Compañía Nacional de Danza

Originally this pas de deux was part of the revival made by Marius Petipa in 1886 of the ballet Esmeralda (1844), being a mythological quote unrelated to the main plot in which Diana, surprised in the bath by Actaeon, becomes angry and turns Actaeon into deer to be devoured by his own pack of hunting dogs.

Agripina Vagánova (1879-1951) staged a reduced version of Esmeralda in 1935 and saved this duet as a choreographic heritage, giving it a typical energy of the Soviet school but at the same time with the academic rigor of the old Russian school.