Costume design by Oliver Messel for the Fairy of the Songbirds in the Prologue of Marius Petipa's ballet The Sleeping Beauty, Sadler's Wells (now Royal) Ballet, 1946 or later revision.

A costume design for the Fairy of the Songbirds, in the ballet The Sleeping Beauty. She wears a brown and dark yellow bodice decorated with birds in yellow, blue and white. A train decorated with birds is attached to the left shoulder. The headdress is similarly decorated. Two flowers hover above each outstretched hand. To the right of the main design is a watercolour sketch of the bodice.

Acquired with the support of the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Art Fund and the Friends of the V&A

Oliver Messel designed The Sleeping Beauty, Marius Petipa and Tchaikovsky's masterpiece, in 1946 for the Sadler's Wells (now Royal) Ballet, the production with which the company reopened the Royal Opera House after its wartime use as a dance hall. The production was in the repertory for nearly twenty-five years. Messel revised the designs several times, with major revisions in 1952 and 1960 and he reworked the designs when the production was mounted in 1959 for the Royal Ballet Touring Company.
Lord Snowdon, Oliver Messel's nephew, inherited Messel's theatre designs and other designs and artefacts. The designs were briefly stored in a disused chapel in Kensington Palace before being housed at the V&A from 1981 on indefinite loan. The V&A Theatre Museum purchased the Oliver Messel collection from Lord Snowdon in 2005.

Historical significance: The production of The Sleeping Beauty was an immediate success and established itself as the Sadler's Wells (now Royal) Ballet's 'signature' work, associated with many key events in the company's history. These included their first sensational appearance in New York in 1949 (which established the company's international reputation in America) and Russia in 1961, when they took the ballet, performed by a British company barely thirty years old, back to the place of its birth in St Petersburg. Messel's designs were a significant part of the ballet's success. Sarah Woodcock said of this production “The Sleeping Beauty was to be Messel’s biggest and most enduring production … The production was performed nearly one thousand one hundred and fifty times, from London to Los Angeles, from Leeds to Leningrad, becoming the Company’s ‘signature ballet’.” (Pinkham, ed., 1983).

This might be a revised design for a later revival of the production.

Reason For Production: Commission

Oliver Messel (1904-1978) was Britain’s leading theatre designer throughout the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, mastering every aspect of entertainment - ballet, drama, film, musical, opera and revue - as well working in interior decoration and textile design. His lavish, painterly and romantic concepts were perfectly in tune with the times and earned him an international reputation. By 1960, however, that style was becoming unfashionable, and Messel gradually abandoned theatre and built a new career designing luxury homes in the Caribbean.

The Sleeping Beauty, designed for the Sadler's Wells (now Royal) Ballet in 1946, is Messel's most enduring production. The fairy costumes and fantasy elements he anchored in a 'real' world, inspired by the soaring architectural fantasies of the 17th and 18th centuries and costumes based upon mid-late 17th-century fashions, mixing English, Spanish and French period styles.

The Fairy of the Songbirds bestows the gift of eloquence on Aurora at her christening. Messel's design features a train decorated in birds, in line with the original conception of Marius Petipa (1822-1910), the choreographer, who wrote "The Fairies should have long trains, the way they are depicted on the ceilings of the palace at Versailles." (Petipa's production notes, 1889).

S.15-2006