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Theme and Variations.5

18 Wednesday Jul 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Films and Music, Literary History, Theatre and Performance

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Arthur Rackham, Aschenputtel, Brothers Grimm, Cendrillon, Charles Perrault, Cinderella, CS Evans, Disney, Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passe, Jardin des Tuileries, Julie Andrews, La Belle au Bois Dormant, Lotte Reiniger, My Fair Lady, Ombres Chinoises, Oscar Hammerstein, Richard Rodgers, Sergei Prokofiev, Shadow puppet plays, Sleeping Beauty, Tchaikovsky, wayang kulit, Zolushka

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In this post, we come to the end of our series on other ways of presenting fairy tales, in which we have taken two by the author who is usually cited as beginning the modern Western tradition, Charles Perrault (1628-1703).

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In 1697, Perrault had published this,

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entitled Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passe (“Stories or Tales of/from Past Time”), with a kind of subtitle, Contes de Ma Mere L’Oye (“Tales of My Mother Goose”).

The volume contained only 8 stories, with two being “La Belle au Bois Dormant” (“The Beautiful Girl in the Sleeping Wood”)

image3sb.jpg

and “Cendrillon” (“Cinderella”), which we chose to be the basis of our posts.

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So far in these posts, we’ve looked at “Sleeping Beauty” in everything from ballet to Disney and “Cinderella” in early operas and silent films.  In this final post of the series, we want to begin by saying, as we did in our first post, that “Cinderella” exists in two basic forms, that of Perrault, from 1697, and that of the Brothers Grimm,

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from 1812.

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In this version of the story, the fairy godmother is removed and replaced by birds seemingly sent by Cinderella’s dead mother.

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We mention this because this is the version followed by our next creator, Charlotte (Lotte) Reiniger (1899-1981)

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in her 1922 film, Aschenputtel (“Cinderella”)

image9aschen.jpg

This is a silent film in which delicately-cut paper figures through stop-motion photography are manipulated to tell the story.

image10aschen.png

Here’s a LINK so that you can enjoy the short (about 13 minutes) film.  And, if you enjoy that, there are more of Reiniger’s works on YouTube for you to see.

To us, her work very much resembles wayang kulit, the traditional shadow plays of Bali,

image11wayang.jpg

 

as well as the Ombres Chinoises, (“Chinese Shadows”—Chinese shadow puppets) brought to France in the 18th century.

image12ombres.jpg

It also closely resembles two works illustrated by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939),

image13ar.jpg

his Cinderella (1919)

image14cindy.jpg

and The Sleeping Beauty (1920).

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In each of these, Rackham employs silhouettes to tell the story (in versions by CS Evans), giving both the look of stories told by moonlight.

image16cindy.png

We could easily show you all of the illustrations, marveling at them right here, but, instead, we give you a LINK to an on-line version of The Sleeping Beauty (with apologies for not being able to locate an on-line Cinderella).

In one of our previous posts in the series, we discussed Tchaikovsky’s ballet, Sleeping Beauty, now we add to this Cinderella (Zolushka) by the Russian composer, Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953),

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premiered in 1945.  Here’s a LINK to a suite of music from it, along with two sheets of costume designs from the original production, suggesting what a sumptuous spectacle it must have been.

image18costumes.jpg

image19costumes.jpg

Prokofiev and his collaborators followed Perrault and the fairy godmother was back.  Here’s the pumpkin coach from a more modern—but still Russian—production.

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And this coach brings us to our next and next-to-last item.

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We grew up with this image of the story in our heads, as well as its music.

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This is the 1950 Disney version, which stuck fairly closely to the Perrault, but, along with the fairy godmother, kept the helpful birds (changing their color)

image23abluebirds.jpg

and added a gang of equally helpful mice.

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To which we add our final piece.  In 1957, the well-known composer/lyricist team of Rodgers and Hammerstein created a first, a made-for-television musical production of Perrault’s version, starring someone who was already becoming a star by appearing as Eliza Doolittle in Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady, Julie Andrews.

image24rodgersham.jpg

image25andrews.jpg

In five postings, we’ve traveled from 1697 to 1957 and visited a number of places in between, all of which was based upon two traditional stories recreated in new tellings by Charles Perrault.  Is it any wonder, then, that in 1910, this bust was erected to his memory in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris?

image26chasp.jpg

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

Theme and Variations.2

27 Wednesday Jun 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Films and Music, Literary History, Military History

