The Sleeping Beauty

Tchaikovsky’s second full-length ballet score, The Sleeping Beauty (1888-89), encapsulates his music’s finest qualities. For nearly three hours, he sustains an inspired level of orchestral ingenuity, melodic enchantment and emotional intensity on a symphonic scale. Remarkably, he had everything sketched out except the final act in just three weeks. Critics and audiences were almost unanimous in their appreciation. Even Tchaikovsky, who was almost pathologically self-critical, felt it was one of his best works, confiding to his patron Nadezhda von Meck that he had written it with “such warmth and enthusiasm that my feelings must surely be reflected in the music”. In the 10 years following its 1890 premiere, the Imperial Ballet gave more than 200 performances of The Sleeping Beauty, which focuses initially on Princess Aurora’s 16th birthday celebrations, when a strange old woman (the evil fairy Carabosse) gives Aurora a spindle on which she accidentally pricks her finger and collapses. A century later, Prince Désiré is out hunting on his estate when the Lilac Fairy appears before him and conjures up a vision of the enchanted Aurora, leading him to a bewitched castle. Overwhelmed by the beauty of the sleeping princess, he tenderly kisses her, thus releasing her from the spell.