Tchaikovsky: The Sleeping Beauty

No. 400 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages is this week's Friday Blog and Podcast. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast400

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Our 400^th and final montage for this year (and the concluding montage for our ongoing Friday series) is a crossover post from our survey of the complete Tchaikovsky ballets, which we began this part Tuesday.

The Sleeping Beauty was the second of Tchaikovsky's three ballet scores, composed and orchestrated from October 1888 to August 1889, with minor revisions during stage rehearsals in the last three months of 1889. The score consists of an Introduction and 30 individual numbers, laid out as a shoirt prologue, and three acts.

"I am planning to write a libretto on La belle au bois dormant after Perrault's fairy tale. I would like a mise en scène in the style of Louis XIV, which would be a musical fantasia written in the spirit of Lully, Bach, Rameau, etc. If this idea appeals to you, then why not undertake to write the music? In the last act there would have to be quadrilles for all Perrault's fairy-tale characters—these should include Puss-in-Boots, Hop o' My Thumb, Cinderella, Bluebeard, etc." - Ivan Vsevolozhsky, in a letter of 13/25 May 1888

In 1888, Ivan Vsevolozhsky (Director of Imperial Theatres for Saint Petersburg) commissioned a new ballet from Tchaikovsky — The Sleeping Beauty — for which he provided a detailed scenario, as well as suggestions as to how the epoch of Louis XIV was to be reproduced in the music and on the stage. This time the composer was enthusiastic about the subject and readily set to work on the assignment.

Vsevolozhsky arranged the initial meeting between Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa (choreographer and principal dancer at the Imperial Theatres in Saint Petersburg), and throughout their fruitful collaboration on this first joint project he acted as an intermediary between them. A fine draughtsman, Vsevolozhsky also produced sketches of the costumes for the ballet's fairy-tale figures and supervised the work of the set designers, always striving for historical authenticity. The successful premiere of The Sleeping Beauty at the Mariinsky Theatre on 3/15 January 1890 vindicated his creative vision, and Yelena Fedosova has rightly emphasized that Vsevolozhsky anticipated by two decades the idea commonly attributed to Sergey Diaghilev (1872–1929) of "uniting composer, ballet master, and visual artist in the creation of a work".

Tchaikovsky acknowledged Vsevolozhsky's vital contribution and support by dedicating The Sleeping Beauty to him. Although the authorship of the libretto is normally attributed to Vsevolozhsky, it is possible that Marius Petipa also had some involvement, since in the archive of the latter there is a manuscript dated 3/15 July 1888, with a list of characters in the ballet, and descriptions of the numbers in every scene .

The performance is from the same Royal Philharmonic Orchestra anthology of the complete Tchaikovsky ballets (under Barry Wordsworth) we are surveying under the Cover2Cover series.

I think you will love this music too.