Cenerentola

Composed by Prokofiev between 1941 and 1944 and commissioned by the Kirov Theater (now Mariinsky) in St. Petersburg in the wake of the success of Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella was first staged at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on Novembre, 21, 1945, with choreography by Rostislav Sakharov. Based on a scenario by Nikolaj Volkov taken from the fairy tale Cendrillon by Charles Perrault, Prokofiev’s score combines a great wealth of almost Tchaikovsky-style lyrical cues with a subtle irony that allows us to move seamlessly from the marvels of the magical fairy tale to the humour of social satire.
After the reinterpretations by Frederick Ashton (1948), Maguy Marin (1985), Rudolf Nureyev (1986) and John Neumeier (1992), Jean-Christophe Maillot, choreographer-director of the Ballets de Monte-Carlo since 1993, also tried his hand at Prokofiev’s work in 1999, enhancing on the one hand the realistic and comic (but never grotesque) elements in the representation of the stepmother, stepsisters and the prince’s court, prisoners of the artificial cult of an empty and sophisticated beauty, on the other the profoundly human element that is the basis of the magical fairy tale as an initiatory journey from adolescence to adulthood.