Prokofiev, an inveterate transcriber and recycler of his own music, decided that this dance from Cinderella would adapt well to a cello-and-piano scoring, inasmuch as a good portion of the music in that ballet was dominated by the cello section. This number appears in the ballet score as No. 17, the pas de deux of Cinderella and the Prince, in the ballet's second act. Prokofiev also reused the same music in Suite No. 3 from Cinderella, Op. 109, calling it "Cinderella and the Prince (No. 2)."

Some listeners will find this arrangement for piano and cello preferable to the original, owing to its leaner, more intimate character. The Adagio marking is actually a bit misleading here, since the music sounds slower—like a Largo. The theme is passionate and intense, needing little momentum to express its powerful emotions. The scoring here heavily favors the cello, the piano serving as accompaniment and giving a few flourishes of color. This five-minute piece is quite effective in this guise, even if it might come across as a bit overwrought to those unfamiliar with its context in the ballet.

The piece begins with rolling chords on the piano, after which the cello sings out a curving, deep-breathed melody full of yearning and tenderness (as is much of the music from the ballet as a whole). After a bridge of delicate piano figurations, the cello elaborates the theme, with a particularly impassioned passage halfway through that rises several times from growls in the instrument's low register to soaring phrases near the top of its range. This subsides into a quieter final treatment of the melody, close to its initial statement.

© Robert Cummings, Rovi