Virginia Zucchi

[1] Perhaps her most lasting legacy is the celebrated La Esmeralda pas de six, which Marius Petipa created for her to the music of Riccardo Drigo in 1886.

She studied ballet under Lepri & Carlo Blasis in Milan,[2] She made her debut in 1864 in Varese and danced throughout Italy, as well as in Berlin and Paris.

Mir iskusstva was a movement created by Ballets Russes collaborators that included Leon Baskt, Diaghilev, and Alexandre Benois.

Of this period, Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp say: After her tenure with the Imperial Ballet came to an end, Zucchi danced in Moscow and St. Petersburg with her own company in the late 1880s and the early 1890s.

She was commissioned by Cosima Wagner to choreograph the Bacchanal in Tannhäuser when the opera was performed at the Bayreuth Festival for the first time in 1891.