Sleeping Beauty

Item details

• Description +

  • Arranged by Scott Weatherson
    Duration: 7 min.
    
    Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty (1889), is a mainstay of the classical repertoire, alongside his other famous ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. The ballet tells the fairytale story of Princess Aurora, who was put to sleep for 100 years by the evil fairy Carabosse. 
    
    This arrangement contains two dances from the ballet – the March (Marche de salon) heard early in the prologue where many of the dancers make their first appearance on stage, and the well known Waltz (Grande valse villageoise) from Act 1, a dance performed by the townsfolk on Princess Aurora's 16th birthday, which precedes the entrance of the princess to the stage. 
    
    The arrangement is for 7 players and requires glockenspiel, two vibraphones and two to four marimbas (including one 5 octave instrument). Marimbas 1 & 2 can share a 4.3 octave instrument and marimbas 3 & 4 share the 5 octave instrument. Two mallet playing is used throughout by all instruments.

• Instrumentation +

  • Percussion Ensemble (7 players)
    
    Required Instruments:
    1 Glockenspiel
    2 Vibraphones
    2-4 Marimbas (including one 5 octave instrument. Marimbas 1 & 2 can share a 4.3 octave instrument and marimbas 3 & 4 share the 5 octave instrument)

• Watch+

• About the composer +

  • Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (25 April / 7 May 1840 – 25 October/6 November 1893), often anglicized as Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky /ˈpiːtər .../, was a Russian composer of the late-Romantic period, some of whose works are among the most popular music in the classical repertoire. He was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally, bolstered by his appearances as a guest conductor in Europe and the United States. Tchaikovsky was honored in 1884 by Emperor Alexander III, and awarded a lifetime pension. 
    
    Although musically precocious, Tchaikovsky was educated for a career as a civil servant. There was scant opportunity for a musical career in Russia at that time and no system of public music education. When an opportunity for such an education arose, he entered the nascent Saint Petersburg Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1865. The formal Western-oriented teaching he received there set him apart from composers of the contemporary nationalist movement embodied by the Russian composers of The Five, with whom his professional relationship was mixed. Tchaikovsky's training set him on a path to reconcile what he had learned with the native musical practices to which he had been exposed from childhood. From this reconciliation, he forged a personal but unmistakably Russian style—a task that did not prove easy. The principles that governed melody, harmony and other fundamentals of Russian music ran completely counter to those that governed Western European music; this seemed to defeat the potential for using Russian music in large-scale Western composition or from forming a composite style, and it caused personal antipathies that dented Tchaikovsky's self-confidence. Russian culture exhibited a split personality, with its native and adopted elements having drifted apart increasingly since the time of Peter the Great. This resulted in uncertainty among the intelligentsia about the country's national identity—an ambiguity mirrored in Tchaikovsky's career. 
    
    Despite his many popular successes, Tchaikovsky's life was punctuated by personal crises and depression. Contributory factors included his early separation from his mother for boarding school followed by his mother's early death, the death of his close friend and colleague Nikolai Rubinstein, and the collapse of the one enduring relationship of his adult life, which was his 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck. His same-sex orientation, which he kept private, has traditionally also been considered a major factor, though some musicologists now downplay its importance. Tchaikovsky's sudden death at the age of 53 is generally ascribed to cholera; there is an ongoing debate as to whether cholera was indeed the cause of death, or if it was accidental or self-inflicted. 
    
    While his music has remained popular among audiences, critical opinions were initially mixed. Some Russians did not feel it was sufficiently representative of native musical values and expressed suspicion that Europeans accepted the music for its Western elements. In an apparent reinforcement of the latter claim, some Europeans lauded Tchaikovsky for offering music more substantive than base exoticism, and said he transcended stereotypes of Russian classical music. Others dismissed Tchaikovsky's music as "lacking in elevated thought," according to longtime New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg, and derided its formal workings as deficient because they did not stringently follow Western principles.

• Credits +

  • Front Cover Graphics and Layout: Ronni Kot Wenzell
    Engraving: Scott Weatherson & CPH Engraving
    Printed in Copenhagen, Denmark
    Copyright © Edition Svitzer
    www.editionsvitzer.com

Related publications

Le tombeau de Couperin

Ma Mère l`Oye

Carmen Suite No. 1

Air on a G String

Prelude No. 5, D Major

Polovtsian Dances

Carmen - Suite from the Opera