Sleeping Beauty

Finale

Opinions differ as to which is Tchaikovsky’s greatest ballet, his first (Swan Lake), his last (Nutcracker) or Sleeping Beauty which he wrote between the two. Certainly, Charles Perrault’s fairy story delighted the composer “beyond all description” and inspired what he rightly considered to be one of his finest scores. On its first performance in St Petersburg in 1890, however, the Tsar could find nothing more enthusiastic to say about it than “Very nice!” Unless the Tsar was asleep, it was a very inadequate reaction to a ballet masterpiece. And he surely could not have slept through the rousing Finale in which the whole company celebrates the wedding of the once sleeping beauty to Prince Désiré who had awakened her with the required kiss. It takes the form of a very lively and brightly coloured mazurka including two contrasting episodes but ending on an even higher dynamic level and at an even quicker tempo than it began.