The Royal Ballet's Mayerling on Stage and Screen

Crown Prince Rudolf

 

The Royal Ballet Mayerling Royal Opera House, 29 Nov 2022 19:30

Schloß Mayerling is now a Carmelite convent. In 1889 it was a royal hunting lodge where Rudolf, the 30-year-old Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and Mary Vetsera, an impressionable 17-year-old, killed themselves. Details of their deaths were suppressed for many years but the truth eventually emerged.  In 1978 Sir Kenneth MacMillan created a ballet on the story to the music of Franz Liszt with designs by Nicholas Georgiadis. I saw the work in the cinema in October and on stage at the Royal Opera House on 29 Nov 2022. 

While not exactly a barrel of laughs it is one of MacMillan's most frequently performed ballets.  It is not hard to see why.  It has exciting choreography, enchanting music, elaborate sets and lavish costumes. For many years the Royal Ballet was the only company to stage Mayerling.  There are now several others in the United States, Germany and Scotland.  Scottish Ballet's was based on Sir Kenneth's choreography and staged with his widow's cooperation.  I missed it because I was recovering from a hip injury when it was on tour. 

The performance that I saw last Tuesday evening was one of my best nights at the ballet in a lifetime of theatre-going. That was despite last-minute cast changes resulting from an injury to Steven McRae.  Having seen Ryoichi Hirano on screen I had been looking forward to a very different interpretation from McRea.  I also wanted to see Kristin McNally as Sissi, Anne Rose O'Sullivan as  Rudolf's long-suffering wife and Bradfordian Thomas Whitehead as Colonel Bay Middleton.  Having said that I was not in the least disappointed by those who took their place.

The role that MacMillan created for Prince Rudolf is pretty close to the historical character.  An exceptionally privileged individual who could literally get away with murder (or at least manslaughter) but also a very trapped one.  A figure readily deserving contempt but also sympathy and compassion. Hirano stimulated all those emotions in me.  Contempt as he humiliated his bride in a brothel or threatened women with his pistol but compassion as he drank himself crazy minutes before he blew his brains out.  The role requires outstanding virtuosity.  It requires a rare talent to carry all that off but that is exactly what Hirano did.

There are four important female roles in Mayerling:  

• Mary, Baroness Vetsora who agreed to die with him
• Mitzi who most certainly would not
• Rudolf's wife, Princess Stephanie of Belgium, and 
• his mother, Empress Sissi.

Akane Takada brought Mary to life with her sweetness and delicacy. Perhaps more than brought her to life because the real Mary was little more than a child when she met Rudolf.  Leticia Dias was a streetwise Mitzi, picking herself up and carrying on even after a police raid.  Yuhui Choe danced Stephanie. Her indignation was palpable as she was dragged to a brothel.  Itziar Mendizabal danced the Empress exactly as I would have imagined her,

The Hapsburgs who had ruled Austria since the 13th century were approaching their end by the late 19th century. Like contemporary Britain, they faced challenges from nationalists represented in the ballet by the 4 Hungarian officers, Luca Acri, Benjamin Ella, Joseph Sissons and David Yudes.    There was more than a little sleaze as represented by the sex workers.   A flawed royal family had their extra-marital support in such characters as Sisi's lover Colonel Middleton danced by Nicol Edmonds.

Exeunt's Ballet Reviews - Mayerling and Casanova

The Mayerling Hunting Lodge near Vienna

Source Wikioedia

I have recently discovered Exeunt Magazine as a result of a twitter spat that has arisen from its review of a performance of the Royal Ballet's Mayerling (see Anna Winter's Review: Mayerling at the Royal Ballet 3 May 2017). I read the review to see what the fuss was about.

The review starts with the observation

"The Royal Ballet is on mighty form in Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling, delineating the late choreographer’s dark vision of lust, morphine and mental instability with exquisite panache."

Had I not had other commitments tomorrow evening those words might have tempted me down to London. The reviewer then discusses the plot which deals with the death of the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian empire in very suspicious circumstances at Mayerling, the imperial hunting lodge just outside Vienna, in 1889. There is quite a good synopsis in Wikipedia (see Mayerling (ballet)) as well as a discussion of the incident (see Mayerling Incident).

