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THEMES

Order and discipline are good, sturdy Family Values as put forth in Swan Lake. Good behavior is trebly important because the characters are a Royal Family, not the Smiths next door. The choice of a bride, the choice of a friend, a night spent hunting in the forest, all have political as well as personal implications.

The established order of doing things is reflected in the selection of a bride from a list of potentials representing solidity and stability to the dynastically-conscious Russians, who were going through a bit of Romantic reflection on the old ways in 1876, when the libretto was being written. A recent example of the sort of thinking that went into this tradition can be remembered within the last twenty years with the speculations surrounding the impending marriage of Charles, the Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer. Nascent speculations about Prince William of Wales and teen-age dating are occasionally seen in tabloid journalism now.

Curses were a staple of European folk tales, certainly those that were transformed into ballets. There was a logic and lawfulness to these curses and spells: "Because of something you, or your family did, this will happen. But if this totally implausible thing happens in the future, the curse will be lifted." And the one who laid the curse had to abide by that. If Odette finds a man who has never loved before ("pure of heart," like Lancelot) who promises to marry her and keeps his promise, then she, and her friends, the Swan Maidens, will be free of the curse. If the man betrays her, then she must die. Simple, terrible and inexorable. The fact that Siegfried is tricked does not matter. That he truly loved Odette and realized his error instantly does not matter. He has broken the rules, and they both must pay for his error.

Besides the obvious internal themes of fidelity and caution expressed by the story, there is also an external theme in the setting - Germany. Russian foreign policy has always expressed a considerable cynicism and mistrust of other countries. In the 1870s, Russia was beginning to make wider overtures to Western Europe, and was experimenting with different nations to find out which would be the most congenial partner in alliances. Germany had always been a safe region for Russians to open with, some of the ducal and gravurate houses having had ancient family connections with the House of Rurik, the ancestral house of the Romanov Dynasty. Eventually, these experimentations in foreign policy and the backlashes against them would end in both the Triple Entente before the First World War and the murder of the deposed Romanovs during the Russian Revolution.

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