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This was the famed Kingdom of the Shades, which he mounted in 1963, two years after the Maryinsky first showed it in the West. Even earlier, Nikolai Sergeyev, the former Maryinsky regisseur who, ballet notations tucked under his arm, fled post-revolution Russia and transported the 19th-century classics to the West, encountered similar opposition. Only with his own short-lived troupe did he manage a few performances of what sounds like a version of the Kingdom of the Shades. He even failed to persuade Anna Pavlova to take it for her touring company, despite its importance in launching her career. (She scored her first great dramatic success at the Maryinsky as the bayad? – or temple dancer – Nikiya in 1903.) She agreed to start rehearsals; but when the (mostly) English dancers saw the choreography for a Fakir ensemble, they fell into hysterics and Pavlova realised how quaintly pass?he ballet was to Western taste.No amount of diplomacy could soothe Sergeyev’s hurt.

Russians are passionate about La Bayad?, and our incomprehension must have been disheartening. OK, Minkus’s beer-garden score is no Tchaikovsky masterpiece. OK, the setting is ersatz India, crudely clich?and inaccurate. But the story – an Eastern Giselle – is rather good, a meaty, adroitly constructed triangle in which the hero is truly in a dilemma, and a wonderfully flawed Brahmin priest acts as a catalyst. If we can accept Giselle’s Wilis, we can see beyond La Bayad?’s bare-midriff kitsch and appreciate the magnificent span of the choreography: from character dances such as the charming danse manu, in which two thirsty little girls badger a woman with a water pitcher on her head, to the classical grand pas of the engagement festivities, where jewel-like ensembles frame a glittering pas de deux for the noble warrior Solor (who has sworn undying love to Nikiya) and Gamzatti (Nikiya’s high-born rival). And there is, of course, the Kingdom of the Shades, the vast suspended opium dream where Solor meets Nikiya’s ghost: perhaps the most eerily beautiful, classically pure achievement of any ballet.

Its opening, inspired by Gustave Dor? illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy, is a masterstroke – minimalism a century early – in which 32 identical bayad?s (expanded to 48 in 1900) enter down a ramp with a hypnotically long series of repeated fondu arabesques. (The back bend following each arabesque is a Soviet refinement.) Time has a drugged elasticity and the apparitions are like refractions in a play of mirrors, stretching into eternity.
This marks Marius Petipa, creator of The Sleeping Beauty and, with Lev Ivanov, of Swan Lake as a genius, capable of mould-breaking leaps. The premiere of La Bayad? took place at the Bolshoi Theatre, St Petersburg, in 1877, with Ivanov as Solor and Ekaterina Vazem, Russia’s first great ballerina, as Nikiya. Rehearsals were stressful, and made worse by Vazem, who disliked Petipa, rejected any solo she thought unsuitable, and was the dancer from hell.Writing about his first viewing of the ballet, when he was seven, the designer Alexander Benois remembered leaping tongues of flame in the opening scene, and the elaborate procession for the engagement festivities, with a bejewelled elephant, a royal tiger and “warriors in their golden armour… beautiful veiled maidens whose arms and ankles jingled with bracelets”.