La fille mal gardée (English: The Wayward Daughter, literal translation: "The Poorly Guarded Girl"), Frederick Ashton's Royal Ballet production, began in 1959 when British choreographer Frederick Ashton created a new version of La fille mal gardée for the Royal Ballet of London.
This production premiered on 28 January 1960,[1] with Nadia Nerina as Lise, David Blair as Colas, Stanley Holden as the Widow Simone, and Alexander Grant as Alain.
At the suggestion of the ballet historian and musicologist Ivor Guest, Ashton studied the 1828 score by Ferdinand Hérold, and found the light, simple music more suitable for his conception.
Ashton then commissioned the Royal Opera House's composer and conductor John Lanchbery to orchestrate and edit Hérold's score.
Ivor Guest found a violin reduction of the pas de deux that Fanny Elssler had arranged for her performance in the ballet in 1837, tucked away in an old box of music at the Paris Opéra.
Ashton took this idea to an entirely new level with the Fanny Elssler pas de deux, devising a spectacular Grand adage for Lise, Colas and eight women with eight ribbons.
Ashton also included Petipa's original mimed sequence known as When I'm Married, a passage that was performed by all of the great ballerinas of old when they danced the role of Lise.
He was taught this passage by Tamara Karsavina, former Ballerina of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres and the Original Ballet Russe.
Robert Helpmann was originally cast in the role of Widow Simone, spending considerable time in rehearsal before the pressure of film work in the US compelled him to stand down.
Ashton fashioned a humorous number from this music for Simone and four ballerinas, at the beginning of which Lise tempts her mother with a pair of clogs, which she cannot resist.
She puts them on and whirls into one of Ashton's most celebrated numbers, which also features the dancers using the clogs to perform sur la pointe (on their toes).
After Ashton's death, the rights to his staging of La fille mal gardée passed to Alexander Grant, the original performer of the role of Alain.
In 2007, the Paris Opéra Ballet invited Alexander Grant to supervise a staging of Ashton's version, which premiered at the Palais Garnier on 22 July 2007 with Dorothée Gilbert as Lise, Nicolas Le Riche as Colas, Simon Valastro as Alain, Stéphane Phavorin as the Widow Simone and Gil Isoart as the Piper.
[citation needed] For Ashton's 1960 revival, John Lanchbery utilised Hérold's 1828 music as well as passages from the original Bordeaux score of 1789 as "raw material".