Death by Tchaikovsky

Abstract

The 2010 film Black Swan embeds Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ballet within a macabre meta-ballet, in which the “Black Swan” character subsumes the life of Nina, the prima ballerina tasked with playing the dual role of Odile/Odette. Nina fulfills the balletic role by succumbing to a nightmarish nineteenth-century “death and the maiden” narrative in which she attains “perfection” by disappearing into the ballet and ultimately dying. The weaving-together of threads of musical analysis, nineteenth-century music pathology, and twenty-first-century psychology reveals a darkly whimsical reading of the narrative in which Tchaikovsky himself is drawn into the filmic fray as the phantasmagorical force behind Nina’s psychological derailment.