Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. And if you don’t want to reenter? Well, you have other balletic choices under the sun. I will concentrate on ...

If there’s a single moment in ballet that everyone knows, it’s when the swans glide magically on to the stage in Act II of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. It’s been imitated and parodied a thousand times ...

“Swan Lake” premiered in 1877 with a libretto of uncertain authorship, a score by neophyte ballet composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and choreography, now lost, by the now forgotten Julius Reisinger.

Vladimir Putin's enemies are keeping a close eye on a bird in pointe shoes, because a broadcast of "Swan Lake" may reveal his demise. The ballet—a more-than-century-old staple of our own highbrow ...