Jump to content

Sleeping Beauty history - books?


Recommended Posts

Many years ago, when ROH Insight events were rather more in-depth than they are now, there was a wonderful talk by Giannandrea Poesio on the history of the Sleeping Beauty. He mentioned in passing that he hoped one day to do a book about that ballet. Much to my disappointment this book has yet to appear, so, while we wait, does anyone know of a detailed account of the history and symbolism of Sleeping Beauty (in English, as sadly I don't read Russian)?

 

There are of course various short summaries all over the place but as we are about to start another ROH run I feel the need to read something more substantial.

 

This forum is great for hints of the intricacies but the clues are widely dispersed across many posts (so far as I know there isn't a topic just on the history of this most interesting and complex of ballets). I would love to know more (the breadcrumbs, the in-jokes about people at court and so on) so any clues on where to start would be most welcome.

 

Incidentally, clicking around looking for online research, I discovered a rather nice page about Tchaikovsky's work on the ballet (it looks like Wikipedia but isn't):-

 

http://en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/The_Sleeping_Beauty

 

Finally, a small question about ROH performance history which maybe someone on here knows the answer to. I saw a ROH production in the 1960s (not the classic one but the one which followed it and was then superseded by Peter Wright's 1968 production) and wonder about what I think I saw. After Aurora pricked her finger on the thimble, my memory is that they somehow engineered the spindle on to a trap door, so that at a suitable point, the trap descended and the spindle was made to vanish. Did I really see this or is it a false memory?

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Welcome to the Forum, Sebastian. Not necessarily history, as I know of none, but Gordon Anthony's Sleeping Princess Camera Studies, published in the 1940's, is a fine pictorial book, as are all his Camera Studies books. That really is the only book I'm aware of that deals exclusively with the subject. Sorry if that isn't much help.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

http://www.for-ballet-lovers-only.com/Beauty1.html

 

Sebastian, you might be interested in Doug Fullington's very long piece about the reconstruction of Sleeping Beauty for the Mariinsky Ballet - there are lots of historical details there.

 

Also, the US-based forum Balletalert has a long thread about the ballet, 58 topics ranging from history to trivia. It's in the section Ballets and Choreographers.

Edited by Jane S
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Tim Scholl's book is extremely interesting, but unfortunately seems to be out of print. A search on the web offered a new copy for £50 and used copies for around £30, which seems an awful lot for what is quite a slim volume. An hour long lecture by Tim Scholl about certain aspects of the reconstructed Sleeping Beauty can be found on Youtube. Another good source for the history of the 1890 production is Roland John Wiley's book on the Tchaikovsky ballets

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you are in London, Sebastian, you can enjoy reading it in the excellent reading rooms of the new British Library:

 

"Sleeping beauty," a legend in progress / Tim Scholl.

Tim Scholl, 1962-
New Haven, Conn. ; London : Yale University Press, 2004.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

After Aurora pricked her finger on the thimble, my memory is that they somehow engineered the spindle on to a trap door, so that at a suitable point, the trap descended and the spindle was made to vanish. Did I really see this or is it a false memory?

 

Apologies: "thimble" should of course also be "spindle" (must have been autocomplete doing its best with my terrible typing!)

 

Thank you for your most interesting suggestions. I am lucky to have access to a university library at the moment so obscurity / expense are not obstacles. I look forward to reading into why Petipa made the choreographic choices he did.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I can't help thinking that it's a great pity that Cyril Beaumont did not follow up his books on Giselle and Swan Lake by writing a third volume "The Ballet Called Sleeping Beauty".If he had, we would not only know the ballet's history at least up to the point at which it entered the Vic Wells repertory in the late 1930's, but we should also have a very good idea about the choreographic text and its variants,up to that time.As far as actual books are concerned Wiley's book on the Tchaikovsky ballets is invaluable for anyone really interested in learning about the extraordinary development of ballet on the Imperial stage at the end of the nineteenth century. Tim Scholl's book on Sleeping Beauty is excellent and if, after you have read it, you decide that you want a copy you might strike it lucky as it sometimes turns up cheaply on the internet.Remember Amazon  is not the only site for the sale of used books.

