all other rehearsals on hold so that the company could concentrate on the production of the new ballet. During Petipa's sojourn in Paris for the staging of Le Marché des Innocents, he acquired a scenario from the dramatist Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges for a ballet titled La Fille du Pharaon (The Pharaoh's Daughter), inspired by Théophile Gautier's Le Roman de la Momie. Throughout the Victorian era Europe was fascinated with all things concerning the art and culture of ancient Egypt, and Petipa was sure that a ballet on such a subject would be a great success. Petipa began work by collaborating with the composer Pugni, who wrote his melodious and apt score with Petipa while in rehearsals. The Pharaoh's Daughter premiered on to an unrivaled success. The work exceeded even the opulent tastes of the Tsarist audience, as so lavish and exotic a ballet had not been seen on the Imperial stage for some time. The work went on to become the most popular ballet in the entire repertory of the Imperial Theatres—by 1903 it had been performed 203 times. The great success of The Pharaoh's Daughter earned for Petipa the position of second Maître de ballet to the Imperial Theatres. Saint-Léon answered the success of Petipa's The Pharaoh's Daughter with the fantastical ballet Le Petit Cheval bossu, Ou La Tsar-Demoiselle (The Little Humpbacked Horse, or The Tsar Maiden), a ballet adaptation of Pyotr Yershov's famous Russian poem. The work proved to be a success equal to that of The Pharaoh's Daughter, with its series of fantastical tableaux set under-water and on an enchanted isle, as well as the ballet's final Grand divertissement celebrating the many peoples of the Russian Empire. Though Arthur Saint-Léon was by title and technicality Petipa's superior, the two men were viewed as equals by the critics and balletomanes of the day, and would rival one another with splendid productions throughout the 1860s. Not only did Saint-Léon and Petipa have their own respective audiences and critics, but also their own ballerinas—Petipa mounted the majority of his works at that time for his wife, the Prima ballerina Mariia Surovshchikova-Petipa, while Saint-Léon mounted the majority of his works for the Prima ballerina Marfa Muravieva. Despite their rivalry, nearly every ballet staged by Petipa and Saint-Léon during the 1860s was set to the music of Cesare Pugni. On Petipa presented a lavish revival of the ballet Le Corsaire for