Premiere: 3 January 1890, Mariinsky Theatre
Premiere of the revised version: 25 March 1952, Kirov Theatre of Opera and Ballet (Mariinsky Theatre)
Running time: 4 hours 5 minutes
The performance has three intervals
The life-changing meeting between Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa was initiated by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Director of the Imperial Theatres. It was his idea to stage a ballet based on the French fairy-tale, he wrote the libretto, he created the unbelievably beautiful costumes and he was the co-creator of the miracle born from the genius of two great maestri.
The Sleeping Beauty was both completely traditional and utterly fresh. Its music, like other ballet scores of the latter half of the 19th century, had been composed according to the choreographer’s specific plan with indications as to the number of bars and the nature of their sound. But the execution of the commission did not limit Tchaikovsky’s music to the expected dance character alone. The ballet resounded with full-blooded exemplary symphonism. Its melodic richness could not but inspire great achievements. Tchaikovsky’s work did not inspire Petipa to undertake revolutionary steps; in the music the choreographer heard harmony. And his Sleeping Beauty was not a search for new methods; rather in its ideal construction it assembled together everything that the choreographer had done over his many years of work at the St Petersburg Theatre. The dance harmony of the production was defined by the balanced proportions of the ingredients – pantomime, genre crowd scenes and classical dance forms constructed with impeccable logic of the development of choreography, from ensembles to the ballerina’s solo entrance. This model of grand ballet, familiar for its component parts and innovative in the perfection of its composition, was to be the crowning glory of ballet in the 19th century. At the same time, it was The Sleeping Beauty that gave an impulse to ballet discoveries in the 20th century. Enchanted by Tchaikovsky, Petipa and Vsevolozhsky’s masterpiece, Alexandre Benois – and the subsequent most radical ballet creators – created works in the spirit of years-gone-by and remote cultures. The fascinating atmosphere of France during the reign of Louis XIV, reproduced in The Sleeping Beauty, opened the gates to the modernistic stylisations of the World of Art movement. Olga Makarova
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