 

Looking to the future it will be interesting to see what 2018, the bicentenary of Petipa's birth, will produce in the way of books and DVDs.Will we finally get a biography of Petipa in English comparable to that which Ivor Guest wrote about Jules Perrot? I am sure that there will be plenty of material published in Russia but I do wonder whether much of it will be translated into English or French. Then there is the question of price. Will any of it be available at a reasonable price rather than the sort of prices usually reserved for academic books?

 

 I sincerely hope that the companies which have staged reconstructions of Petipa's ballets in recent years. particularly those with which Ratmansky has worked, perform their reconstructions during 2018 and that they issue DVDs of them. The Bolshoi have staged reconstructions not only of Le Corsaire but also of Esmeralda and Coppelia. It would be wonderful to have access to all of them and being really greedy I would like to think that the full length version of Corsaire will find its way onto DVD. I somehow doubt that the Mariinsky will be brave enough to issue a DVD of their reconstructed Sleeping Beauty from the 1990's. As far as Ratmansky's work in the West is concerned is it too much to hope that ABT will issue a DVD of their reconstructed Sleeping Beauty with Trenary as Aurora or that his reconstructed Swan Lake will also make it onto DVD? It seems to me that all of these reconstructions are of significance and that they should be made available to a public which may never be able to see them in the theatre but would there be sufficient demand for them?

 

If you believe in the myth of ""improved" technique then such efforts at reviving older performance styles and musicality are pointless and difficult to watch because the performances look wrong.If you believe that the so called "improvements" in technique represent a shift in emphasis from technique as a means to an end, to technique as an end in itself and that other essential elements of dance, such as sensitive variations of dynamic and musicality, and nuance in performance, have tended to be ignored in this shift of emphasis then you may see this "early dance movement" as restoring a range of performance options to the dancer a bit like restoring a range of colours to a painter's palette 

 

Finally I can't help wondering whether Ratmansky will eventually be remembered more as a man committed to reconstructing and staging Petipa's choreography with period appropriate musicality and performance style and thus the founder of a flourishing "early dance movement" comparable with the early music movement  than as a choreographer in his own right?   

Edited by FLOSS
  • Like 8
Link to comment
Share on other sites

In addition to the Scholl, mentioned above, have you looked at Petipa's memoirs? Called "Russian Ballet Master" it was translated by Helen Whittaker and edited by Lilian Moore. It was published in New York in 1958 (Macmillan, I believe) and republished by Dance Books in London in the 1970s. I think they might have reprinted some years later. The book is somewhat superficial and doesn't really go into dealing with the questions you raise in any detail. It is, however, worth a look.

 

The most useful sources of the information you seek are, I think, two monographs, which you should be able to find if you have access to an adequate university library. The first, chronologically, is Yuri Slonimsky's "Marius Petipa" in Dance Index Vol VI nos 5 and 6 (1947). The translation is by Anatole Chujoy. The second (and I think most useful) is Vera Krasovskaya's  "Marius Petipa and The Sleeping Beauty" . The translation is by Cynthia Read and the work was published as issue 49 of Dance Perspectives in Spring 1972. Only 56 pages long this work is full of the information you seek about the creation of Beauty and contains both a description and analysis of the choreography and production. It puts the work (fairly concisely) into the context of Petipa's career and has excellent illustrations (usually photographs) of cast and sets.

 

I can't help with your other query about a Royal ballet production immediately prior to the 1968 one, but I assume that Dance and Dancers for the relevant period would have the production reviews in some detail. There is also an Arlene Croce article in Ballet Review Vol III no 4 from 1970 dealing with the Royal Ballet in New York called "Annals of the Sleeping Beauty".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't think there was a production between the 1946 version and Peter Wright's in 1968, was there? They tweaked the 1946 one a bit over the years but the Wright was the first completely new one.

 

Jane S, you are of course correct: I was condensing a friend's offhand comment about changes between 1946 and Sir Peter's version of 1968. Incidentally, following another RB production in 1973, 1977 saw Madam have another go, at what was called at the time a "back to the grassroots" production, which made Carabosse less of a witch (among other changes to 1946). This returns us to my original question about the "magical" (witch-like) disappearance of the spindle in or around 1963/4.

