The opera aria behind the “White Swan” pas de deux

This is neither news, nor new, since the link I’m about to post is several years old. But somehow, I never managed to find this online until now.

It’s well-known that the second act (“White Swan”) pas de deux in Swan Lake was an upcycled operatic duet from an earlier opera by Tchaikovsky, Undina. I’ve finally found a recording of it online to share, after reading a paragraph of Simon Morrison’s Tchaikovsky’s Empire (a 2024 biography of Tchaikovsky that I’ve just started—I’ll post about when I’ve finished it).

The paragraph in question simply spoke about a review of a performance of the rescued fragments of Undina, so I knew that there must, somewhere, be a recording online. And here it is (or they are): it should start at the right place when you click it, but if for any reason it doesn’t work, the aria starts at 47:40)

There are other recordings out there, but I like this because it’s staged and gives you the surtitles. Here’s another version; again, it should start automatically in the right place, but if it doesn’t, skip to 19:32:

This feels like an appropriate with which to celebrate—apparently, according to a congratulatory anniversary email I’ve just received—19 years on WordPress. In fact, I started my blog 23 years ago on Movable Type, when blogs were still a bit of a niche oddity. It now feels like an oddity in the wrong way—who reads blogs any more? But I keep going, because this blog has become a kind of commonplace book for my own use, somewhere to put all the things that I don’t want to forget, or want to be able to point to at a later date. This aria is a perfect example of the kind of thing that I want to be able to find easily again.