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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.