The Big Sleep “The Sleeping Beauty” at its centenary
With no other ballet could the idea of a centenary be so resonant. There is, for one thing, that hundred-year sleep in the ballet. And the ballet itself is full of different layers of history, of different centuries. Its own pertormance history, studded with such dates and places as 1890 in St. Petersburg, 1921, 1939, and 1946 in London, is a crucial thread of the history of the art. And, then, survival and rebirth are among its subjects.
Pasternak said that he loved Pushkin's poetry because it was "full of things”; and this surely is true more of “Beauty” than of any of the old ballets. It is alive with the variety not only of ballet but also of life itself: as when in Petipa's or, better, Balanchine's Garland Dance in Act I the stage is full of men, women, and children; or when peasants and courtiers all dance in the farandole. It can be a great ballet in the theatre, but it is elusive - far more so than “Swan Lake” or “The Nutcracker”. During the seasons when there is no great “Beauty” to watch, however, it remains a marvellous idea of a ballet to run through in one's head — which is the only place where some details will probably now ever happen, such as the effect described in my favourite sentence from Petipa's scenario, when Aurora and the court awaken: "The dust and cobwebs disappear, candles illumine the room, the fire flares up in the fireplace." This clinching stroke, like many others in the ballet, might well belong in a novel-like the master of ceremonies whose hair is torn out and who, because it can never grow again, wears a fantastic wig ever after; or the foolish well-meaning knitting-women; or the hunt and the game of blind man's buff (subjects painted by Fragonard); or the journey by water through the sleeping forest; the arrival at the enchanted palace. The ballet is alive with the excitement of what nineteenth-century music-theatre could do. The panorama mobile of the Act II water-journey, which never works today as Petipa and Tchaikovsky intended, was based-like a similar journey in Act I of Wagner's 1882 “Parsifal” — on an earlier Beauty ballet: the 1829 “La Belle au bois dormant” by the librettist Scribe, the composer Hérold, the choreographer Aumer, and the designer Ciceri. And Petipa would have been influenced too by the precedent of Jules Perrot's 1849 ballet-féerie tale of a heroine over whom good and evil fairies conflict, “La Filleule des fées”, one of the first ballets revived by Perrot for Russia (in 1850) and one of his most unusual.
Three or four ditterent centuries seem to exist at the same time in “Beauty”. The Prince and his retinue dance an eighteenth-century minuet; the awakened courtiers dance in Act III (according to the ballet's plan) a seventeenth-century sarabande; and the music of every act of the ballet is steeped in the great dance of the nineteenth century, the waltz. Primarily, “Beauty” is about Versailles and the spirit of Louis XIV. Louis, who as a young man had seemed a young Apollo to the diarist John Evelyn, who took his famous Sun symbol from ballet and who was never seen to make an ill-considered or ungraceful gesture, made Versailles a court whose life of ritual and etiquette was described as "a perpetual ballet." But “Beauty” is also, in Act II, about the eighteenth century-about the endurance of Versailles atter Louis; and it suggest also the replication of Versailles in Imperial Russia. At the ballet's last climax, the old French anthem "Vive Henri Quatre" rings out. Now, at Covent Garden, the Lilac Fairy returns with her retinue to the stage; but what Vzevolozhsky, Tchaikovsky, and Petipa had in mind here was "Apollo in the costume of Louis XIV, illuminated by the sun and surrounded by fairies." (Not the Sun King as the Sun God, but vice versa!) This symbolic gesture makes the full historical suggestion of the ballet clear: it is about the continuance of the classical ideal (Apollo) by way of the Sun King and the emergence in France of ballet—and by implication, as crystallized in Tsarist Russia. At that point at the Kirov, today, fountains suddenly burst forth —reminiscent of Versailles and of the Tsar's summer palaces. But Apollo, the Sun King, the eruption of fountains - these are symbols that only have force if “Beauty” demonstrates the enduring life of academic dancing. You should sense the ancient Greek ideals of proportion, balance, and harmony, and the vitality of bodily line as it evolved through the French and Russian academies as the ballet's lifeblood. The ballet says, as Diaghilev did, "Classicism evolves."