 

Ongoing thanks to everyone: Douglas Allen, thank you in particular for some most interesting leads, which I will certainly follow up.

Edited by Sebastian
Link to comment
Share on other sites

An amusing aside: I have just been reading the article A CONTEXT FOR PETIPA by Roland John Wiley (in Dance Research, 2003) which begins:-

 

For a person quite so celebrated, Marius Petipa remains something of a mystery. Most accounts of him suffer deficiencies of fact or context, and provide a salient detail or two amidst the broadest generalisations.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I just came across a short piece about "Sadler's Wells Ballet Books", edited by Arnold Haskell and published by The Bodley Head - probably in the late 1940s. They are described as "lucidly written and compactly contrived booklets aimed at helping the public to know the repertoire of the Sadlers Wells Ballet...All phases in the creation of the ballet are covered..Each volume is devoted to the works of a specific Wells choreographer".

 

One is "The Sleeping Beauty" with articles by Sacheverell Sitwell, Joy Newton, Dyneley Hussey and Tamara Karsavina. I haven't read it but imagine that, as a "booklet", it's on a scale different from Scholl and Wiley. But it may possibly be of interest in connection with the 1946 production; and Karsavina might have something to say about the performance history in Imperial Russia and after.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

There is a book called  "Era of the Russian Ballet  1770-1965" by Natalia Roslavleva published in English by Gollancz in 1966 which you may find of interest as it puts Petipa into his historical context as far as the development of ballet in Russia is concerned.It only allocates five or six pages to the Sleeping Beauty itself, the author had to deal with Petpa's entire career in a single chapter, but it does help you to understand the ballet's significance, or perhaps what its significance was thought to be, in Russia in the mid 1960's. I am not sure whether there was a party line which had to be followed by this time or not. I think that it is well worth reading as it includes a whole chapter on Ivanov and one on Gorsky and the Dramatic Movement in Ballet. While Wiley wrote a whole book about Ivanov I'm not so sure that there is anything much available in English about Gorsky.

Edited by FLOSS
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 9 months later...
On 24 January 2017 at 09:46, FLOSS said:

I can't help thinking that it's a great pity that Cyril Beaumont did not follow up his books on Giselle and Swan Lake by writing a third volume "The Ballet Called Sleeping Beauty".If he had, we would not only know the ballet's history at least up to the point at which it entered the Vic Wells repertory in the late 1930's, but we should also have a very good idea about the choreographic text and its variants,up to that time.

 

FLOSS, I recently had the opportunity to consult the papers of Cyril Beaumont held by the V&A. There is indeed clear evidence Beaumont was flirting with the idea of doing a successor to his books on Giselle and Swan Lake, and that he had begun to encourage his collaborator/s in Russia to send him relevant material. However beyond a few translations of key texts - and some detailed notes on the history of the choreography - there is little which could be considered a work in progress. The collection seems to hold no drafts by Beaumont himself - except for the Sleeping Beauty sections of his earlier "Complete Book of Ballets" and some sleeve notes for a recording of the SB music - which suggests he didn't get much further. As you say, a great pity. 

  • Like 4
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/22/2017 at 13:57, Wulff said:

Tim Scholl's book is extremely interesting, but unfortunately seems to be out of print. A search on the web offered a new copy for £50 and used copies for around £30, which seems an awful lot for what is quite a slim volume. An hour long lecture by Tim Scholl about certain aspects of the reconstructed Sleeping Beauty can be found on Youtube. Another good source for the history of the 1890 production is Roland John Wiley's book on the Tchaikovsky ballets

 

Not just "another good source" , Wiley'a work on Russian Imperial ballet is the authoritative source in English. Roland Wiley is a professional musicologist with main focus on Russian 19th century music and ballet, Scholl is a professor of Russian and comparative literature responding to the popular demand among the ballet going public caused by the amount of coverage "reconstructions" and "authentic Petipa" were receiving in the madia.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...