in 1946. Olga Lepeshinskaya created Cinderella in Moscow (where Ulanova, who alternated with her, had great success in the role) and Dudinskaya first danced it in Leningrad. Prokofiev and his collaborators were guided by Perrault's version of the story and by the great Tchaikovsky ballet scores, which themselves served the structure of Petipa's choreography. Prokofiev wrote that he conceived Cinderella (which he dedicated to Tchaikovsky): and again: Ashton's choreography Frederick Ashton first considered the idea of composing a full-evening ballet as early as 1939, when the Vic-Wells Sleeping Princess had proved so successful, but because of the war these ambitions were shelved. Early in 1946, though, in a speech at the Soviet Theater Exhibition, de Valois said she could not wait to see the first full-length English classical ballet, and during 1946 and 1947 there were constant rumours of possible three-act ballet scores. At one point Delibes' Sylvia seemed the most likely choice (that came in 1952 and was Ashton's second full-length ballet), but in the late spring of 1948 Prokofiev's Cinderella was selected as the score Ashton would choreograph. He had heard and liked quite a lot of the Prokofiev music and he thought Perrault's story a good one. In the event, Ashton cut some of the music, notably the third-act scene showing the Prince's journey in search of Cinderella (a pretext for a divertissement of national dances: Ashton's comment on this was "I didn't like any of the places he went to, nor the music he wrote for them") and a shorter dance of Grasshoppers and Dragonflies after the Fairy Summer's variation in the first act. The choreography of Cinderella is Ashton's homage to the classical tradition of Petipa, as had been Symphonic Variations of two years earlier, albeit on a smaller scale. In 1948 Ashton also created Scènes de ballet, which distilled the essence of Petipa's ballets down to just one act. The choreography of Cinderella is full of dreams, some most definitely unfulfilled. In the ballroom, the put-upon, shy Ugly Sister—significantly Ashton's own role—performs a Petipa figure that amounts to her dream of being Odile at Siegfried's ball or the Sugar Plum Fairy. She is in fact full of choreographic dreams, and that is the clue to her character (as is the fact that she has Edith Sitwell's nose). Again in the ballroom the bossy Ugly Sister does a fish-dive with her suitor, a dream of