History is peculiarly present in the ballet's very steps. Just look at the Rose Adagio. Don't pay too much attention to the balances; they only became a canonical part of the role in the West with Margot Fonteyn in the forties.<1> But look at the positions involved before, during, and after those balances. Aurora, in profile to us, prepares her left leg stretched betore her in croise tendu front. Then, as she takes a Prince's hand and arches one arm above her head, she raises that leg and keeps it angled behind her in effacé attitude back: which she sustains throughout the promenades, the bal-ances, and the successive Princes. Finally, as she lets go, she opens that same leg into first arabesque, her head and upper body now stretched towards the Those three positions, which characterise Aurora throughout the ballet, derive from different eras. The tendu front we associate with the minuet and the eighteenth century; the attitude with the 1820s neoclassicism of Carlo Blasis; and the long-stretched line of the first arabesque with the late nineteenth century, with the era of the Imperial Russian Ballet which produced “The Sleeping Beauty”. Aurora, daughter to King Florestan XXIV, embodies the whole Versailles spirit of classical-academic codification that pervaded Louis XIV's Royal Academies and its subsequent development. The tendu front, the attitude, the arabesque are signal events in every version of “Beauty”'s cho-reography, Russian or Western. Russian productions emphasise the baroque flavour of the ballet, with powdered wigs and a particular period flavour given to such older ingredients as that tendu front.<2> The importance of the attitude to “Beauty” has been widely acknowledged; and those balances have made it more so. The first arabesque is no less vital. In the long-lived 1946 Covent Garden production, with designs by Oliver Messel, the ballerina in her very first entrance would run on at the back, strike a first arabesque, and run off the other side, before re-entering in her lively first dance<3>. Aurora emphasises first arabesque in her big Act I violin variation,<4> and in each of her supported adagios— the Rose Adagio, the Vision Scene, the Wedding.
And when Aurora sleeps, ballet - formal, turned-out, classroom dancing; the danse d'école - sleeps. Ballet has existed before her, with her fairy god-mothers; and it exists around her in her attendants and, later, her wedding guests. But, until she reappears as a vision, the only dancing that occurs at all is the court dances and the peasants' farandole. Dance continues; for a hundred years, however, ballet vanishes. That's why the structure of the ballet is spoilt if modern producers allow the Prince to dance either an allegro ballet solo during the Hunt scene or an adagio one immediately after it. It is part of the ballet's poetic impact that, when the Prince discovers Aurora, he discovers ballet. When Aurora appears as a vision, she enters dancing, as she had in Act I; and when the Vision fades, we don't see ballet again until Act III. Throughout “The Sleeping Beauty”, ballet's existence is imperilled by the curse and then the spell. One of the work's themes, then, is the rebirth of ballet.
And isn't this the history of the art of academic dance? Ballet dies, again and again, or seems to. People have always been saying "It's all over, it's gone"; and they've often been right, inasmuch as what they've known as dance has come to an end. In 1739 — just about the implicit time of “Beauty's”’s second act, and soon after the Paris debut of the bounding sixteen-year-old virtuoso ballerina La Barbarina - a French play had an old man conversing with his daughter on dancing old and new. He adheres to the dancing of Lully's day: "People used to dance; now they jump." (She replies: "People walked, people ran, but they didn't dance; it's only in our day that people possess this art... This is the real era of dance.") Ballet died again with the French Revolution; and again with the decline of the Romantic era; and again with the combination of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and, in 1929, the death of Diaghilev. And now, after the deaths of George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton in the 1980s, we are witnessing another such death of ballet.
"She's dead!" Carabosse proclaims in Act I after the spindle has pricked Aurora's finger and she has fallen lifeless. General consternation and dismay, while Carabosse vanishes in a puff of smoke through the floor. Enter the Lilac Fairy, taking her time. "Can't you remember anything?" she mimes. (She does so at Covent Garden anyway; it's one of my favourite pieces of silly mime.) She goes on to remind them of her counter-prophecy. ("Oh, yes, now we remember," they all seem to say to each other.) It's comic. It's also beautiful, for she is saying, "She is not dead, but sleeps."
