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Month: May 2006

Dornroschen in Graz – Darrel Toulon’s Sleeping Beauty

Aware of his audience – in large part families with children – Toulon shifts the focus from the grands pas of the fairies into some kind of excursion into a Disney-like world of fairytales…. It makes a nice allusion to the end of Charles Perrault’s and Battista’s original versions of the Sleeping Beauty story (dropped in the Brother Grimm’s Dörnroschen, the Petipa Sleeping Beauty and in the Disney film – which appears to be based closely on the Petipa ballet in turn based on the first half of Perrault.

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Sleeping Beauty – Petipa Libretto for Tschaikowsky

I haven’t been able to find a definitive version of the original Maurius Petipa and Ivan Vsevolozhsky libretto to which Pyotr Tschaikowsky composed the original score. Here is Marinsky Theatre Director’s Vsevolozhsky’s comment on the origins of the ballet: I conceived the idea of writing a libretto on La Belle au bois dormant after Perrault’s tale. I want to do the mise-en-scène in the style of Louis XIV. Here the musical imagination can be carried away, and melodies composed in the spirit of Lully, Bach, Rameau, etc., etc. In the last act indispensably necessary is a quadrille of all of…

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Sleeping Beauty – Charles Perrault (aka La Belle au Bois Dormant)

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY IN THE WOODS

Charles Perrault

Once upon a time there was a king and a queen, who were very sorry that they had no children,—so sorry that it cannot be told.

At last, however, the Queen had a daughter. There was a very fine christening; and the Princess had for her godmothers all the fairies they could find in the whole kingdom (there were seven of them), so that every one of them might confer a gift upon her, as was the custom of fairies in those days. By this means the Princess had all the perfections imaginable.

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Sleeping Beauty – Giambattista Basile (aka The Sun, Moon and Talia

SUN, MOON, AND TALIA

Fifth Diversion of the Fifth Day

There once lived a great lord who was blessed with the birth of a beautiful infant daughter, whom he named Talia. The lord sent for wise men and astrologers to foretell what fate had in store for his daughter, and after they had consulted together and cast her horoscope, they told the lord that Talia would be put in great danger by a splinter of flax. The lord then decreed that no flax or hemp, or anything of the kind, should be brought into the house; he thought that by doing so he could protect his daughter from her fate.

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Sleeping Beauty – Brothers Grimm Version (aka Dornroschen )

Briar-Rose

A long time ago there were a King and Queen who said every day, "Ah,
if only we had a child!" but they never had one. But it happened that
once when the Queen was bathing, a frog crept out of the water on to the
land, and said to her, "Your wish shall be fulfilled; before a year has
gone by, you shall have a daughter."

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