Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux

Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux is a ballet choreographed by George Balanchine to a composition by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky originally intended for act 3 of Swan Lake (op. 20, 1875-1876). With costumes by Barbara Karinska and lighting by Jack Owen Brown, it was first presented by New York City Ballet at the City Center of Music and Drama, New York, on 29 March 1960. Robert Irving conducted the New York City Ballet Orchestra. The dancers were Violette Verdy and Conrad Ludlow.

In 1877, Anna Sobeshchanskaya, prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, made her debut in the dual role of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake. After three performances, she was so dissatisfied with the choreography of Julius Reisinger that she asked for new material for the role of Odile in act 3. With permission from the producers, she traveled from Moscow to Saint Petersburg to ask Marius Petipa, ballet master of the Imperial Theaters, to set a pas de deux for Odile and Siegfried to replace the pas de six that functioned as the grand pas in act 3. This he did, using music written by Ludwig Minkus. Upon learning this, Tchaikovsky was angered by the idea of a Minkus composition being inserted into his ballet score, so he composed a new pas de deux for the ballerina, even matching the structure of the Minkus piece so that she would not have to change Petipa's choreography. It was a standard pas de deux classique, with a short entrée, a grand adage, a variation for the danseur, a variation for the ballerina, and a coda. Madame Sobeshchanskaya was, apparently, pleased.

For more than seventy years, this pas de deux was forgotten. Because it was a later composition, it was not published as part of Tchaikovsky's score and was thought to have been lost. Accidentally discovered in 1953 in the archives of the Bolshoi Theater among the orchestral parts for another ballet, it came to the attention of George Balanchine, who successfully sought permission to use it for his own choreography.

There is no single, universally accepted system of transliterating Russian names from Cyrillic to Latin script. There are many such systems, some targeted to particular languages, some meant for library use, some prescribed for passport use, and some purely traditional. This has led to multiplication of spellings of names. The surname of the Tchaikovsky family may also be written as Tchaykowsky, Tchajkowskij, Czajkowski, Chikovsky, and Tschaikovski, among numerous other variations. The New York City Ballet and The George Balanchine Trust choose to use Tschaikovsky as their preferred spelling. Their reasoning is sound: that is how the composer spelled his name when he visited New York in 1891.

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