new works. Petipa presented his colossal grand ballet set in ancient Rome La Vestale in 1888, which was staged for the benefit performance of the visiting Italian ballerina Elena Cornalba. The ballet was set to the music of the composer Mikhail Ivanov, a noted music critic. The next year, Ivan Vsevolozhsky commissioned the Italian Riccardo Drigo—principal conductor of the Imperial Ballet & Italian Opera—to compose the score for Petipa's Le Talisman, also staged for Cornalba. Although the ballet was not a success Drigo's score was much praised by contemporary critics. The director Vsevolozhsky commissioned the great composer Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky to compose the score for Petipa's The Sleeping Beauty, which premiered on . The ballet proved to be one of Petipa's masterpieces of choreography. The Sleeping Beauty proved to be so popular that by April 1903 it had been performed 100 times, making it one of the most popular works in the Imperial Ballet's repertory, second only to Petipa's The Pharaoh's Daughter. Petipa was diagnosed with a severe case of the skin disease pemphigus in 1892. The constant pain and itching brought on by this disease caused Petipa to refrain from choreography for the Imperial Ballet's entire 1892–1893 theatrical season. It has been widely accepted by history that the responsibility of staging Tchaikovsky's second work for the Imperial Ballet The Nutcracker, fell to the Imperial Theatre's second Ballet Master Lev Ivanov. With regard to who was ultimately responsible for the choreography for The Nutcracker, many sources contradict one another. Some claim either that Petipa was responsible for staging the entire ballet or that he merely supervised Ivanov's progress. The Nutcracker premiered on a double bill with Tchaikovsky's opera Iolanta at the Mariinsky Theatre. Many critics of the day considered the work to not even be a ballet at all, with far too much emphasis on spectacle, something made all the more unsuccessful since the ballerina's role was reduced to a Grand Pas de deux in the final scene. The critics also complained that Ivanov's choreography was banal, with only a few passages succeeding simply because Ivanov imitated the choreography of Petipa's dances from other works. One such passage mentioned in reviews was the Valse des flocons de neige (Waltz of the Snowflakes), which was said to be almost identical to a waltz from Petipa's 1879 ballet La Fille des Neiges (The Daughter of the Snows). Petipa's illness kept him from