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Arthur Rackham, Baron Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, Brothers Grimm, Charles Dickens, Charles Perrault, Charles S Evans, Cinderella, Disney, Dornroeschen, Edgar Taylor, ETA Hoffman, French Revolution, George Cruikshank, German Popular Stories, Hans Christian Andersen, Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passe, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, James Robinson Planche, Kinder und Hausmaerchen, La Belle au Bois Dormant, Little Briar-Rose, Louis XIV, Louis XVIII, Mariinski Theatre, Napoleon, Robert Samber, Sleeping Beauty, St Petersburg, Tchaikovsky, The Little Mermaid, Undine

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.
In our last, we began talking about the fairy tales of Charles Perrault (1628-1703), originally published under the rather vague title, Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passe, (“Stories or Tales of the Past”) in 1697.
image1perrault.jpg
Among his stories was one entitled “La Belle au Bois Dormant”—literally “The Beautiful Girl in the Sleeping Woods”, which we English-speakers call “Sleeping Beauty”. We had said that we thought it would be interesting to look at various treatments of that story over time and, so far, we’ve discussed James Robinson Planche’s (plawn-SHAY) two works, an 1840 “extravaganza” (a kind of very early musical comedy) and his 1868 story-in-verse version (here’s the first edition).
image2planchesleep.JPG
Planche could read the French original, but those whose knowledge of French was confined to menus could find English translations dating all the way back to the first, that of Robert Samber, in 1729.
image3samber.jpg
(This image, by the way, explains not only why English-speakers call this story “Sleeping Beauty”, but also why we call the stories as a group “Mother Goose Tales/Stories”. Please see our previous posting for where Mother Goose came from in Perrault.)
In the early 19th-century, a competitor to Perrault appeared. In 1812, two German scholars, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1785-1863, 1786-1859,)
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began publication of a work which they would enlarge numerous times through the first half of the 19th century, Kinder und Hausmaerchen (something like “Children’s and Domestic Wondertales”), the first volume of which first appeared in 1812.
image5kinder.jpg
“Sleeping Beauty” appears as #50, under the title Dornroeschen, “Little Briar-Rose”. This is like the Perrault story, but not the same, providing an alternate version of the tale. For those without German, an English translation was published in 1823.
image6kinder.jpg
Although their names aren’t on the title page, this is a collaboration between Edgar Taylor (1793-1839), translator,
image7taylor.jpg
and George Cruikshank (1792-1878), illustrator.
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Of the two, Cruikshank is the better-known. Originally, he was famous as what we now call an “editorial cartoonist”, creating images critical of politicians and political events of his time. Here is his 1823 caricature of Louis XVIII of France (reigned 1814-1824 with a little gap in 1815 when Napoleon came back briefly from exile on Elba).
image9louis18.png
His public relations people wanted Louis to look like this:
image10louis.jpg
to remind them that he was the direct descendant of Louis XIV, the famous “Sun King”, a grand and heroic figure in recent French history.
image11louis.jpg
In reality, Louis was old and fat and looked more like this—
image12louis
It wasn’t about Louis per se, weak and temporary monarch though he was, so much as the long-standing English/French rivalry/hostility, which went back for centuries and which had intensified during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, stretching almost without a break from 1792 to 1815. Napoleon, as representative of what the English of the time saw as revolution-which-led-to-chaos-and-worse, was a regular target from the later 1790s on and Cruikshank certainly aimed his pen and brush at him—as in this mocking depiction of the fate of Bonaparte after his first abdication in April, 1814.
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Political commentary aside, Cruikshank, as we see in his illustrations for the Brothers Grimm (and isn’t it odd that we never say, in English “the Grimm Brothers”—which sounds either like a menacing secret society or perhaps an old, established firm of teakwood importers), was involved in all sorts of illustrating, including a second volume of the Grimms, in 1826. This is the 1868 reprint which the editor says duplicates in one volume the text and illustrations of the original two. (We include a LINK so that you can download your own copy.)
image14reprint1868.jpg
As well, he illustrated the original serialized version of Charles Dickens’ (1812-1870) Oliver Twist (1837-1839). This is a famous scene near the end of the novel, where the main villain, Fagin, is in the condemned cell, awaiting dawn and his execution. Dickens was famous for his performance of this.
image15fagin.jpg
On a more cheerful note, here’s Cruikshank’s sketch of Dickens himself from 1836.
image16sketch.jpg
The Grimms’ version of the “Sleeping Beauty” story is combined with that of Perrault in our next example. It’s the 1920 The Sleeping Beauty,
image17sb.jpg
text by Charles S. Evans (1883-1944), of whom we have found no picture, and Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) of whom this may be our favorite picture.
image18ar.jpg
The year before, Evans and Rackham had collaborated on a version of Perrault’s “Cinderella”—and we’ll talk about that in our next. The Sleeping Beauty is anything but sleepy—its illustrations practically dance off the page. (Here’s a LINK for your own copy.)
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image20ar.jpg

