ExclusiveTchaikovsky: Sleeping Beauty Waltz

【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Sleeping Beauty Waltz. This beautiful piece was played by Ashoka_PremiumBeat. It is a royalty free music provided by pond5.com.

The Sleeping Beauty is a ballet in one prologue and three acts set to music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, his Opus 66, completed in 1889. It is the second of his three ballets and, at 160 minutes, his second longest work in any genre. The original scenario was by Ivan Vsevolozhsky after Perrault's La belle au bois dormant, or The Sleeping Beauty, and the first choreographer was Marius Petipa. The premiere took place at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg on 15 January 1890, and since then The Sleeping Beauty has remained one of the most famous ballets of all time.

Tchaikovsky based his work on the Brothers Grimm's version of Perrault's 'Dornröschen'. In this version, the princess's parents survive the 100-year sleep to celebrate the princess's wedding to the prince. However, Vsevolozhsky also incorporated other characters from Perrault's stories into the ballet, such as Puss in Boots, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Bluebird, Bluebeard, Ricky the Tuft and Tom Thumb. Other French fairytale characters include Beauty and the Beast, Pretty Goldilocks and The White Cat. Despite this, Tchaikovsky was happy to tell the director of the Imperial Theatre that he had enjoyed studying the work and had been sufficiently inspired to do it justice.

The choreographer was Marius Petipa, ballet master of the Imperial Ballet, who wrote a very detailed list of musical requirements. Tchaikovsky worked quickly on the new work at Frolovskoye; he began sketches in the winter of 1888 and began orchestrating the work on 30 May 1889.

The focus of the ballet was on the two main opposing forces of good (the Lilac Fairy) and evil (Carabosse); each has a leitmotif representing them, which runs through the entire ballet and serves as an important thread to the underlying plot. The third act of the work, however, takes a complete break from these two motifs, focusing instead on the individual characters of the various court dances.

The premiere of the ballet was more favourably received by the press than Swan Lake, but Tchaikovsky never had the luxury of seeing his work become an instant success in theatres outside Russia. He died in 1893. By 1903, The Sleeping Beauty was the second most popular ballet in the Imperial Ballet's repertoire (Petipa/Pugni's The Pharaoh's Daughter was first), having been performed 200 times in just 10 years.

The video was shot in Switzerland by Simone Schlegel and edited by Wenjing Ma.


#classicalmusic, #Music, #古典音樂, #klassischemusik, #GJWexclusive, #Switzerland, #Schweiz, #Natur, #Nature, #KlassischeMusikundNatur, #ClassicalMusicAndNature, #古典音樂小站,