derek. The film also trades the ballet's swan maidens for a puffin, a turtle and a frog, who befriend Odette while Rothbart holds her captive.

Which real monarch, who took the swan as his emblem, inspired John Neumeier's 1976 ballet Illusions, like Swan Lake?

Ludwig II of Bavaria built Neuschwanstein as a castle for the swan knight Lohengrin. Declared insane and deposed in 1886, he died days later in mysterious circumstances in Lake Starnberg.

Which 2000 film ends with its grown-up hero taking the stage in Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake?

Billy Elliot. The grown-up Billy is danced by Adam Cooper, a star of the production's first cast, as his father and brother watch from the audience.

Tchaikovsky reportedly first used the Swan Theme in an 1871 home ballet called what?

The Lake of the Swans. He made it up for his sister's children during a summer stay on the family estate, and they remembered its main tune as the one the big ballet made famous.

The Act 2 love duet in Swan Lake was reworked from which destroyed Tchaikovsky opera about a water spirit?

Undina. Its closing duet for the water nymph and her knight became Odette and Siegfried's, with the two voices handed to a solo violin and cello.

Which Delibes work made Tchaikovsky say he would not have written Swan Lake had he known its music?

Sylvia. He heard it in Vienna some months after his own premiere and wrote that he was ashamed: beside its charm and wealth of melody, his own ballet seemed poor stuff.

In the original 1877 libretto of Swan Lake, how do Odette and Siegfried die?

They drown in a rising flood. Siegfried tears off the crown that protects Odette and hurls it into the lake; a storm breaks and the waters close over them both.

How did Tchaikovsky respond when an 1877 Odette added another composer's pas de deux to Swan Lake?

Wrote music to fit her steps. Anna Sobeshchanskaya wanted to keep Petipa's choreography, so he matched the rival piece bar for bar, and she liked it enough to ask him for an extra variation.

Critics of Swan Lake's 1877 premiere called Tchaikovsky's score 'too noisy, too symphonic' and too what?

Wagnerian was no compliment: ballet audiences expected light, tuneful music from house specialists, and critics judged his score far too complicated to dance to.

Swan Lake's first staging is called a flop, but what became of it?

Ran six years, all of them in Moscow. Joseph Hansen, the ballet master who twice restaged it there, then left for London's Alhambra Theatre and made a one-act ballet called The Swans.

Who turned a long-lost number from Swan Lake into the Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux in 1960?

George Balanchine. The music had dropped out of the published score and lain forgotten until a copy turned up in Moscow in the 1950s; hearing of the find, he asked for and won permission to use it.

Ivanov's Act 2 of Swan Lake was first seen at which February 1894 event?

Memorial concerts for Tchaikovsky, who had died the previous autumn just as plans to revive the ballet took shape, so he never saw the staging that most companies still follow.

Which Italian ballerina led the 1895 Swan Lake revival, staged as her benefit?

Pierina Legnani kept the role to herself in St Petersburg until she went home in 1901, and her virtuoso technique spurred Russian dancers to develop the brilliance they are now known for.

The Italian ballerina who led the 1895 Swan Lake revival was famous for which feat of technique?

32 consecutive fouettés, whipped turns on one leg. She had dazzled St Petersburg with them in Cinderella, and Petipa gave them to her again in the ballroom scene, where they have been a test for ballerinas ever since.

For the 1895 revival of Swan Lake, the villain became the magician Rothbart instead of whom?

Odette's stepmother, a witch, was the one who hunted her in the 1877 story, while Rothbart simply turned up at the ball as a baron and showed himself a demon once the prince was tricked.

Rothbart is usually depicted as resembling which creature?

An owl. In the 1877 story a different villain stalked Odette in that shape; when the 1895 rewrite put Rothbart behind the spell, he inherited the wings.

In Swan Lake, who is Odile?

The sorcerer's daughter, brought to the ball to trick the prince. She is known today as the Black Swan, yet in the 1895 staging that fixed the ballet's shape she did not wear black at all.

In Swan Lake, what can break the spell on Odette?

A vow of eternal love, sworn by one who has never loved before. In the 1895 story killing Rothbart would not do it: when Siegfried moves to strike him, Odette intercedes, because his death would seal her fate.

What are Siegfried and his friends carrying when they set off to hunt the swans?

Crossbows. Siegfried is taking aim at the leading swan when it turns into Odette, and he lays the weapon aside and promises not to harm her.

What is the name of Prince Siegfried's friend who spots the flock of swans and suggests the hunt?

Benno once did more than spot swans. In the 1895 staging he helped Siegfried partner Odette in the lakeside love duet, which became a dance for two only when a later prince chose to partner her alone.

What does Siegfried's mother tell him he must do at the royal ball?

Choose a bride. At the ball six princesses are presented and he turns every one down, until an uninvited guest arrives with a young woman who looks exactly like Odette.

How many dancers perform the Dance of the Little Swans with arms crossed and hands linked?

Four. They cross the stage as one linked line in exact unison, and only in the last bars do they break the chain and try to fly, before dropping to the ground.

What did the leading Soviet-era productions of Swan Lake do to its tragic finale?

Replaced it with a happy one. Soviet taste called for an upbeat close, so Rothbart is beaten in a fight, the spell breaks and the lovers live happily ever after.