image21ar.jpg
And dance itself is the basis of our last example.
In 1888, Pyotr/Peter Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

image22tchai

was offered a commission for a ballet. Originally, the subject was to be a famous early German Romantic novella, Undine (un-DEE-neh), written by the Baron Friedrich de la Motte Fouque (foo-KAY) (1777-1843),
image23baron.jpg
and published in 1811. It’s the story of a knight and a water spirit and shares the basic plot of HC Andersen’s later “The Little Mermaid”. Here’s an illustration from Rackham’s 1909 version.
image24undine.jpg
As things developed, however, this story was replaced by the Perrault/Grimms’ “The Sleeping Beauty”, which first appeared at the Mariinski Theatre
image25mariinski.jpg
in St Petersburg in January, 1890. We are lucky to have a number of photos of the original production and cast.
image26sleep.jpg

image27sleep.jpg

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And here’s a LINK to a suite (selection) of music from the ballet—but the full ballet is available on YouTube and we hope that you like this suite so much that you’ll try the whole thing.
In our next, we’ll move on to a second Perrault story, “Cinderella”.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
MTCIDC
CD
ps
If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that we can rarely resist adding something more. In fact, in this ps, we add two somethings more.
First, before Undine was proposed for a ballet, it was the subject of an opera by the strange and wonderful German Romantic author and composer ETA Hoffmann (1776-1822).
image29hoffmann.jpg
Here’s a LINK to the overture. In a future post, we’ll have more to say about Hoffmann…
Second, as people who grew up on Disney, we can’t close without mentioning Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty, with its attempt at a new style of visual presentation—as well as its use of Tchaikovsky’s music as the basis of its score. If you haven’t seen it, we certainly recommend it, especially for its combination of elements of the older look of such films as Cinderella (1950) with a newer, simplified one.
image30disney

Theme and Variations.1

20 Wednesday Jun 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Literary History, Narrative Methods, Theatre and Performance

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Bibliotheque nationale Francaise, Charles Kemble, Charles Perrault, costuming, David Garrick, Edward Burne-Jones, Extravaganzas, Faulconbridge, Folger Library, Giambattista Basile, Gianfrancesco Straparola, Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passe, Histories or Tales of Past Times, James Robinson Planche, King John, La Belle au Bois Dormant, Les Contes Des Fees, Madame d'Aulnoy, Mercure Galant, Mother Goose, Punch Magazine, Richard "Dicky" Doyle, Shakespeare, Sleeping Beauty, Sur La Lune

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

For a current writing project, we’ve gone back into our fairy tale collection (we recommend, by the way, the wonderful Sur La Lune site to help you to build yours—here’s a LINK) to reread the fairy tales of Charles Perrault (1628-1703)–

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although he wasn’t the person who first called them that—that was his contemporary, Madame d’Aulnoy (1650/1-1705),

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who called her stories contes des fees—“stories of fairies”.

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In 1695, Perrault had circulated an illustrated manuscript of such tales, calling it Contes de ma Mere l’Oye—“Tales of My Mother Goose”.

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In  February, 1696, he published one of them, “La Belle au Bois Dormant”—“The Beautiful Girl in the Sleeping Wood” in an early magazine, the Mercure Galant (maybe in English something like “The Courier of Style”).

image4mercure.JPEG

(If you’d like to read the story in French as it was first published, here’s a LINK to the BnF, the Bibliotheque nationale Francaise, where it is available on-line, which we think is just magical.)

Then, the following year, the collection was published under the title Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passe (“Stories or Tales from the Past”).

perrault.jpg

The term “contes de ma mere l’Oye” appears to have been known in literary circles from at least the 1650s and indicated rustic/countryside stories—in a sense, folktales—and Perrault had used traditional material, some of which had first appeared in print in Italian in the 16th century and could be found in the folktale collections of people like Gianfrancesco Straparola (1485?—1558) and Giambattista Basile (1566-1632).

