The Sleeping Beauty

The most sumptuous and dreamlike ballet, almost the “ballet par excellence”: The Sleeping Beauty, when it was first performed in St Petersburg in 1890, saw the development of an exemplary collaboration between choreographer (Petipa), composer (Tchaikovsky), and the director of the Imperial Theatres, Vsevoložskij, who also created the costumes, to present to the Petersburg nobility the fabulous grandeur of the court of King Louis XIV. It was at La Scala that Nureyev entrusted the debut of his Sleeping Beauty in 1966, performing on stage alongside Carla Fracci in a role considered a key ballet in his artistic life. From the original choreography, Nureyev managed to preserve its purity while infusing it with a new theatrical breath, with a complex choreography that revealed the characters’ psychology, the Prince among them. Six years after the previous performances, the production returns in the setting created by Oscar-winning designer Franca Squarciapino for La Scala in 1993, splendid in its exquisite décor and costumes evoking the court of Versailles.