Song Number 40 in our summer countdown of classical music is in the books. This is an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty Waltz.
According to https://petipasociety.com/the-sleeping-beauty:
The Sleeping Beauty Waltz was the first collaboration of Marius Petipa and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Although Tchaikovsky’s first ballet Swan Lake had not been the success he had hoped for, it did not end his composition of ballets. In 1886, during rehearsals for his opera The Enchantress, he was commissioned by the Director of the Imperial Theatres, Ivan Vsevolozhsky about a possible ballet adaptation of the story Undine. Despite the failure of Swan Lake, Tchaikovsky did not hesitate to accept the commission. However, by 1888, the idea of composing Undine was abandoned and Vsevolozhsky was more in favour of a ballet with a French subject. Eventually, he set his sights on the Charles Perrault fairy tale La Belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty) as the story for which Tchaikovsky would compose the music, an idea with which Tchaikovsky was fully on board.
The fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty is one of the most classic of stories that has been widely known for centuries. The earliest known version is found in the prose romance Perceforest, which was written between 1330 and 1344, though it also appears in the myth of the Norse goddess Brunhilde. The story was first written as a fairy tale entitled Sun, Moon and Talia by the Italian writer Giambattista Basile and was published in 1634 in his collection Il Pentamerone. Basile’s variant was later retold and published by Charles Perrault in 1697 under the title Sleeping Beauty and it was again retold by the Brothers Grimm in 1812 under the title Little Briar Rose.
The fairy tale was first adapted into a ballet by Ferdinand Hérold and Jean-Louis Aumer and was staged at the Paris Opéra on the 27th April 1829, with Lisa Noblet as the Princess Iseult and Marie Taglioni appearing in one scene as a naiad. Aumer and Hérold’s Sleeping Beauty was later staged in London on the 13th February 1833 at Drury Lane, with Pauline Duvernay as the Princess.
(When I woke up this morning, I did not know any of this!)
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