Swan Lake, a classic ballet, premiered in Moscow in 1877 and rearranged and successfully staged in Petersburg in 1895. For more than 100 years, ballets around the world have staged different versions of Swan Lake.
The earliest ballet, Swan Lake, consists of four acts, composed in music in 1876 and based on a medieval folk fairy tale in Germany, telling the legendary love story of the beautiful princess Ojeta and prince Siegfried. The group, solo and double dance characters in Swan Lake are more distinctive, and the "Swan Dance" in the second and fourth acts represents the basic characteristics of ballet art, and has become the most well-known dance movement for more than a century. "Swan Lake" also has a relatively large influence in China, since 1958, "Swan Lake" has become a reserved repertoire often performed by various ballet troupes in China. The new version of "Swan Lake" choreographed by the National Ballet of China adopts multimedia high-tech technology for the first time in stage art, adding new elements of artistic expression to it.
If someone asks what is the most familiar ballet for Chinese audiences? Most people will wonder if it is "Swan Lake" in one voice. Not only have almost all of China's ballet troupes performed this classic work in the past, but also famous ballet troupes from Russia, Britain, France, and many other countries have also come to Beijing to perform the ballet "Swan Lake." In countries around the world, "Swan Lake" is also regarded as the most representative work of classical ballet, and some people even regard it as a synonym for classical ballet.
Ballet is known in the West as the "crown jewel of dance art". Because an important feature of performance technology is that actresses wear special toe dancing shoes and dance upright with the tip of their toes, it is also known as toe dance in folklore. Ballet originated in Italy and was formed in France. It is widely believed that the world's first true ballet was born in 1581, when Princess Catherine of Florence, Italy, married to France and became queen, and under her arrangement, a group of Italian dance artists premiered the Queen's Comedy Ballet in France.
The outstanding Russian composer Tchaikovsky (1840 1893), who integrated the Russian national style with the world music culture, composed a large number of musical works in various genres, including symphonies, piano concertos, chamber music, art songs, etc., especially his successful compositions for the choibu opera and dance drama, which won him a world-renowned reputation and is recognized as the greatest Russian composer in the history of modern music. Tchaikovsky composed music for dance dramas such as Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker, bringing symphonic content and dramatic power to dance music, making these works not only exemplary works of world ballet, but also immortal masterpieces in the world music scene. The music that Tchaikovsky composed for the dance "Swan Lake" was very beautiful, and many people gradually became familiar with and got to know Tchaikovsky through the ballet "Swan Lake." For example, Comrade Li Lanqing wrote: "I learned about Chaikovsky relatively late, when I was interning in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Once, the relevant departments organized us to buy a ticket to go to the Bolshoi Theater to watch the ballet "Swan Lake", and I remember that the ticket price was 12 rubles, which was almost equivalent to our daily living expenses. But I heard that it was starring the most famous ballet dancer in the Soviet Union, Ulanova, and we all went to see it. At that time, we didn't know much about ballet. However, as soon as the dance drama opened and the music sounded, I was deeply attracted by the beautiful melody and the beautiful dance posture, and the more I listened to it, the more I looked at it, the more I was fascinated, if it were not for the order of the theater, I really wanted to shout 'It's great!, at the end of the show, the whole audience stood up and applauded to express their inner excitement. Since then, in addition to Ulanova, the name of Another great composer, Tchaikovsky, has deeply imprinted my memory. 21 Since the Beijing Dance School (now the Beijing Dance Academy) performed the play for the first time in 1958 under the guidance of the Soviet dance expert Gu Xuefu, the ballet "Swan Lake" has always been warmly welcomed by the vast number of audiences in China for nearly half a century.