Fairy Tale Lore of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty Waltz
The Backstory

A fairy tale with a very strict shopping list

Back in May 1888, Ivan Vsevolozhsky from the Imperial Theatres in Saint Petersburg asked me to write a new ballet based on Charles Perrault's old fairy tale. He wrote the story himself and teamed up with the ballet master Marius Petipa to map out all the dances. Petipa handed me a list of instructions so detailed it looked like a recipe from a head chef who does not trust you alone near the stove. Instead of feeling boxed in by all his rules, I found that having the exact measurements made it a pleasure to sit down and invent the music.

Packing a waltz in my suitcase

I sketched out the first ideas for the Sleeping Beauty Waltz in January 1889 while staying at my quiet country home in Frolovskoye near Klin. Right after getting those notes down on paper, I had to pack my bags for a long concert tour across Germany, Switzerland, France, and England. Conducting orchestras all over Europe kept me busy until April, though that swirling tune never really left the back of my mind. It is funny how a melody meant for a fairy-tale palace had to spend its first few months bouncing around in train compartments and hotel rooms.

Summer flowers in the Russian countryside

Once I finally got back to my peaceful house in Frolovskoye, I could trade my conductor's baton for my writing desk again. I finished writing out all the orchestral parts for the waltz in June 1889, right when the countryside around me was in full summer bloom. Working in that quiet house after months of noisy train stations felt like stepping out of a crowded market into a cool garden. You can probably hear a bit of that fresh country air in the music, even if it is dressed up for a royal celebration.

Gardening on the dance floor

In the story, this music serves as the sixth number of the first act, right in the middle of the big party for Princess Aurora. Because the court youths and villagers dance around carrying big arches of flowers, people quickly started calling it the Garland Waltz. It also picked up the French nickname Grande valse villageoise, which sounds much fancier than a bunch of neighbors waving greenery at each other. Watching dancers keep their balance in three-quarter time while holding heavy flower arrangements is quite a sport in itself.

Bringing the whole brass section to a birthday

To make that celebration sound properly festive, I wrote the piece in B-flat major and asked for a rather large crowd of instruments. Along with the strings and woodwinds, I brought in four horns, two cornets, two trumpets, three trombones, and even a tuba to give the tune some weight. Then I added percussion like the tambourine, triangle, and a sparkling glockenspiel so the whole room would shimmer. It might seem like a lot of firepower for a sixteenth birthday, unless you remember that the host is a king.

The world's most expensive shrug

Before the official opening night, we held a grand dress rehearsal at the Mariinsky Theatre in January 1890 for Tsar Alexander III and his court. After the curtain came down, the Tsar called me up to the imperial box, and I stood there waiting for some grand royal verdict on my months of hard work. He simply looked at me and said the ballet was very nice, which is the sort of compliment you usually give a distant cousin's new haircut. Nobody knows for sure if he found my music too rich for his taste or if he just disliked the show's grand tribute to the French court of Louis XIV.

The audience disagrees with the emperor

Thankfully, when the premiere took place the very next evening on 15 January 1890, the paying public was much warmer than the Tsar. Riccardo Drigo conducted the orchestra, and Carlotta Brianza danced the part of Princess Aurora with wonderful grace. A few music critics grumbled that my score sounded too much like a symphony to be a proper ballet, as if good tunes were somehow bad for the feet. The audience in Saint Petersburg ignored the critics completely and turned the show into an immediate hit at the box office.

Four hands are better than two

Back in those days, if people loved a new piece from the theatre, the only way to hear it at home was to play it on their own piano. My Moscow publisher, Pyotr Jurgenson, had Aleksandr Ziloti prepare a piano version of the ballet in 1889, just before the curtain even went up. Soon after, a brilliant young fellow named Sergei Rachmaninoff arranged the waltz for piano four-hands under Ziloti's watchful eye. Sitting two people on one piano bench to play a big waltz is a reliable way to test a friendship, especially when the elbows start flying.

A puzzle I left behind

In February 1890, I wrote to Jurgenson with the idea of pulling the best parts of the ballet together into a shorter suite for concert halls. I talked about letting Ziloti help pick the movements, though life got busy and I never got around to finishing that selection myself. Six years after I passed away, Jurgenson finally published the five-movement concert suite in December 1899 with the waltz as its grand finale. To this day, nobody knows who actually made the final list of pieces for that suite, though I am glad they had the sense to end with the waltz.

My melody goes to the movies

Long after my time, my waltz took a trip to America and found a whole new life in Walt Disney's 1959 animated film Sleeping Beauty. George Bruns adapted my music while Sammy Fain and Jack Lawrence wrote English words for it, turning my instrumental dance into the song Once Upon a Dream. Some people assume the movie studio wrote that tune from scratch, not realizing it started out in my Russian country house seventy years earlier. I certainly never pictured cartoons singing my melody, yet it warms my heart that children everywhere can hum my favorite waltz before they ever step inside a concert hall.