Roland John Wiley’s Tchaikovsky’s Ballets[1] is an anomaly: an authoritative, important, useful book on dance, based on primary source materials, meticulously researched, and intelligently presented. It is all the more impressive an achievement considering that the author’s field is musicology. As its title indicates, the book is meant primarily as a study of the three works Tchaikovsky wrote for the ballet—Swan Lake (both the original Moscow and posthumous St. Petersburg productions), The Sleeping Beauty, and Nutcracker—from their commissioning through the first performances. But more than that, it is an examination of a seminal period in the history of the classical dance, a period of transition that saw the demise of the Romantic era and the emergence of a new age of classicism which would restore to the ballet its prestige and reveal its artistic possibilities.

In many ways Wiley’s book is a revisionist history. The traditional view, especially prevalent among musicians, holds that ballet music prior to Tchaikovsky was feeble because of the tyranny of the ballet master. John Warrack, for example, in Tchaikovsky Ballet Music, writes of composers such as Pugni and Minkus: “Not only was their talent negligible: it was required to be negligible. [Their scores] were expected to do no more than furnish unobtrusive aural decor and rhythmic support as a background against which the dancers could be put through their paces . . . . Few composers had the talent or the resolve to stand up to ballet masters