Johann Strauss's last stage work. The music and dance critic Eduard Hanslick admired Strauss's ballet divertissement for the opera Ritter Pasman and encouraged the composer to undertake a full ballet.
Strauss was not satisfied with the plot he had chosen in a competition, which was based on the fairy tale Cinderella and set in a clothes shop, but began work immediately. He took his time, and by the winter of 1899 Act I, most of Act III and sketches of the orchestration had been completed. However, Strauss died shortly afterwards, and Josef Bayer wrote the necessary music for the ballet after the composer's death.
In 1901, the Royal Opera in Berlin took an interest in the work, the Austrian playwright Heinrich Regel revised the libretto, and the ballet was staged by the ballet's choreographer Emil Graeb. "The premiere of Cinderella took place on 2 May 1901.
When Mahler left the Vienna Opera in 1907 (he refused to stage a ballet by two composers), the theatre's new director, Felix Weingartner, was enthusiastic about returning Cinderella to Vienna, where it had been written. He himself conducted the ballet's premiere on 4 October 1908. The ballet was a great success, with regular performances right up to World War I, and was performed forty-six times.
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The plot of the ballet retains the basic elements of the famous fairy tale of Cinderella: there is a wicked stepmother who openly shows her dislike for her stepdaughter and pampers her daughters. Only this stepmother, Madame Leontine, runs a fashion atelier, and Cinderella is her stepdaughter, Greta, who works there. We meet the Prince here too, but he is Gustav, the young owner of the fashion atelier, and Madame Leontine, in order to get him to take an interest in her daughters, uses all sorts of machinations to prevent Gustav from meeting Greta. There will also be a mysterious story of a lost shoe, culminating in the rediscovery of a charming stranger Gustave meets at the party with their help.
