Tchaikovsky’s inspiration and timeline to crafting one of ballet’s greatest scores.
By Jasmine Fuller Cane
Despite only composingthree ballets in his lifetime, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s name has become synonymous with ballet, and for good reason. His melodious earworms and impeccable use of instrumentation evoking otherworldly landscapes is a recipe for scores that beg for movement and the reason why much of his music, not originally intended for dance, has ended up in ballet canon. So it’s no wonder the three pieces he did create specifically for ballet—Swan Lake (1876), The Sleeping Beauty (1889), and The Nutcracker (1892)—have all become hallmarks of the art form.
This March, the melodies of Tchaikovsky’s incredible Sleeping Beauty will fill the Wortham once again through Ben Stevenson’s extravagant rendition. The Artistic Director Emeritus first premiered his 1967 retelling for Houston in 1978. In 1990, designs by Desmond Heeley, fondly remembered as the “Santa Claus of designers” by Stevenson, revitalized Stevenson’s retelling into the ballet Houston audiences know and love today. Stevenson’s version doesn’t stray far from the source material given to Tchaikovsky by the ballet’s original librettist, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, and this is unsurprising, considering that Stevenson is on record in a 2016 lecture saying that what inspires him is “Music, music, music.”
“I am planning to write a libretto based on La Belle au Bois Dormant after [Charles] Perrault’s fairy tale … If this idea appeals to you, why not undertake to write the music?” Vsevolozhsky wrote in a letter to Tchaikovsky in 1888. The French tale tells the story of a beautiful princess cursed to fall into a deep sleep for 100 years—due to the spite of an uninvited, wicked fairy—only to awaken with true love’s kiss. However, the ballet makes a few changes, omitting Perrault’s fierce ogress (also like The Brothers Grimm did), but still drawing inspiration from the many fairy tale characters Perrault introduced in his career.
Although Tchaikovsky found the material to be “extremely likeable and poetic,” his start on the music was delayed. In the throes of wrapping his Fifth Symphony and Hamlet Overture, Tchaikovsky didn’t begin working on the composition until he could meet with Vsevolozhsky and choreographer Marius Petipa, who gave detailed instructions as to how the dances should unfold, five months later.
Come the new year in 1889, Tchaikovsky made significant progress on his ballet score, refining the Rose Adagio and Act I Waltz and Finale. By January 20, he wrote to his confidante Nadezhda von Meck that he had completed two acts. His work continued at a steady pace, with the fairy variations and character dances for the third act finished by spring. By May, Tchaikovsky reported a surge of creativity, completing the composition and moving on to orchestration; by the end of August, the full score was complete.
Tchaikovsky’s quick compositional turnaround can be attributed to the ballet’s subject matter. “The subject is so poetical,” Tchaikovsky wrote. “It is so suited for music, that in composing it I was utterly absorbed, and wrote with a fervour and passion which always result in work of merit.” Although Tchaikovsky was often disappointed with his works, The Sleeping Beauty struck a different chord with the composer, calling it one of his best works yet.
More than a century later, it’s clear that Tchaikovsky’s instincts were right. The magic of The Sleeping Beauty continues to captivate audiences, proving that, indeed, this ballet remains one of the finest jewels in the ballet world’s crown.