SLEEPING BEAUTY

The classical story was preserved, but two new characters were introduced, Bibi and Berta, the commentators of the events. Music, marionettes and the ingenious set make this performance a real pleasure, both for children and for adults. The story was published for the first time by Charles Perrault in 1697.
There is also an older version by Giambattista Basile from 1634. In 1959, Walt Disney created a cartoon, very popular among children and, in 1890, Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky wrote the music for the famous ballet. At the christening of the kings daughter, the good fairies bring gifts for the princess such as beauty and the talent for singing. The bad fairy curses the young princess to prick her finger in the spindle of a spinning wheel and die on her sixteenth birthday. One of the good fairies doesnt have the power to remove the curse but changes it to sleep instead of death. The king is afraid and orders every spinning wheel in the kingdom to be burned. After sixteen years, at the princesss birthday party the curse is accomplished and the whole kingdom falls into a profound sleep. After one hundred years, a handsome prince is passing by, enters into the castle and, impressed by the princesss beauty, kneels, kisses her and she wakes up.   Charles Perrault (1628- 1703) is one of the "patriarchs" of fairy tales together with the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen. A French writer and important theoretician of classicism, but also an enthusiastic defender of modernism, he became famous in 1675 by publishing a book of stories, among which: Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, which have been enchanting generations of children for over 300 years. He tried to revive the epic poem with Christian subjects, as in "Saint Paulin". He was a major participant in the French Quarrel of the Ancient and the Modern. He took the Moderns side and wrote Parallel between Ancients and Moderns, where he attempted to prove the superiority of the literature of his century. Against his theory, Boileau published his well-known Poetic Art, a manifesto of classicism. His complete works were published in Paris.