Once upon a time… or maybe “once upon a dream?”
We’re finding out where the famous waltz melody from the 1959 animated Disney film “Sleeping Beauty” comes from this week on Classical Sprouts!
The song "Once Upon a Dream" was used in the Disney movie adaptation of "Sleeping Beauty."
But did you know that it wasn’t actually written for the movie?
This piece is called the "Grande valse villageoise" (often called "The Garland Waltz"), and it’s actually from a ballet!
“The Sleeping Beauty” is a fairytale ballet with music written by Pyotr Illych Tchaikovsky.
Tchaikovsky also wrote the music for two other popular ballets that you might have heard of, “Swan Lake” and "The Nutcracker."
However, Tchaikovsky didn’t come up with the story of this famous fairytale. It’s actually been around for hundreds of years.
It tells the story of a princess named Aurora, and the evil spell that is cast upon her when she’s born.
This spell will make it so that on her 16th birthday, she will prick her finger on a spindle (that’s a tool used for spinning wool), and fall asleep for 100 years, only to be awakened by the true love’s kiss of a handsome prince!
(Wait, how does he fall in love with her if she's asleep and can't even talk to him? Ok, seems weird... anyway…)
There are fairies, birthday parties, woodsmen, princes, princesses and ultimately (spoiler alert) a beautiful wedding, and a beautiful musical score to accompany it all.
This famous Garland waltz comes in right at Aurora’s 16th birthday party.
The day has a nervous air to it, because the king and queen remember that today is the day that Aurora will fall asleep.
So, to brighten up the day, the kingdom is decorated beautifully in honor of the princess, and this waltz, the garland waltz, is the music that plays as they prepare to celebrate the princess’s birthday.
In the Disney version of this fairy tale however, writers took this melody, and added lyrics to it, and made it the love duet between Princess Aurora and Prince Phillip when they first meet.
Or so it seems it’s their first meeting… perhaps they met once upon a dream!
Classical Sprouts is produced by Emily Duncan Wilson.
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