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What makes a ballet about a children's fairy tale have such incredible staying power with adult audiences? The great classical ballet The Sleeping Beauty is considered a masterpiece today because both its score and its choreography are flawlessly constructed and magical. In the first production, music, libretto, choreography and design were equal partners--not the usual case in the late 1900s, when designers, composers and balletmasters often worked completely separately. The young Alexandre Benois, who saw the ballet in its first season, called it a "work of Total Art." All production elements were so well blended and balanced that it was impossible to say which was most important. Successful productions of this ballet make use of this factor; unsuccessful ones ignore it.
That having been said, it is necessary to state that few ballets have left such a clear record of "trips to the woodshed" when the creators took their original ideas and modified them in order to make a successful ballet. Full-scale productions in the Imperial Russian style were introduced into the west by the 1921 Diaghilev revival, and most of the western and many of the modern Russian productions owe much to this watershed. It is rather odd to hear stories of how many dancers' first memories of ballet are of Sleeping Beauty. It's the ballet that made Anna Pavlova know that she was a dancer. Thirty years later, Ulanova's mother was dancing the Lilac Fairy when 4-year-old Galina piped up to the whole theater, "That's my Mommy!" Many still consider this ballet a basic building block in constructing an appreciation of classical ballet.--Mel Johnson
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