The Bolshoi Theatre, site of the original Swan Lake
Here are five facts I'll bet most of you didn't know about Swan Lake, culled from wikipedia's vaults. Maybe you can find a few more...
1. Though the Kirov's Swan Lake is the definitive version of the ballet -- and most ballet companies base their own productions on it -- it wasn't the first production. It was first presented as The Lake of the Swans in 1877 by Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet.
2. The production by the Kirov (then known as the Imperial Ballet) was originally set to debut in the fall of 1894 but was delayed several months due to the death of Czar Alexander III and the coronation of his son Nicholas II, the last czar of Russia.
3. Tchaikovsky lifted the music for the first movement of Act IV from his first opera, "The Voyevoda."
4. Opus 20, the music usually heard in the ballet and attributed to Tchaikovsky, is not the composer's original score, but rather a revised score with many deletions and changes arranged by Riccardo Drigo, the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatre's conductor at the time.
5. One of the more successful alternate versions of the dance is Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, which features a male dance corps as the swans.
Source: wikipedia
The Kirov Ballet and Orchestra in Swan Lake, Nov 9-12, The Wang Theatre
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