“The Sleeping Beauty” is the irresistible siren to ballet companies around the world, despite the supreme test and treacherous trap it poses for both the ballerina and the company. The grandest of the “grand ballets” of the 19th century, it demands luxury: lavish scenic transformations, a stage crowded with cast members, choreography that requires dancers adept in every genre from procession to folk to glittering classicism. When it had its world premiere in 1890 at the Mariinsky ballet of St. Petersburg, its production was subsidized by the tsar and yet the company’s budget was nevertheless strained by the expense.

But today most ballet companies are by comparison nickel-and-dime operations. Even the resources of America’s two greatest companies — American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet — are taxed by “Sleeping Beauty,” and yet both companies keep boldly returning to it, as they will this season. Tomorrow, NYCB revives, after a three-year absence, its 1991 production, the staging of which fulfilled a career-long dream of NYCB founder George Balanchine. And this spring, ABT, which first performed an excerpt from the ballet in 1941, will unveil a new evening-length production directed by Kevin McKenzie, ABT’s artistic director, and former ABT star Gelsey Kirkland.

For these companies and countless others, the powerful allures of “The Sleeping Beauty” simply cannot be left behind. First, there is Tchaikovsky’s magnificent score, one of the few ballet scores he wrote. “The Sleeping Beauty” culminates in the era of France’s Louis XIV, and composing the music allowed Tchaikovsky to engage his enthusiasm for historical homage and pastiche, which he did without pedantry. There is also Princess Aurora, the ballet’s heroine, named for the goddess of the dawn in ancient mythology. The story of her birth, coming of age, hibernation, and re-awakening presents a potent retelling of archetypal life cycles, and the role is an extraordinary challenge and opportunity for the ballerina who inhabits it. And there is Marius Petipa’s choreography — a pinnacle of classical ballet, although one might not know it from the enormous amount of revising and tinkering made to Petipa’s masterpiece by choreographers who followed.

But even in Russia, these riches have not been preserved. Reduced budgets, changing aesthetic tastes, and the proclivities of contemporary choreographers have whittled down the spectacle and the pantomime of the work. Small cuts in Tchaikovsky’s score have become customary.

Since 1952, the Kirov (the modern name of the Mariinsky) has performed a production choreographed by Konstantin Sergeyev, then the Kirov’s artistic director. But in 1999, the Kirov made a dramatic effort to re-create the past. In a truly remarkable achievement, Kirov dancer Sergei Vikharev staged a reconstruction based on choreographic notation made in 1903 by another Sergeyev, this one Nikolai, who had been régisseur at the Mariinsky in the final years of the Romanovs.

The notes were incomplete and imperfect, and 1903’s “The Sleeping Beauty” was already modified from 1890’s, so Mr. Vikharev had to do a significant amount of educated guesswork. But seeing the ballet brought back to something recalling its original condition on the stage where it was first performed made for an unforgettable experience. For the first time in my life, I felt that I was seeing the true “Sleeping Beauty.”

But if the mythological wellsprings of “Sleeping Beauty” enhance its magic, the ballet also perpetuates a company’s own egotism. For example, London’s Royal Ballet is so proprietary about its “Sleeping Beauty” that one would think it had first been performed there, rather than in St. Petersburg. This would not be especially problematic, if only the company had not departed dramatically from what was originally created for the Mariinsky. “The Sleeping Beauty” was staged at the Royal (then called the Vic-Wells) in 1939 by Nikolai Sergeyev, who emigrated to the West after the Revolution. It starred teenage Margot Fonteyn, who became a legendary Aurora. Over the years, though, resident choreographers at the Royal have modified Nikolai Sergeyev’s staging so much that today it is hard to locate a single solo variation that has not been tweaked.

Likewise, Kirov veterans — some of them otherwise logical — insist defiantly that the 1952 Kirov “Sleeping Beauty,” is, if not the original, then the correct, authentic version. Old-timers at the Kirov believe that the 1952 “Beauty” is the ballet Petipa would have created if only he’d known how.

In fact, fear of the inability to live up to his ideal of “Beauty” prevented Balanchine, who danced in the ballet both as a child at the Mariinsky, and while choreographing for Diaghilev’s company in Europe in the 1920s, from staging his own version. The watchword of Balanchine’s aesthetic was modernism, yet he felt that, oldfashioned or not, vintage ballet splendor was exactly what the ballet demanded, and he worried that he lacked the funds or stage resources to produce a “Sleeping Beauty” to rival that of his childhood memories. Judging by his treatment of “Coppélia,” “Harlequinade,” and “The Nutcracker,” though, he undoubtedly would have rechoreogaphed much.

And so when Mr. Martins came to “The Sleeping Beauty,” eight years after Balanchine’s death, he did what Balanchine would have done, by freely exerting license over the choreography, making revisions and interjections throughout the ballet, and streamlining it significantly. Most of the hunting scene in Act II is gone. Mr. Martins has sped up the tempo and the action wherever possible. Rapid-dissolve slide projections employed through the ballet are a new wrinkle, escorting the spectator from his or her seat deep into the castle’s interiors. Mr. Martins’s “Sleeping Beauty” is the contemporary, polar opposite of Mr. Vikharev’s.

While there may be no perfect “Sleeping Beauty,” companies around the world continue their sometimes quixotic quests to take on the ballet again and again. Like the Prince in “Sleeping Beauty,” who traverses time and space in the Panorama scene to locate the sleeping Aurora, world travelers will eventually be able to locate a version the ballet to suit every taste.