The premiere of the ballet The Sleeping Beauty took place at the Mariinsky Theatre on the 3rd of January 1890. It was the time of the unchallenged reign of Marius Petipa in Russian ballet, a Frenchman who created the phenomenon of Russian classical ballet out of an average European troupe that has remained vivid for over a century.

It was possible mainly due to the cooperation of the ballet master with Tchaikovsky, whose symphonic music helped to develop and enrich the forms and contents of classical ballet. The Sleeping Beauty was their first joint work. Petipa, who by then had been perfecting the form of large-scale narrative ballets for over half a century, provided Tchaikovsky with a detailed plan that had a disposition for every musical piece, including its length precisely to the bar. Tchaikovsky responded to that with such diverse musical structures and melodies, that made Petipa overcome long established customs and look for new forms.