About the work
Flower Festival in Genzano (Danish: Blomsterfesten i Genzano) is a one-act ballet by August Bournonville with music by Edvard Helsted and Holger Simon Paulli. It premiered on 19 December 1858 at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen.
Plot
In the small Italian town of Genzano, the young Rosa and Paolo fall in love during the annual flower festival. When an escaped bandit appears and seizes Rosa, Paolo frees her, and the couple celebrate their love amid the flower-strewn streets.
Cultural significance
Bournonville drew on a story about bandits from Alexandre Dumas's travel account Impressions de voyage. The complete ballet vanished from the repertoire after 1929, but the pas de deux was revived as a stand-alone piece and has since become one of the most widely performed numbers of the Bournonville repertoire. For the celebrated pas de deux music, Paulli drew on an earlier score written in Vienna in 1842 by the Austrian composer Matthias Strebinger.