Don Quixote is a rambling, picaresque novel by Miguel de Cervantes, full of all kinds of moods and incidents, high and low, published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615, to great and enduring acclaim. The Don of Cervantes’ book, the so-called ‘knight of the sorrowful countenance’, is a comic (and at times tragic) figure, maddened by the tales of romantic chivalry which had been so popular in the middle ages. Accompanied by his earthy servant Sancho Panza, in a series of ridiculous adventures, he rides through the Spanish countryside attempting to right imagined wrongs and punish their supposed perpetrators, who often, in fact, give the hapless Don a good beating. There is also a love interest: Don Quixote vainly imagines a simple peasant girl to be Dulcinea del Toboso, the courtly lady whose favour he seeks through his knightly adventures.

Various themes from the novel have been pushed and pulled in what should have been beyond endurance and credibility by choreographers of note from Jean-Georges Noverre onwards. The most enduring has been that of Marius Petipa for Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre in 1869 and revised for the Imperial Russian Ballet in St Petersburg in 1871. How much of the original spirit or intention, let alone steps, survive from Petipa’s ballet with music by Ludwig Minkus, is obviously debateable. What is true is that in the countless revisions and versions worldwide by a range of dancers, choreographers and directors, there is ample scope for all the might that classical ballet can offer. There is a flamboyant pyrotechnical pas de deux often danced at galas, plus a role from balletic heaven for an aspiring Kitri – with a list of distinguished exponents from Anna Pavlova onwards. In Cervantes’ book Kitri is Quiteria, a character who appears in just one incident when the Don helps rescue her from an arranged marriage. In the ballet pure classicism and farce are conjoined with plenty of Spanish colour and mime in a way Cervantes might have recognised.