Pavane For A Sleeping Beauty: A Song History

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"Pavane For A Sleeping Beauty" is the English name for "Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant," the opening movement of Maurice Ravel's Ma mère l'Oye (Mother Goose), a set of five children's pieces for piano four hands.[1] Ravel began the set in 1908 as a present for Mimi and Jean Godebski, the children of his friends Cipa and Ida Godebski.[2] Its title points to Sleeping Beauty, one of the stories in Charles Perrault's collection of tales, which helped inspire the suite, and its form, the pavane, a slow dance of Spanish origin, was one Ravel had already used in his earlier Pavane for a Dead Princess.[2]

Drawing of a princess asleep on a bench beside a spinning wheel as a young prince enters the room, with an old woman in a chair

Sleeping Beauty (Dornröschen), graphite with white heightening on brown paper, 1864. A drawing of the Sleeping Beauty tale; it has no connection to Ravel's music.

Two girls, eleven-year-old Jeanne Leleu and fourteen-year-old Geneviève Durony, gave the first performance of the duet at a concert in Paris on 20 April 1910.[1] Ravel scored the suite for orchestra in 1911, and Durand issued the orchestral version in 1912; that version soon ranked among the most often performed of all his music.[3][4] He also reworked the music as a ballet, adding a prelude, a new opening scene and linking passages, and it reached the stage at the Théâtre des Arts in Paris on 28 January 1912.[3]

Shelley Stevens includes the pavane in Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer, a Fingers Of Steel book that gives each of its classical pieces in both standard notation and tablature for a DAD-tuned dulcimer fitted with a 6.5 fret.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Pavane For A Sleeping Beauty"

Sources

  1. IRCAM: "Ma mère l'Oye (1908)".
  2. The Orchestra Now (Bard College): "Concert Notes: Ravel's Mother Goose Suite".
  3. Musikproduktion Höflich, Repertoire Explorer: "Maurice Ravel, Ma mère l'Oye (complete ballet), preface".
  4. The Morgan Library & Museum: "Ma mère l'oye: cinq pièces enfantines (full score, Durand, c1912)".
  5. Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer".
  6. Image: Sleeping Beauty (Dornröschen), graphite with white heightening on brown paper, 1864. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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