Tchaikovsky's Ballets: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker (Clarendon Paperbacks)

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 456 pages
• Published by: Oxford University Press, USA May 9, 1991
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0198162499
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0198162490
• Book Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Weighs: 1.6 pounds

Product Review
Drawing on documentary sources from the "late imperial period," Wiley (Music, University of Michigan) offers detailed histories of the first productions of Tchaikovsky's three great ballets - along with technical musical analysis of the scores. Throughout, there's an emphasis on context: an introductory chapter discusses the ballet audience, the standards for late-19th-century Russian ballet music (the emphasis on "dansante" melody, orchestration, timing): the traditional collaborative roles of balletmaster and "specialist" composer, and the prototype of La Bayadere (exotic setting, stage machinery, massed scenes, widely varied choreography). Then come close-up chapters on each ballet - the development of the libretto, the composer/choreographer composition, the casting and designing, the first-night reception (generous excerpts from reviews), the music itself. With Swan Lake, Wiley speculates on Wagnerian influences, on the collaboration between Tchaikovsky and balletmaster Reisinger ("it seems that the two men decided on a scenario and the type and placement of dances, then went their separate ways"), and on the reasons for the ballet's perhaps-exaggerated failure (to some extent Reisinger's "ineptitude prompted the conclusion that Tchaikovsky was lacking as a ballet composer"); the musical analysis focuses on its "carefully chosen tonalities" - the changes of key (fully diagrammed) that provide subliminal structure. After a bridging chapter on theater-reformer/librettist Vsevolozhsky and balletmaster Petipa, Wiley gives Sleeping Beauty - for him the greatest of the three ("never surpassed" in the whole Tchaikovsky oeuvre) - even more minute examination: its thematic unity, sophisticated treatment of variation music, and "metaphorical properties." The Nutcracker receives less wholehearted appreciation: praise for the orchestration's "special sound world," ambivalent reaction to the "borrowed melodies" and "short-breathed" numbers (dictated, in part, by the libretto). And finally, after appraising the revised version of Swan Lake made after Tchaikovsky's death (a general improvement, though "one wonders whether he would have agreed to changes that sacrificed musical coherence to choreographic expediency"), Wiley sums up Tchaikovksy's ballet-music accomplishment: he "took ballet music out of the hands of Minkus and delivered it into the hands of Stravinsky" - making ballet composition "a fit occupation" for serious composers, with enough authority to stand up to the previously imperious balletmaster. Despite the sometimes-pedantic minutiae and some murkiness in Wiley's more ambitious musico-thematic analysis: a valuable source for specialists from the ballet/ music worlds. (Kirkus Reviews)

Product Review

"Wiley's analysis of the musical background of the choreography of the Tchaikosvky-Petipa ballets is fascinating.I find it refreshing to read a musicologist's view, rather than a dance historian's, because of the minute analysis it offers of how the music itself influences the choreography."--Deborah Jowitt, Lingua Franca
"Wiley is thoroughly conversant with the large Russian literature on Tchaikovsky's ballets. It will be one of the book's important contributions that it introduces Western readers to this material and offers a critical assessment of it.An important and pioneering work. He articulates an approach to the study of a composite work of art that is seldom pursued in musicological research on ballet.The scope of documented information alone will make his book indispensable for scholars, performers, and ballet lovers alike."--Journal of the American Musicological Society
"[Wiley's] evaluations of Chaikovskii's music, illuminating the master's musical innovations, and his comprehensive history of each ballet, tracing the ballets' origins, composition, and first productions, will delight music-lovers and balletomanes alike.Wiley's penetrating musical analyses of each balletgive rare insight into Chaikovskii's musical genius often overlooked in studies of his ballet music.Eschewing ideology, Wiley far exceeds his Soviet counterparts with his comprehensive and significant analyses.[His] substantial and engrossing reassessments of these monuments of Russian ballet establish them as great artistic and musical achievements."--Slavic Review
"Wiley has dug deep into the Russian archives, scrutinizing not only books and contemporary newspapers, but every manuscript source he could uncover.Yet Wiley has not given us a dull, austere treatise; there is plenty of humanity and local color in his descriptions of the ballet audience in nineteenth-century Russiawe should be grateful that he has brought us that much closer to an understanding of these three extraordinary highlights of our dance heritage."--Dance Research Journal
"An authoritative, important, useful book on dance, based on primary source materials, meticulously researched, and intelligently presented.Tchaikovsky's Ballets inevitably forces us to reassess our viewsand Tchaikovsky must be recognized as the virtual creator of modern ballet."--New Criterion


Reader Reviews
This is an excellant source for anyone wishing to stage these ballets. It is also comprehensive in it's detail of the origins of the Ballets