This production is a new ballet, with new music and totally new choreography, but it owes its birth to the old libretto. Alexei Ratmansky was thumbing through the anthology 100 Ballet Librettos when he came across the Dmitriev Lost Illusions and immediately noticed its dramaturgical merit and personally found it very attractive. (Good librettos are few and far between and a rare find for a choreographer). Dmitriev’s libretto was later highly praised by the staging consultant for the ballet, Comedie Fransaise actor and director Guillaume Gallienne, and its scenographer, the well-known theatre designer Jerome Kaplan. (Though, of course, the text had to be freed of its patina of Soviet ideology).