Odile Variation (Original Version) - Black Swan Pas de Deux

A Ball at the Castle

Tchaikovsky's own music for Odile, and the older of the ballet's two Act III variations. He never wrote her a solo: in the 1877 original she danced within the Grand Pas de Six (No. 19), just after her entrance at the ball. Drigo deleted that number in 1895, and Petipa built the Black Swan Grand Pas de Deux in its place out of No. 5, the Act I "Pas de deux for two merry-makers", with a solo for Odile interpolated from Op. 72 No. 12 "L'Espiègle" — the variation on the other row. The Moscow stagings (the Bolshoi, and Burmeister's for the Stanislavsky) kept Petipa's pas de deux but carried this one solo back into it, replacing the interpolation. So this is an alternative setting of the SAME slot, not an extra dance: a company performs one or the other, never both. Osipova danced this one at the Bolshoi and the Drigo one at the Royal Ballet; Semionova this one in Burmeister's staging and the Drigo one at Zurich. Tell them apart by ear, not by running time — this one opens with harp and then oboe, Odette's instrument through the Act I and II introductions, which is what gives Odile's disguise its menace.