In which country is the story of Swan Lake set?

Germany, in the age of knights. The plot is thought to draw on German tales of swan maidens, and so a ballet written for Moscow ended up with a Prince Siegfried and a Baron von Rothbart.

Which Nordic company made a complete Swan Lake the first ballet it ever staged, in 1922?

The Finnish National Ballet. The company was born with that Helsinki premiere, and in 1946 it carried the ballet on to Stockholm, the first time Sweden saw it complete.

Which star of the Ballets Russes danced Prince Siegfried in the company's 1911 London Swan Lake?

Vaslav Nijinsky. Diaghilev's company was known for daring new ballets, but for London he put on the old classic and brought a prima ballerina over from St Petersburg's Imperial Ballet to dance with his star.

Which ballerina danced the lead in Britain's first complete Swan Lake, in London in 1934?

Alicia Markova, a Ballets Russes dancer at 14, led the cast. The choreography came from notation written down in St Petersburg and brought to London by Nicholas Sergeyev, a former régisseur of the Imperial Ballet.

Which Danish star staged a controversial, psychological Swan Lake for the National Ballet of Canada in 1967?

Erik Bruhn. His version became a mainstay of the Toronto company, and decades later its former star Karen Kain built her own staging on it to mark fifty years with the troupe.

Matthew Bourne's 1995 Swan Lake is best known for what change?

The swans are danced by men. Bourne saw real swans as big, aggressive and powerful, so his flock is bare-chested and menacing, a long way from ballerinas in white tutus.

Bourne's Swan Lake was first staged in 1995 at which London theatre?

Sadler's Wells. After its first run there it reopened in the West End the following year, and two years after that it was on Broadway.

Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake won Tony Awards for choreography, costumes and what else?

Best Direction, in the musical category. A ballet danced to Tchaikovsky competed as a musical on Broadway, and Bourne went home with both the directing and the choreography prizes.

Graeme Murphy's 2002 Swan Lake was loosely based on the breakdown of which real marriage?

Prince Charles and Lady Diana. In Murphy's version Rothbart's place is taken by the other woman, a Baroness who comes between the royal couple, and the story turns on a love triangle.

Who directed Black Swan (2010), in which a ballerina cracks under pressure?

Darren Aronofsky once planned a single film about a love affair between a wrestler and a ballet dancer. It split in two, becoming The Wrestler and then Black Swan.

Natalie Portman won which prize for playing Nina Sayers in Black Swan?

The Oscar for Best Actress. The film's score had no such luck: the Academy ruled it ineligible, as too largely adapted from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake to count as original.

Who plays Lily, the newcomer who becomes Nina's rival, in Black Swan?

Mila Kunis. Her Lily is loose and confident where Nina is rigid and perfect, a natural for the dark half of the role, which is why Nina comes to fear her.

The Swan Princess opened poorly in 1994 as Disney reissued which hit film?

The Lion King. Disney had pulled its summer hit from cinemas that September and brought it back in November just as the rival film opened, a move Variety called sabotage.

The Dying Swan, a solo created for Anna Pavlova, is danced to music by which composer?

Camille Saint-Saëns. The Swan was the one movement of The Carnival of the Animals he let be published in his lifetime, fearing the rest would hurt his standing as a serious composer.

Swan Lake was the first of Tchaikovsky's three ballets; which was the last?

The Nutcracker followed The Sleeping Beauty by two years. Both were new works for St Petersburg, while Swan Lake, dropped in Moscow years before, was not being danced anywhere in Russia.

Which ballerina, later a Romanov by marriage, took over Swan Lake's lead in 1901?

Mathilde Kschessinska left Russia after the revolution and taught in Paris for decades, where her pupils included Margot Fonteyn; she died there at 99.

Tchaikovsky rushed the Swan Lake score in 1875 because he was eager to start what?

His next opera. He sketched two acts of the ballet in a single summer and said he was rushing it to be free for the opera, though he also admitted he had long wanted to try his hand at ballet.

Who choreographed the original 1877 production of Swan Lake?

Julius Reisinger and Tchaikovsky barely worked together: the composer wrote the whole score from a bare outline before a step was set, and the reviews were hardest on the choreography.

Which company, America's oldest professional ballet troupe, staged the country's first complete Swan Lake in 1940?

San Francisco Ballet. It had begun as a troupe that supplied dancers for the city's opera house; Willam Christensen turned it to full-length classics and cast his brother Lew as the prince.

Which ballet score's use of recurring themes for its characters especially influenced Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake?

Adam's Giselle. Tchaikovsky had studied other composers' ballet scores before writing his own, and he used the same device again in The Sleeping Beauty.

Tchaikovsky's score for the Swan Lake ball has Hungarian and Spanish dances and one named for which Italian city?

Naples. When the ballet was restaged in 1895 its two choreographers split the ball's national dances between them: Ivanov took the Neapolitan and Hungarian numbers, Petipa the Spanish dance and the mazurka.

Who was called upon to rewrite the Swan Lake libretto for the 1895 Petipa-Ivanov revival?

Modest Tchaikovsky, the composer's younger brother, gave the prince an excuse. In the 1877 story he alone sees any likeness between the newcomer at the ball and Odette; the rewrite makes her a magical double, so he is tricked, not fickle.