PART ONE

The opera opens in a palace where courtiers, workers, and townspeople have been asleep for 100 years, surrounding a princess, Thorn Rose. The space feels both like a banquet hall and also like a tomb. A Stranger enters and kisses Thorn Rose. She awakens and complains, along with everyone else, that they have been rudely awakened from their carefree dreaming. They are unimpressed with the nearly silent Stranger, whom they find to be presumptuous. The Stranger begins to explain the story he’s heard about the cursed palace. The Court Poet interrupts him, so that the courtiers, workers, and townspeople might enact how they ended up asleep for a century.

They start by recalling Thorn Rose’s birth and her christening as a baby, during which the Godmothers bestow gifts of beauty and grace upon her. This celebration is interrupted by Carabosse, an outcast who was left off the invitation list, and who, in revenge, foretells that Thorn Rose will prick her finger on a spindle and die on her 16th birthday. Sixteen years later, Thorn Rose hears a whirring from the top of a tower and runs up the stairs to find a spinning wheel and spindle, on which she pricks her finger. All the courtiers run up to the turret to find her in a swoon. The Godmothers intervene and transform the curse. They inform everyone that instead of Thorn Rose dying, all the palace will fall asleep.

This retelling of the past, which began as a play-within-a-play pageant for The Stranger, has become in the reenactment indistinguishable from the actions of the present. Thus, at the end of the tale the whole palace falls asleep, forming the same tableau that began the opera.

One hundred years pass.

PART TWO

As at the beginning, The Stranger enters. He kisses Thorn Rose as if for the first time. She awakens, as do the courtiers, workers, and townspeople. As if meeting him for the first time, she asks him how he found his way to the palace, and why he has interrupted their dreaming. He responds this time with a philosophical aria concerning the mysterious relationship between dreaming and waking (“Isn’t reality itself a kind of dream?”). He then describes his quest for Thorn Rose (“I heard you were sleeping in a tower”), a journey he took up in response to his own aimlessness at his father’s court. He recounts how only he was able to reach the palace and wake everyone, while many other men died trying. Thorn Rose, inspired and disturbed to hear of the many adventurers who risked their lives and perished in search of the palace, responds with her own aria (“Poor souls”).

Thorn Rose remains disappointed that the humble and awkward Stranger is the one who has succeeded, and yet she decides to accept him as he is. The whole community rejoices in preparation for their wedding, a celebration that eventually leads to exhaustion. Everyone around the couple falls asleep, one by one. The Stranger and Thorn Rose struggle to stay awake, traveling along the edge of slumber, drifting between waking and dreaming. Then they fall asleep as well.