Perrault’s stories, which include what we call “Sleeping Beauty” (you can see that that’s a mistranslation) and “Cinderella”, first appeared in English in London in 1729, translated by Robert Samber, its title being identical with the 1697 French.

image6samber.jpg

In this post and (at least) two following, we thought that we would choose two of these fairy tales and see in what different forms they’ve been presented since first appearing in 1697.

Because it was the first to be published, we’ll begin with “Sleeping Beauty.  (This is a Pre-Raphaelite version by Edward Burne-Jones, 1833-1898.  It is one of a set of four and has a very interesting history—here’s a LINK so that you may found out more, if you wish.)

image7sleepbeautjones.jpg

Our first work, entitled surprisingly enough, The Sleeping Beauty, is what its author, James Robinson Planche (plahn-SHAY), 1796-1880,

image8planche.jpg

would call an “extravaganza”, meaning, in this case, something like a modern musical comedy.  First produced in 1840, it combined dialogue in rhyming iambic (more or less) couplets with songs set to already existing tunes.   Based upon Perrault, it used spectacle, everyday references which a London audience would have immediately picked up on, and gentle political/cultural satire to entertain.  Unfortunately we don’t have any images of this production, but here’s a LINK to volume 2 of Planche’s “extravaganzas” so that you can form your own impression.  If you know the works of the Victorian dramatist/composer team of WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, you will see that Planche is their direct ancestor.

For many years, beginning in the early 1800s and continuing into the 1860s, Planche was Mr Theatre, in London, writing or co-writing at least 175 shows of various sorts.  These works, like Planche himself, have faded away, but he did leave one mark.  In 1823, Planche had had a conversation with a famous actor, Charles Kemble (1775-1854),

image9kemble.jpg

in which he suggested that, whereas money was always being spent in the theatre on spectacles, almost nothing was done for the plays of Shakespeare.   In fact, Shakespeare’s plays had always been costumed in the clothing of the period of the actors, rather than the dress of the time of the events.  Here’s a print of the well-known 18th-century actor, David Garrick (1717-1779) in four of the roles for which he was famous:  Lear, Macbeth, Richard III, and Hamlet—by dress and props alone, perhaps we could guess that the actor with the two daggers was someone playing Macbeth (or perhaps an assassin from the 1760 version of Game of Thrones), but otherwise?

image10garrick.jpg

Kemble, in turn, told Planche that he would willingly put on an historically-accurate production of several Shakespeare plays, beginning with King John, if Planche would do the necessary research and design.  Planche agreed and here’s a playbill of the result.

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Reading the fine print, it’s even possible to see that Planche cited at least some of his sources—everything from funerary statuary to manuscript illustrations.  Whereas we don’t, unfortunately, have any illustrations to show for The Sleeping Beauty, we can show you what a difference Planche made to attempting to make Shakespeare appear in period dress.  Here’s Kemble playing Faulconbridge, a major character in King John, in 1819.

image12kemble1819.jpg

The historical John lived from 1166 to 1216—why would he be dressed as a sort of cosplay Roman legionnaire?  And here is an engraving made from Planche’s 1823 design, with Kemble again in the role of Faulconbridge.

image13kemble1823.jpg

The Kemble/Planche look caught on—and is with us, in some form, to this day.   (The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, owns a set of the 1823 colored engravings—here’s a LINK so that you can see other costumes for the production.)

Even as his life in the dramatic world was fading, Planche continued to be a literary figure—as well as a literary recycler.  In 1868, he collaborated with a prominent British illustrator, Richard “Dicky” Doyle (1824-1883),

image14rdoyle.jpg

on a verse version of “Sleeping Beauty”:  An Old Fairy Tale The Sleeping Beauty.

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Doyle was, in fact, a very versatile artist, having, for instance, worked for the satirical magazine Punch,  but his lasting fame lies in his fairy/fairy tale illustrations.

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Doyle’s work was prized, but his work ethic was, apparently not:  commissions came and went, sometimes filled, sometimes not, and it seems that he never quite completed the illustrations to the Planche, (perhaps why Planche’s introduction is dated 1865 and the publication date is 1868?), but here’s a sample to show what he could do, when focused.  (And here’s a LINK to the book, so that you can see all of the illustrations for yourself, as well as read Planche’s text.)

image17prince.jpg

So as not to overwhelm you, dear readers, we’re going to pause here, but we’ll continue in our next by looking at other forms—opera, ballet, and animated feature—which Perrault’s story has inspired, taking our story from 1890 to 1959.

In the meantime, thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

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