The Royal Ballet's 2013-14 season will open with Carlos Acosta's much-anticipated production of the virtuoso comic 19th-century ballet Don Quixote, the first of a traditional classical-looking year with modest openings for new work. Prime among those will be a cheeringly ambitious full-length story-ballet by Christopher Wheeldon based on Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, a plot whose themes of jealousy in marriage and the abandonment of a child promise to push the generally abstract choreographer into a new dimension.

Two world premieres in one night is almost more pressure than anyone can bear - choreographers, commissioning company or audience. Still more when the spotlit dancemakers are probably the two top Western names in the art, Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon. Everyone, but everyone, expects masterpieces.

There's grand larceny afoot in the Royal Opera House. Two of today's stars are stealing Fonteyn and Nureyev's signature ballet, and they're leaving some spectators' cherished beliefs shattered in pieces around them. On Thursday, for the last time, Marguerite and Armand will be danced as a farewell to the Royal Ballet by its departed favourites, Tamara Rojo and Sergei Polunin, whose interpretations of the dying courtesan and her tragically hotheaded young lover have shown the heights that ballet can reach in deceiving spectators with purple romance.

Genius does not mean having no influences. Monotones, one of the very greatest of Frederick Ashton's ballets, is heavily influenced by other works: by George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations and Apollo, by Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère. And it in turn has influenced other great works: Kenneth MacMillan’s searing Gloria would not exist without this unearthly, moon-calm vision.

The worldwide success of John Cranko’s 1960s version of Tchaikovsky’s opera, in turn an adaptation of Pushkin’s verse-drama, might have taken even the choreographer by surprise. Tchaikovsky himself worried that “Pushkin’s exquisite texture will be vulgarized if it is transferred to the stage”, and added, “How delighted I am to be rid of Ethiopian princesses, Pharaohs, poisonings, all the conventional stuff.”

It’s hard to work out why the Royal Ballet has not indulged in more Jerome Robbins, so eminently suited does it seem for their taste for emotional understatement. In the Night had a few outings in the 1970s, and has only now been revived, possibly after seeing the audience response to the Mariinsky’s immaculate performance of the same in London a year ago.

Offstage dramas made more waves than onstage, where dance-followers have much less to see, and a prospect of still less in this arid immediate future. The on-dit revolved around the Olympics ceremonies, TV dance, Michael Clark and some spectacular door-slamming by a young ballet dancer who bolstered the myth that we would all be happier if we quit an arcanely dedicated, quietly hardworking world where we were notably appreciated by the team, in order to take quick riches, dubious star vehicles and avid media spotlights.

'Tis the season to be... transported to a magical, mystical extravaganza that will leave your mouth a-gasp, and your festive spirit in overdrive. This is how the lyrics of "Deck the Halls" should read once you’ve been to the Royal Opera House and savoured the Royal Ballet’s Nutcracker.

Benjamin Britten would have been 99 on the day of this concert. He died aged 62, nearly six months after the premiere of a masterpiece, the 15-minute "dramatic cantata" Phaedra, ruthlessly sifting key speeches from Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine. The compression of inspired, marble-hewn ideas, the like of which few contemporary composers come anywhere near in operas of two hours’ length or more, places Phaedra on a pedestal.

With a reputation as the prince of unflinching emotional catharsis, Kenneth MacMillan emerged from the Royal Ballet’s triple bill marking the 20th anniversary of his death as a lord of lyricism. The new bill presents MacMillan three ways, his academic instincts, intellectual imagination and emotional vision - a bold versatility you (whisper it) almost never see from today's choreographers.