On this date in 1890 Sleeping Beauty premièred in St. Petersburg. Ten things you might not know about Tchaikovsky's ballet.
- It was the second of Tchaikovsky's ballets, and the longest, the full score being nearly four hours long. Most productions of the ballet are edited and therefore much shorter.
- The Sleeping Beauty was based on a fairy tale written by Charles Perrault, two hundred years earlier in 1697. The story was called The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood. This in turn had been based on a folk tale which had been around for much longer and passed on verbally through the generations until Perrault wrote it down.
- Tchaikovsky had already written a short ballet based on the same story for his sister’s children in 1867, so was pleased to be commissioned to write a longer version.
- Tchaikovsky wrote the Music. The choreography was by Marius Petipa. Petipa was actually quite dictatorial about how he wanted the music – how long each piece should be and what the tempo should be. He asked for a Waltz in Act 1, a Mazurka in Act 2, and a Polonaise in Act 3. While some composers might have found that limiting, Tchaikovsky rose to the challenge.
- The score makes use of a musical device called a leitmotif which is a musical theme associated with a character or concept. There are two in Sleeping Beauty, representing good and evil, and are in turn associated with the Lilac Fairy and the evil fairy Carabosse.
- The Lilac Fairy’s name comes from an old Russian belief that placing a newborn baby under a Lilac tree will bring the child great fortune and wisdom.
- The ballet wasn’t a huge success at first although the critiques were generally favourable. At the premiere, Tsar Alexander III summoned Tchaikovsky to the imperial box. Tchaikovsky was expecting him to rave about it, but all he did was damn with faint praise – all he said was, 'Very nice.' Tchaikovsky wasn’t impressed. After Tchaikovsky’s death in 1893, however, the ballet grew in popularity and was performed 200 times over the next 10 years.
- The Rose Adage is perhaps the most famous moment in the ballet, when four potential suitors vie for Princess Aurora’s attention. It’s a notoriously difficult dance and is considered a test of a great ballerina. It was Dame Margot Fonteyn who popularised the sequence of balances which are now included in all productions.
- In the prologue, the dancer playing the evil fairy points her finger a lot, which is meant to represent her zapping Electricity like a modern day supervillain. Some of Aurora’s moves were designed by Petipa to look like a shell, to reflect Sandro Botticelli’s painting, The Birth of Venus.
- The Disney film based on the ballet uses the music and the name Princess Aurora, which Disney, in true greedy, money-grabbing huge corporation style, slapped a trademark on, which means no-one else can make a film with a Princess Aurora in it, and also meaning that Aurora is the only Tchaikovsky ballet heroine not to have a corresponding Barbie doll.
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