Ideas from Kirill Smolkin
Explore below as Kirill Smolkin’s Deep Dive takes us from The Handmaid’s Tale and Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Theme” into horror films, popular music & the unexpected ways we can hear the pastoral in a familiar motif.
SWAN LAKE IN HORROR & PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER
The Swan Theme serves as a theatrical epigraph to Dracula (1931), immediately establishing its sinister atmosphere — a practice rooted in the silent film era that simultaneously inaugurated a long tradition of Swan Lake's use in horror cinema. Image courtesy: FilmGrab
In Black Swan (2010), Tchaikovsky's music, interwoven with a haunting minimalist score by Clint Mansell, runs through the entire film to embody the two opposing sides of the protagonist — light and dark. The music box playing the Swan Theme simultaneously symbolizes Nina's childhood innocence and her psychological unraveling. The image of a ballerina trapped in a box mirrors the same archetype as in The Handmaid's Tale. Image courtesy: FilmGrab
The usage of the Swan Theme in Abigail (2024) draws a direct arc back to Browning's Dracula while elevating it to a postmodern register: the theme becomes the leitmotif of a vampire girl who studies ballet and turns her passion into a bloody game with her captors. Image courtesy: FilmGrab
Return to The Handmaid's Tale
Swan Lake in Popular Music
"Saturday Nite at the Duck-Pond" by Keith Owen, rec. by The Cougars (1963). With its ironic title and rock'n'roll guitars and drums, this track provokes listeners to hear a familiar melody from Swan Lake afresh. Image courtesy: Discog.com
Dark Moor's symphonic metal arrangement of "Swan Lake" from their 2009 album "Autumnal" lays bare the score's most dramatic, passionate, and sinister passages in a way that is both thrilling and unsettling. Image courtesy: Spotify
Although Madonna quotes The Nutcracker in her 2019 single "Dark Ballet," the title explicitly evokes Swan Lake and its darker cultural register. Through the story of Joan of Arc (another intertextual nod to Tchaikovsky's opera The Maid of Orleans) Madonna explores the persecution of those who refuse to conform and the social stigmatization of queer identity. Image courtesy: Discog
PAstoral, Melancholic, and Tragic Oboe
Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony (1808) is one of the most celebrated expressions of the oboe as the musical voice of nature and idyllic landscape — the very tradition Tchaikovsky drew on when he entrusted the Swan Theme to the oboe in Act II, lending it both its pastoral beauty and its undercurrent of melancholy. Image courtesy: Spotify
J.S. Bach, "Ich habe genug" BWV 82 (1727). Behind the pastoral beauty often lie metaphors of Arcadia — a utopian otherworld, Elysium, or paradise — where the Oboe becomes a symbol of death or life after death. In this cantata, Bach employs the oboe as a metaphor for death as deliverance. Image courtesy: Spotify
Gustav Mahler, Kindertotenlieder (1905). In the cycle's opening song, "Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgeh'n," Mahler employs the oboe's timbre to hold two opposing meanings at once: the grief of a parent mourning dead children and the transcendent hope of their passage into a better world beyond. Image courtesy: Spotify