A ballet by Boris Eifman. The basis of the narrative canvas of the ballet is memories of the dying composer filled with phantasmagoria. The whole life is flashing before the eyes of exhausted Tchaikovsky as a delirious near-death experience. Elaborating on the principle of the diversity of characters, their fragmentation into a gallery of images, Eifman expressly complicates the construction of the performance and the structure of the characters. Allusions to the composer's great works – the ballets The Nutcracker and Swan Lake – are aligned with fantasies on Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades opera themes. The mystery of birth of imperishable masterpieces, appearing as if in defiance of the world of everyday life, with its vanity, is in the main focus of the choreographer-thinker and it becomes a key philosophical problem of the performance.
Music: Petr Tchaikovsky.