Dormez, dormez...

Despite its enticing title, whose potential was fully grasped by Tchaikovsky and later Walt Disney, Charles Silver’s La Belle au bois dormant has slumbered longer than its heroine, since it has taken almost 130 years for the score to find its way back to the concert hall and the stage. The opera was begun in Rome, within the walls of the Villa Medici, around 1895, when the young composer arrived there fresh from winning the composition prize of the Institut de France. He spent several years on the Pincian Hill thanks to the resident scholarship offered by the French Academy in Rome, with Perrault’s fairytale close at hand