Aurora is not the only character in mythology who wakes from an enchanted sleep. Her story recalls that of Rip Van Winkle and, in the Nibelungen Ring story, that of Brünnhilde. (It was a coincidence that Perrault's original 1697 story of "The Beauty in the Sleeping Wood" was retold for English readers in Andrew Lang's “Blue Fairy Book” in 1889, while the ballet was in preparation. But in 1876 Tchaikovsky had seen Brünnhilde's awakening in the Bayreuth premiere of Wagner's “Ring” cycle.) All these stories, how-ever, have important differences. Aurora's awakening isn't like that of Rip van Winkle, who wakes to a sense of misplacement and nostalgia. It's more like that of Brünnhilde, who has been laid to sleep and surrounded with a ring of magic fire that only a fearless hero can enter; when Siegfried does so, he wakens her with a kiss; she wakes to joy. The charm and the significance of Aurora's story are that the old world sleeps and wakes with her.
And, when she wakes, she gives the Prince her hand. The bestowal of hands an image of betrothal is one of the key choreographic signs of the ballet, and it is the sign that is emblazoned on the ballet's great adagios. We first see supported adagio while Aurora is in her cradle, when the fairy god-mothers, using their partners' support, show the attitudes, arabesques, and pirouettes that will become part of Aurora's adagios. <5> And more than giving Aurora a vocabulary, this adagio is the first choreographic demonstration of chivalry in the ballet. (Like the adagios that Aurora then dances in each act, its melody takes its flow and rhythm from the Lilac Fairy's theme.) The history of supported adagio is not clear (there are hints of it in the way Fanny Elssler is described as using the support of her sister, Thérèse), but its spirit derives from the medieval concept of courtly love. And it seems now that “Beauty” is the first ballet to have made it central to our concept of classical ballet. A man helps a woman to perform on pointe feats that otherwise she could not do in that manner: in particular, long phrases in which she changes direction and shape while remaining on one pointe. This becomes noble and eloquent in Petipa, as later in Balanchine, because we are also shown, elsewhere and during the adagio, the considerable extent of what the ballerina can do without support.
Aurora is not only the most classical heroine from the old repertory, she is also the most modern. As in the plotless ballet of our twentieth century, Aurora is a heroine who hardly ever mimes, whose emotional inner life is not made important to us, who seems only to exist in terms of academic movement. And her steps make her real to us make her the heart of the ballet. Like a work by Balanchine, this is a theme-and-variation ballet; as Feodor Lopoukhov may have been the first to note, Aurora takes steps and floor-patterns from each of her godmothers. Roland John Wiley has written in “Tchaikovsky's Ballets” that the sound world of Act III is less magical, more materialistic than that of the Prologue and Act I; the harp is replaced by the piano. Likewise Lopoukhov, whose Petrograd staging of “Beauty” was of immense importance, observes that whereas only effacé positions and en dehors movements are used in the Prologue and Act I, croisé and en dedans become part of the choreographic texture in Acts II and III, as if part of the shadow cast by Carabosse. The new world does not have the unclouded radiance of the old one. But it has more wisdom, as we see with Aurora's dances, which rise to their most complex and various in her great third-act variation.
I spoke of the present death of ballet. Right now, “The Sleeping Beauty” is one of the surest victims. Its inner life has steadily faded in Kirov, Bolshoi, and Royal performances during the last twenty years; nor has any other company definitively picked up its torch. <6> But “Beauty” has always been a work in progress. When the current Covent Garden production was new, Ninette de Valois went on making improvements for the first nine months; and I'm always moved to think of her words then "We must get it right." There are features that were so finely developed by post-Petipa generations such as Fonteyn's balances that they have now become part of the ballet. The hundred years of the ballet's performance history also contain several rebirths. The Diaghilev staging was surely one the most influential failure in dance history. ("I have been fifteen years too early with this production," he said.) Only four years had passed since the Russian Revolution. How moving that Diaghilev, the originator of "Etonne-moi" and all that, should have chosen that moment to turn to this, of all the old ballets from lost St. Petersburg. Like Aeneas fleeing from Troy with the penates, the home-gods, of his old city, Diaghilev was, with his Sleeping Princess, rebuilding St. Petersburg in the West. Just as Ninette de Valois would later take those penates and made them central to Royal Ballet tradition. Just as Vzevolozhsky, Tchaikovsky, and Petipa had already taken Versailles and rebuilt it in St. Petersburg, Classicism not only evolves; it migrates.
