1946 – Sadler’s Wells Ballet moves to Covent Garden to perform The Sleeping Beauty

In 1946 the Sadler’s Wells Ballet opened their first season at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, with a new production of The Sleeping Beauty. The scenery and costumes were designed by Oliver Messel who, aided by the larger dimensions of the Opera House’s stage, evoked the sense of magnificence that had originally belonged to the ballet, both in St Petersburg in 1890 and in London in 1921 with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, then called The Sleeping Princess. The splendour of the production was matched with that of Constant Lambert’s conducting. The orchestra was able to reveal the full magic of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s score. The joyous world in the ballet being lost and regained had a particular resonance in London just a year after the end of World War Two. When the company opened their first tour to the United States of America with this production of The Sleeping Beauty at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1949, it was a sensation. It has been an important ballet for the company ever since.The first-night cast included Margot Fonteyn, Robert Helpmann, Beryl Grey, Pamela May and Alexis Rassine.