While Delibes fashioned Tasso's pastoral play about a nymph uninterested in love, a faithful shepherd, and a lecherous nymph into a romantic ballet, it took choreographer László Seregi to turn it into a full-blooded ballet within a ballet about the everyday lives, rivalries, intrigues and petty infatuations in a dance company.
Seregi's contribution was to take the bucolic tale, which by then seemed somewhat simplistic, and subject it to a complete blood transfusion. He didn't shrink from placing his own craft in front of a sort of funhouse mirror, either: this is how we are, fallible and frustrated artists, and even more so, people.