NOTES
“When I first did the Rose Adagio, I did not do any of those sustained balances; I cannot even remember when they first emerged. Although I never saw Markova do ‘Sleeping Beauty’, people described to me how she would maintain marvellous balance while changing hands with the various suitors, so then I started experimenting. The greatest difficulty is to manage to do it without making a great fuss; it is only really valid if one can make it seem as easy as getting off a bus." Margot Fonteyn in Keith Money's “The Art of Margot Fonteyn”.
The particular importance of this tendu pose to the Russian tradition of performing this ballet is confirmed by its presence in photographs of Anna Pavlova (in heeled baroque shoes, in Bakst's 1916 designs) and of Olga Spessivtseva's Aurora (in pointe shoes, in the 1921 Diaghilev-Bakst production); and by its presence in Balanchine's most Beauty-inspired choreography—Theme and Variations.
Aurora's entrance in Act I has been the subject of much confusion and revision. I believe that in the 1890 St. Petersburg production she entered down a flight of steps, and that it was the 1921 Diaghilev production that added Petersburgro utur a runeing along behind a colonnade at the back of the stage. (In a 1984 interview, Freder ick Ashton told me that this was the one specific image he had of Olga Spessivtseva in this production.) The 1939 Vic- Wells staging, like Soviet productions, used the fight of steps; the 1946 restored the first entrance along the back as in Diaghilev's staging; the 1968 revision reverted to the flight of steps. I do not recall the entrance in th short-lived MacMillan staging; Ninette de Valois restored the run along the back for the present, 1977 staging but with Aurora stopping for only a little pose, such as in fourth position on pointe. The first arabesque seems to have been invented for the Messel production -and then to have been relegated to oblivion. (In the designs for Act I that are currently in use at Covent Garden, there is not space for Aurora to show a first arabesque.)
Vera Trefilova, according to Mary Skeaping, "in the variation stressed the arabesque allongée at the beginning and she stretched and stretched forward and then came out of it into attitude pose, with less emphasis on the chassé and glissade which came in between." (A Conversation with Mary Skeaping, Peter Anastos. Ballet Review, vol. 6 no 1.) This is very much the way that Fonteyn, by all accounts, phrased the variation; Antoinette Sibley has often spoken of how easily Fonteyn just "walked" from position to position here, whereas she, Sibley, "just had to" stress all the transitional steps.
I base this on the assumption that the presence of cavaliers in the Prologue adagio as seen at the Royal Ballet is authentic Petipa. The Kirov and Bolshoi Prologue adagios, however, omit cavaliers from the choreographic climax, and instead have a striking line-up of fairies un-supported on pointe. Whether or not this was Petersburg Petipa, it probably became Petrograd Petipa, for Balanchine took that image and built on it in Theme and Variations.
Work on getting back to the 1890 “Sleeping Beauty” has continued, albeit in fits and starts. This essay was written before Sergei Vikharev’s short-lived 1990 Kirov reconstruction of the 1890 Maryinsky Sleeping Beauty production was seen in the West. It was also written before the Boston Ballet revival of Ninette de Valois’s 1977 Covent Garden Sleeping Beauty and Alexei Ratmansky’s short-lived American Ballet Theatre production of Sleeping Beauty, based on the closest study to date of the 1890 Stepanov notation. For the latter, see my September 2021 document “A Hundred and twelve questions on ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, A Hundred and twelve answers”. AM, February 2026.
<First published in Dancing Times, May 1990. Republished in Robert Gottlieb’s anthology Reading Dance.>