La Fille Mal Gardee

La Fille mal gardée (English: The Wayward Daughter) is a comic ballet presented in two acts, inspired by Pierre Antoine Baudouin's 1789 painting, La Réprimande/Une Jeune Fille Querellée par sa Mère. The ballet was originally produced and choreographed by the Ballet Master, Jean Dauberval, to a musical pastiche adapted from fifty-five popular French airs by an unknown hand. The ballet was first presented under the title Le Ballet de la paille, ou Il n'est Qu'un pas du mal au bien (The Ballet of Straw, or There is Only One Step from Bad to Good) at the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux, in Bordeaux, France on Wednesday, July 1st, 1789.

The oldest, and one of the most important works in the modern ballet repertory, La fille mal gardée has been kept alive, throughout its long and complex performance history, by way of many revivals, for well over two centuries. The work has undergone many changes of title and no fewer than six scores, many of which were adaptations of older music.

Today La Fille mal gardée is normally presented as one of two different versions: many ballet companies in Russia, Europe, the Caribbean, and South America retain productions of the ballet which stem from the 1903 revival by Alexander Gorsky, based on the score of Peter Ludwig Hertel. Gorsky's version was derived from the late-nineteenth-century revivals of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, which was, itself, a revival of Paul Taglioni's version staged in 1864 for the Court Opera Ballet of the Königliches Opernhaus in Berlin. It is from this version of the ballet that the so-called La Fille mal gardée pas de deux is extracted.

Modern audiences are perhaps most familiar with the production staged by Sir Frederick Ashton for the Royal Ballet in 1960, set to music adapted by John Lanchbery from the 1828 score of Ferdinand Hérold and the original pastiche used for the 1789 premiere.

The appealing simplicity and the naïve familiarity of the action of La Fille mal gardée have lent it a popularity that has established it in the repertory of many ballet companies all over the world.