Magifique: Tchaikovsky Suites

“A few ballets”, “The Nutcracker”, “Sleeping Beauty”, and “Swan Lake”, which at the end of the 19th Century brought together to the stage the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and two ballet masters of the imperial theatre, Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, were conceived from three orchestral suites, which had become musical standards. Among these symphonic suites, “The Nutcracker” alone was written by the composer and performed under his direction before the creation of the completed ballet. It was on the occasion of a gala evening, so Tchaikovsky chose the „featured dances”, namely dances reserved for “entertainments”. Yet, even if he had considered using them, the orchestral suites of “The Sleeping Beauty” and “Swan Lake” were included without his approval after his death. Destined to be performed in concerts, they were considered a sort of best off of each of the ballets; bringing together without an event-driven chronology, the “featured dances” and a few numbers centred on the characters and the action. In looking for a title, I remembered that as a child I defined my wonderments as “Magifique”. Magnifique without a “n” because hatred divides (the word for hatred in French sounds like the letter “n”), and that this invented word, a sort of short-circuited language, fits well with the intentions of this creation: to create magic or else recycle life’s raw material through expressive and poetic forms. However, the title is also “Tchaikovsky‘s Suites”, in order to be consistent i.e. “avoir de la suite dans ses idées”. Thierry Malandain