The Pharaoh's Daughter

The Pharaoh's Daughter (Russian: Дочь фараона; French: La Fille du pharaon), is a ballet choreographed by Marius Petipa to music by Cesare Pugni.

The principal dancers at the opening night were Carolina Rosati (Mummy/Aspicia), Nicholas Goltz (Pharaoh), Marius Petipa (Ta-Hor), Timofey Stoukolkin as John Bull, Lubov Radina (Ramzaya), Felix Kschessinskiy (King of Nubia), and Lev Ivanov (Fisherman).

The notations document the choreography and mise-en-scène as staged by Marius Petipa for his last revival of 1898, which was mounted especially for the benefit performance of Mathilde Kschessinskaya.

The Pharaoh pulls her back and grants her permission to marry Ta-Hor, and the Nubian king leaves in a fit of rage, swearing revenge.

Everyone starts to celebrate, but as the party reaches its peak, the opium dream ends and Ta-Hor is transformed back into the English lord.

The Pharaoh's Daughter (La Fille du pharaon) was the first multi-act grand ballet Marius Petipa staged during his long career with the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres.

The interest in Ancient Egypt at the time, inspired by recent archaeological finds, as well as Gautier's Le Roman de la momie, gave Petipa the push to create The Pharaoh's Daughter.

The ballet's literary source is Le Roman de la momie by Théophile Gautier, an exponent of literary exoticism which offered all sorts of romantic expedients: the passionate love story of the great Pharaoh's daughter and Tahoser set in a Biblical Egypt which, however, disappeared in the ballet, and the Gothic taste for gloomy corridors and dark tombs.

With an artifact from the past or a puff of opium – a familiar influence in the works and lives of contemporary artists such as De Quincey – allowed Gautier to add a brighter aura to his characters by setting them on the borderline between life and death from which all Egyptian art took nourishment.

Irony serves the same function in the ballet, for example in the moment when Lord Wilson, the quintessence of Englishness, impassively attempts to sketch the scene of the desert disturbed by the simoom, or when Aspicia, after rising from the sarcophagus, looks into a mirror and is pleased to find herself as pretty as she was a few millennia before.

The story called for an artist in the title role who had a special dramatic talent (as did Rosati), because of all the scenes of love, fear, and courage which culminate in Aspicia's attempt to cast herself onto a flower-basket hiding a snake, a classic gesture since Cleopatra's time.

Twenty years later, Virginia Zucchi (less conventionally) portrayed an unusually humane princess, not as arrogant and voluptuous as that of her successor Mathilde Kschessinskaya who, on the other hand, made it more of a virtuoso role.