This was a scandal that had many repercussions, though perhaps not as many as some would say as the First World War would probably have taken place even without the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the dual-monarchy would probably have collapsed even without a war. Nevertheless, Anna Winter was shocked by this story and wrote:

"You leave the theatre not only having experienced incredible dancing, Liszt’s luscious score and Nicholas Georgiadis’s murkily opulent designs, but also with the distinct feeling that the royal family should really be doing something else apart from narrowing their DNA selection and having parties."

She then took a swipe at the person sitting next to her who had "remarked that in several years’ time he hoped to see an all-British roster of principal dancers."  It was that remark that appears to have got Winter's goat for she linked it with the incident and her critique of monarchy generally:

"Yes, that’s right, you tweedy prick – let’s narrow the balletic gene pool. Let’s have British dancers for British people! Let’s ignore the fact that it’s such a fucking immense privilege that dancers – stupendously talented foreign dancers – like Marianela Nunez and Sarah Lamb and Vadim Muntagirov choose to make London their home and in doing so help to make the Royal a beacon not just of artistic excellence but relative diversity."

After that peroration, Winter returned to the performance of the principal dancers which included Marianela Núñez. Edward Watson, Natalia Osipova, Sarah Lamb and Franceska Hayward.  A very strong cast from whom one would expect an "astounding artistic achievement" which is exactly how the reviewer described the ballet.

On balance, a perfectly reasonable review, one might think, but that is not how it was viewed by everybody. Exeunt's editor, Alice Saville, reported "an unprecedented number of emails and tweets directed at Exeunt in response to Anna Winter’s review of Mayerling at the Royal Ballet" in her feature In Defence of Exeunt’s Mayerling Review 8 May 2017. The passage that seems to have prompted all those emails is Winter's reaction to the remark about an all-British roster of principal dancers in a few years time. That may have been an expression of post-Brexit chauvinism (in which case my thoughts would have been similar to Winter's), or it may simp,y have been an expression of hope that enough young British dancers would eventually make it to the top so that it would be possible one day to stage a performance of Mayerling from their number.  As context is everything I took the view that the reviewer's reaction to the remark was a little over the top and detracted from an otherwise good review.

But that was nowhere near as far over the top as sending "blisteringly unpleasant" emails. Saville complained of

"a forum thread devoted to picking apart both Exeunt’s response, and the credentials of our writer. One poster hunted down her educational background, and proposed confronting her at a future performance!"

She also said that

"Several members of ballet.co are calling on the Royal Opera House press office to revoke our press tickets, in a hugely illiberal response to a single review that offended them."

Now that really is going a bit too far. As Saville observes, "a threat of harassment is much more serious than reporting on the speech of an anonymous stranger."

Now that spat troubled me because I have been a subscriber to BalletcoForum for several years. I have enjoyed reading its discussions and have met a number of very interesting people who share my passion for ballet. When I learned that one of them had been blocked on twitter my reaction was to take up the cudgels against the blocking. However, even though I am still against blocking I can see why it was done in this case.

Some pretty horrible things were said about the Exeunt website.  I had never heard of it before but I read some of the reviews including Winter's and found that they are actually quite good. Winter has just written a particularly good review of Kenneth Tindall's Casanova (see Review: Casanova at Sadler’s Wells 11 May 2017 Exeunt) which is a ballet that I know quite well having attended the opening night in Leeds (see Casanova - "it has been a long time since I enjoyed a show by Northern Ballet as much as I enjoyed Casanova last night" 12 March 2017), last Saturday's performance at The Lowry (see Casanova Second Time Round 7 May 2017) as well as a preview in Leeds (see Casanova Unmasked 16 Feb 2017) and having been given an exclusive interview by Tindall (see "A Many Sided Genius" - Tindall on Casanova 4 March 2017).  As I said in my original article on Winter's review (which I have removed at the request of one of the moderators of BalletcoForum) it is thoughtful and well researched and one of the best reviews of the ballet that I have seen so far.

Exeunt was founded in 2010 by Natasha Tripney who is now the Reviews Editor of The Stage and Daniel B. Yates. It claims to believe in "making beautifully written, experimental, fierce and longform writing about theatre available for free" and I think it succeeds.  I shall certainly visit it again.  The irony is that I might never have learned of its existence had it not been for BalletcoForum.