With this mixed bill of heritage ballets – honouring the three most important choreographers in the Royal Ballet’s history – two things come to an end. One is the company’s 2006-07 season, the other is the extraordinary Covent Garden career of Darcey Bussell.

The nation’s favourite ballerina is bowing out after 18 years at the top. On Friday, BBC Two will televise her final performance live from the Royal Opera House. For TV audiences it will be preceded by behind-the-scenes interviews with her friends and colleagues, along with archive footage of her on stage.

This unprecedented coverage marks the end of an era, for Bussell was the first English ballerina since Margot Fonteyn to capture the popular imagination, and there’s no one waiting in the wings to replace her in the hearts and minds of the British public.

Bussell’s swansong is one of her favourite ballets, Kenneth MacMillan’s 1965 creation, Song of the Earth, set to Mahler’s grand song cycle. A heavy-duty, hour-long abstract ballet about life and the inexorability of death, it’s not the kind of glamorous exit one might expect. Yet seeing the 38-year-old Bussell dance the leading female role on Saturday night was to understand why this is the way she wants to be remembered.

Bussell has always been an instinctive dancer rather than an intellectual one and this ballet’s demand for emotion without narrative is her passionate territory. She interprets MacMillan’s imposing, eloquent choreography with a luminous intensity and shapes his physical language exquisitely. The magnificent breadth of her lyricism, the radiant affirmation of life she exudes dancing with Carlos Acosta’s stunningly powerful Messenger of Death: this is clearly a role that means much to Bussell and her commitment to it is transporting. So ravishing is her performance, so voluptuous her long limbs, that the idea of retirement beggars belief.

Her rapture seemed to inspire the entire Royal Ballet cast, including Gary Avis as the Man she loses to death. All were outstanding on Saturday night. The final fervent image of Acosta, Avis and Bussell stepping slowly forward into the unknown couldn’t have been more apt or more poignant, for while a much-loved artist heads for a new life, Covent Garden loses its last British-born ballerina. Bussell may have been a role model to thousands of little girls, but her departure highlights the paucity of homegrown dancers who make it to the top in a British ballet world dominated by foreign talent.

Song of the Earth comes as the final offering on a bill that also includes Ninette de Valois’s Checkmate (1937) and Frederick Ashton’s Symphonic Variations (1946). The former was distinguished by Zenaida Yanowsky’s fierce and bewitching Black Queen, the latter by the pride and joy of first soloist Belinda Hatley, who is also retiring this season and will be much missed.

There are four performances of this mixed bill this week, with Bussell dancing Song of the Earth again on Wednesday and, of course, Friday, when it really will be all over.

— Box office: 020-7304 4000. Darcey Bussell’s Farewell is on BBC Two at 9pm on Friday

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette