The Vienna State Ballet is part of the Vienna State Opera and Vienna Volksoper
im siebten himmel
Marsch, Walzer, Polka Martin Schläpfer Fly Paper Bird World Premiere Marco Goecke Symphony in C George Balanchine Premiere 14 November 2021 Vienna State Opera
Kiyoka Hashimoto, Davide Dato, Ensemble
about today’s performance Gustav Mahler was “in seventh heaven” while working on his 5th Symphony. This was due to his great love, who would later become his wife, Alma Schindler, to whom he also dedicated the Adagietto – the famous slow movement from the “Fifth” composed between 1901 and 1904, that Marco Goecke now takes as the starting point for his first collaboration with the Vienna State Ballet. From his earliest works, Goecke has created an unmistakable language of movement, a “système Goeckien” in the words of the dance critic Horst Koegler, characterised by fluttering, trembling and wrenching, with which he creates “surreal, vibrating miracles” filled with a dark, glowing magic – as if the dancers’ bodies have been charged with high voltage current. However, Martin Schläpfer also takes us to “seventh heaven” in this programme with his ballet Marsch, Walzer, Polka to a series of dances by the Strauss family that the Director of the Vienna State Ballet uses as the score for his “Viennese ballet”: a homage to waltz dreams and the ecstasy of dance but also a piece of fine portraiture and subtle humour with a new design by the Viennese fashion artist Susanne Bisovsky, whose experimental works, inspired by historical “Tracht”, probe the boundaries between tradition and the avantgarde. Marsch, Walzer, Polka was first created in 2006 – and it has accompanied Martin Schläpfer ever since. For its Viennese premiere he has now created an additional dance scene to the Neue Pizzicato-Polka by Johann Strauss (Son). Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C was clearly written with an awareness of its great Viennese precursors: its intonations are reminiscent of Haydn and Mozart, its proportions of Beethoven, but one can also hear melodics learned from Schubert. It is the work of a 17-year-old, composed in 1855 at the Paris Conservatoire – and yet it is more than a purely exercise in style. The symphony was given its first public performance in 1935 by Felix Weingartner in Basel. George Balanchine discovered it for dance in 1947 and, fascinated by the distinct hierarchy within the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, he transposed this into a skilful interplay of solos, pas de deux and group dances in an architecture of movement, a “crystal palace” of choreography with which, in the version that was revised a year later for the New York City Ballet as Symphony in C, another “seventh heaven” opens up: a finale of enchanting brilliance and virtuosity.
ABOUT TODAY’S PERFORMANCE
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marsch walzer polka Music The Blue Danube. Waltz Op. 314, Annen Polka Op. 117 & New Pizzicato Polka Op. 449 by Johann Strauss (Son), Music of the Spheres. Waltz Op. 235 by Josef Strauss, Radetzky March Op. 228 by Johann Strauss (Father) Choreography Martin Schläpfer Musical Direction Fayçal Karoui Stage & Costume Design Susanne Bisovsky Lighting Robert Eisenstein Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera
WORLD PREMIERE 10 FEBRUARY 2006 BALLETTMAINZ, STATE THEATRE MAINZ THE NEW PIZZICATO POLKA IS A WORLD PREMIERE FOR THE VIENNA STATE BALLET
MARTIN SCHLÄPFER
“It can be exciting to ride the music, to visualise its complexity in the body and in people. But it is not about fraternising with the music. The two layers must be in communication with each other – like electric shocks. It is art when you lose yourself in control.”
Martin Schläpfer
HEINRICH LAUBE
“An evening and half the night in Sperl, when the gardens are in full bloom, is the key to erotic life in Vienna. It is typified by the beginning of the dance. Strauss begins his quivering preludes that crave full release: they have a tragic sound, reminiscent of a bliss still wrapped up in the pains of birth; the Viennese folds his girl deep into his arms, they rock each other into the beat in the most wonderful way until suddenly the blaring trill bursts forth, the real dance begins at tremendous speed and they throw themselves into the maelstrom. These orgies go on almost till dawn: then the hero of Austrian musical, Johann Strauss, takes his violin and goes home – to catch a few hours’ sleep and dream of new plans and waltz motifs for the following afternoon. The glowing couples emerge into the warm Viennese night air and the caressing and giggling vanishes in all directions.”
waltzing dreams and ecstatic dancing ANNE DO PAÇO
A dancer writes desire into the space with a flowing detachment. Others discover the lurking hesitation of the tango for the waltz and the pointe shoe as a dangerous weapon. They rock back and forth in the splits, listen pensively when the violins in the orchestra “sob” at their most beautiful, meet like drowsy sleepwalkers filled of unexpected tenderness on a summer night, lose their nerve, spin around with imaginary partners, stagger home like over-excited ballgoers long past midnight or get trembly knees instead of standing up straight, radiant and certain of victory like a Field Marshal inspecting an imaginary Imperial army. “What we require of dance music is not only to keep the stamping of the dancers’ feet in time, but to understand the lives of their souls, to interpret, raise and ennoble their mood and passion. The lowest grade of dance music only affects the feet, on a higher level it speaks to the imagination, to the emotions and to the mind.” With these words in his obituary of Johann Strauss the Elder, the music critic Eduard Hanslick described what was special about what the composer had achieved, and in which he was followed by his three sons Johann, Josef and Eduard: music as entertainment, that did not deny its functional nature, but which at the same time is music of the highest artistic ambition, fitting for the concert hall, where one might hear it “with contemplative pleasure”: music genuinely played to dance to, yet which can move the passive listener. 9
WALTZING DREAMS AND ECSTATIC DANCING
But it is also music that, while originally intended for nothing other than dancing, is also capable of incorporating programmatic elements, and in its evocation of images, emotions and associations has become linked with everything that one generally associates with the “longing sideways glancing notion of ‘Vienna’” as Otto Brusatti puts it: “Irony and very deep meaning, Schubert and the Dreimäderlhaus in one, Hanswurst and the Eroica […], hysteria and death cults” – not forgetting the countryside surrounding the city, as in the signature work from the pen of Johann Strauss the Younger The Blue Danube, whose five waltzes spin out from an enigmatic tremolo like gentle waves of beating motif fragments and gain their drive from those typical hesitations – that famous, joyous missed heartbeat. This is Viennese music that expresses a joie de vivre like no other: big city music from the 19th century that found its way out of the dancehalls and all around the world – marketed by an extremely successful family firm: the Strauss dynasty. Music that one likes to think one has long since heard all of, accompanied by glossy images under blue skies – and yet there is so much more, because it continues to fascinate us in new ways. In 2006 when Martin Schläpfer took four of the most famous works by Johann Strauss the Elder, Johann Strauss the Younger and Josef Strauss as the score of a ballet – the waltzes The Blue Danube op. 314 and Music of the Spheres op. 235, the Annen Polka op. 117 and thre Radetzky March op. 228 – what attracted him was precisely this: taking on all their associations, surrendering to their melodic flattery and infectious dance rhythms without being seduced into adopting images linked to this music and the term ‘Vienna’, but filling them with his own movements, seemingly choreographed with a light touch. The two waltzes exude a sublime beauty that grows out of a peculiar tension between the dance and the music, because Martin Schläpfer does not allow himself and his dancers to be dragged along by the ¾-time into intoxicated spins, but counters the drive of the two Strauss’s with his own tempo, an imaginary duple metre instead of ¾-time. He counters the famous loss of control in the ecstasy of the waltz with a controlled loss of self, without any distortion of the music or movement. He combines the elegant vocabulary of classic danse d’école with athletic movement sequences, and natural playfulness with the steely power of the “tough fairies” as Martin Schläpfer calls the group of women on pointe in the Waltz of the Spheres. In their extremely subtle humour but also their tragicomedy, his characterisations reveal the precise gaze of an observer of human beings, such as in the Annen Polka, in which one female dancer, realising that she has failed to secure the right man, plunges into a nervous breakdown through a series of stumbling fouettés. With a solo mimed to the Radetzky March by Strauss the Elder, this series of dances closes not with an idealised march in honour of an aged Field Marshal worshipped by his troops, but with a caricature that presents unhesitating obedience, toadyism and fantasies of masculinity as a furious grimace and shifts Strauss’s march closer to Offenbach territory. In the world premiere with ballettmainz, but also in its subsequent reincarnation with the Ballett am Rhein, which presented Marsch, Walzer, Polka to large audiences not only on its two home stages in Düsseldorf and Duisburg, but also in numerous guest performances, the Field Marshal stood before the viewer, exposed also on a
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visual level, dressed only in hotpants – an economy that ran consistently through all the costumes designed for the production. With the premiere of Im siebten Himmel, Martin Schläpfer reveals, he is fulfilling a long-held dream: “I have always secretly dreamed of being able to show Marsch, Walzer, Polka in the place where its music naturally belongs: in Vienna. However, the original costume designs, which were very simple and showed a great deal of bare flesh no longer seemed appropriate for the revival with my new ensemble. I had something very different in mind here.” It was in a feature in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, where Martin Schläpfer read about the designer Susanne Bisovsky, in whose costume and stage designs the choreography can now be seen in Vienna: “I was absolutely electrified by her art”, Schläpfer confesses, “I am absolutely fascinated by her work, its intensity, its richness, its modernity but also its traditional element, incorporating everything one thinks of as ‘Tracht’.” Inspired by imaginary images she found in Martin Schläpfer’s notes to his dances such as ‘Tavern’, ‘Vienna After 12’, ‘Tough Fairies’, ‘God’s Creature’, ‘Carriage Home’ and ‘Radetzky’, she created a costume design that is as sumptuous as it is humorous, and as erotic and it is playful and – with more than 50 costumes delicately sewn by hand in her studio – overwhelmingly beautiful: one that she set in the landscape of a meadow by night, an image that has been with Susanne Bisovsky for many years: “This landscape, probably of Dutch provenance, decorates a small wardrobe from the 1960s that was the first piece of furniture I bought from Caritas when I moved to Vienna to study at the University of Applied Arts at the age of 18.” However, the Viennese premiere of Marsch, Walzer, Polka not only features a new design, but also an additional polka scene created especially for two female and four male dancers from the Vienna State Ballet. With the New Pizzicato Polka op. 449, Martin Schläpfer contrasts the good-humoured hysteria of the Annen Polka with a sextet made up of two trios – full of wit and with the wise smile of a childlike and boisterous lightheartedness – with which he explores the possibilities of dancing in threes.
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WALTZING DREAMS AND ECSTATIC DANCING
Ketevan Papava
Eszter Ledán, Igor Milos
Daniel Vizcayo, Adi Hanan, Gaspare Li Mandri
Hyo-Jung Kang, Alexey Popov
Jackson Carroll
fly paper bird world premiere
Music “Moving stormily, with the greatest vehemence” & “Adagietto. Very slow” from Symphonie No. 5 C sharp minor by Gustav Mahler Text From the poem My Bird by Ingeborg Bachmann Choreography Marco Goecke Musical Direction Fayçal Karoui Stage & Costume Design Thomas Mika Lighting Udo Haberland Dramaturgy Nadja Kadel Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera
Marco Goecke
MARCO GOECKE
“For me, dance is nothing other than affirming life when we meet in the theatre – life in its absurdity, its beauty, its sadness. There is hardly a metaphor that is more filled with energy than dance. Dance is the opposite of death.”
fly paper bird NADJA KADEL
The list of ballets to music by Gustav Mahler is a long one. One of the first was Dark Elegies, which Anthony Tudor created in 1937 to the Kindertotenlieder. Kenneth MacMillan choreographed Das Lied von der Erde in Stuttgart in 1965. And in 1975 John Neumeier, who had himself danced in MacMillan’s piece ten years earlier, created his first full-length symphonic ballet with the Dritte Sinfonie von Gustav Mahler, which marked the beginning of his long series of Mahler ballets. Maurice Béjart explored the composer’s music in several of his works and in 1973 Roland Petit created La Rose Malade to the fourth movement of the 5th Symphony – the famous Adagietto that Marco Goecke has also chosen for his work in Vienna. Most recently, Martin Schläpfer, who had already explored the 7th Symphony in 2013, created 4 in Vienna to Mahler’s “Fourth”: a symphonic ballet for all the dancers in his company. For his new interpretation of the second and fourth movements of Mahler’s 5th Symphony, Marco Goecke has chosen a smaller cast of eight male and four female dancers, whom Thomas Mika has dressed in light, transparent black suits. Under these they wear close-fitting flesh-coloured garments with grey patches and stripes that interrupt the smoothness of the body and suggest traces possibly of scars, possibly of feathers. One male dancer opens the piece with a solo. Those familiar with Marco Goecke’s movement vocabulary will immediately recognise his customary focus on the upper body: lightning fast, hyper-precise arm movements that almost appear to be fluttering due to their numerous repetitions. The dancer seems to be competing with the stormlike movement of the music. A female dancer joins him, and later a second. A pas de deux develops, in which both partners hug, cling to, release and cling on again to each other with extremely rapid holds in a whole variety of ways.
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The force with which Gustav Mahler begins his second movement subsequently gives way to a calm, more introspective episode that refers back to the first. The two moods are very different and reflect a two-fold structure that is characteristic of the symphony as a whole: the first two movements are distinctly separate from the third, fourth and fifth. At the end of the second movement, silence prevails. A female dancer recites a few verses from Ingeborg Bachmann’s poem Mein Vogel (My Bird) in a loud whisper. The entire group joins her. Then the fourth movement, the Adagietto, begins. What Marco Goecke choreographs to this music is markedly different from the hitherto existing dance settings of the Adagietto. He starts with a solo for one male dancer on the floor. The inwardly listening, slowly building dialogue between harp and strings seems to pick up on the Bachmann verses that were whispered earlier: “Whatever comes to pass: you know your time, my bird, you put on your veil and fly through the mist to me.” “Time is what we’re all acting to counter: what we’re most afraid of. That it will take everything away from us, the only thing we know: being present”, Marco Goecke admits. For him, written or spoken language, especially in the compact form of poetry, is another means of expression: “Dance isn’t the only weapon. I also like using language to express myself, for example, I like speaking and like telling stories, including in rehearsals. But what the pen was for Ingeborg Bachmann, is definitely dance for me – a means of liberation and a means of expression”, says Marco Goecke. Mahler’s string melody, which could keep spinning on into infinity and we could go on listening to for ever, entices him to connect it with the creatures hovering in the air. Thomas Mika’s stage and costume designs scrupulously guide our gaze onto this world of the ethereal. And the connection is established through Bachmann’s words. For her, the bird is an owl, whose feathers enable the poet to write the saving word. “Like the owl, the word also sets to work at the right time, cutting through the fog, following the cue, bursting out and finally rising upwards to a more elevated vantage point. Ingeborg Bachmann has faith in the word: it stands by her and at the same time it robs her, it veils and unearths things, spiralling up and mollifying, it’s both transparent and mysterious, this word taken in good faith!” This is how the writer Ludwig Harig described the poem in his 1994 interpretation. It is the paradox of time hidden here – the saving word at the right moment being the key to immortality, hoping for the right moment while being afraid of the time that eats away at our existence – that interests Marco Goecke. Sustained by Mahler’s sounds, he transforms the allegory of the feather as a “weapon” that is of service in searching for the word at the right time into a search for the right movement, the saving step at the right moment.
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FLY PAPER BIRD
INGEBORG BACHMANN
My Bird Whatever comes to pass: the devastated world sinks back into twilight, the forest offers it a sleeping potion, and from the tower the watchman’s forsaken, peaceful and constant the eyes of the owl stare down. Whatever comes to pass: you know your time, my bird, you put on your veil and fly through the mist to me. We peer into the haze where the rabble houses. You follow my nod and storm out in a whirl of feathers and fur – My ice-gray shoulder companion, my weapon, adorned with that feather, my only weapon! My only finery: your veil and your feather. And even when my skin burns in the needle dance beneath the tree, and the hip-high shrubs tempt me with their spicy leaves, when my curls dart like snake tongues, sway and long for moisture,
the dust of distant stars still falls right on my hair. When I, in a helmet of smoke, come back to my senses. my bird, my nighttime ally, when I’m ablaze in the night the dark grove crackles and I hammer the sparks from my limbs. And when I stay ablaze as I am, loved by the flame until the resin streams out of the trunks, drips over the wounds and spins the earth warm into thread (and though you rob my heart at night, my bird of belief, my bird of faith!) the watchtower moves into brightness where you, tranquil now, alight in magnificent peace – whatever comes to pass.
the beauty of dancing arms ANGELA REINHARDT
Fluttering, fidgeting, twitching and spasming. Whoever watches a Marco Goecke ballet for the first time is inevitably astonished; the choreographer virtually attacks the audience with movement – with unusual movement, for in contrast to classical en pointe or modern ballet, in Goecke’s work, above all, we see the torso and its extremities in sheer turmoil. In Goecke’s ballets the focus is no longer the beautiful legs. Arms and hands, which until now were rounded daintily or stretched out casually, are suddenly no longer the formulaic complement above the more active lower half of the body. Instead, a wholly new universe of movement evolves around head and torso. Very soon, islands of meaning appear from within this nervy river; what initially seemed to be restless suddenly demands to be recognised and understood, and wants to be integrated. Is that a sawing, a caressing? What is the finger pointing to, and which letters is it drawing in the air? Didn’t Charlie Chaplin run like that? And why is the smile frozen? Are the arms really telling us something? Can we truly read them? Or is Marco Goecke primarily creating movement to music, pure “dance” dance – which is meant to be viewed purely aesthetically –, as the counterpart to intellectual conceptual dance is known? The choreographer from Wuppertal is undoubtedly fixated on movement, just like, for example, George Balanchine or William Forsythe. In his pieces there is no plot, barely any set, and little costume to speak of other than black trousers in the subtlest variations. He controls his craft, the universal parameters of his choreography, with fascinating virtuosity: dynamics, musicality, the wealth of ideas, and how these are developed further in diverse ways. What at one moment recurs frenetically and as if possessed, dies away the next in gentle lyricism. Few choreographers are able to alternate between breakneck pace and slow motion within the smallest possible space in such a sophisticated way that both convincingly suit the music.
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What Goecke does not have is structure. His ballets are not an exact reproduction of the musical form. He does not count any beats and he does not keep to musical phrases, rather he responds purely associatively, playing with the music as skilfully and effortlessly as a juggler throwing his balls through the air. His style complements the strict polyphony of Johann Sebastian Bach through surprising images as well as the Romantic Tchaikovsky, jazz, singing monks or punk music; and often there is just silence in his works. Goecke’s stage is a space of secrets: nightmares and other surprises lurk in the penumbral, never fully illuminated corners. His dancers do not step towards the ramp with aplomb, but materialise somewhere out of the darkness and are submerged by it again; sometimes they also dance while lying or sitting down, when their choreographer simply tilts our habitual perspective to the side. Nighttime on stage often seems threatening, but it is also full of the old, lost magic of the theatre: the most mysterious things topple in from the sides or appear in the background; the dancers often even handle unusual materials; they dance on rose petals, balloons or popcorn; they throw flour, smear soot, stand in the rain. Whether it is snow or butterflies, everything is black in Marco Goecke’s world; just occasionally, candles glow or bright sparks die down. We cannot “understand” these pieces, which range between martial self-destruction and the childish innocence of a clown; instead, we must lend our personal associations to the eloquent arms which have so much to say. Certainly, each movement has a meaning, but they can never be completely grasped in this density and speed; while our intellect grasps individual images, our subconscious perhaps understands even more. Just as in the idioms of August Bournonville or Jiří Kylián, though, Marco Goecke’s very own style dances freely and confidently along on the music; there are still irritations and falterings, but then they are absorbed again into a flowing, lavish dynamic. Aesthetic fascination and the desire to participate as a reader clash with one another; like all great choreographers, Marco Goecke combines motion with emotion. At the beginning, he did not want to copy anything, in fact he did not want to repeat any old movement; now he accepts, after many pieces, the beautiful line as a possibility, perhaps even as a place of longing. But beware: if you watch too much Goecke, you may find that when you next watch Balanchine or Forsythe the arms are just too boring.
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THE BEAUTY OF DANCING ARMS
Duccio Tariello, Marcos Menha
Duccio Tariello, Masayu Kimoto
Ensemble
Helen Clare Kinney, Daniel Vizcayo
symphony in c Music Symphony in C major WD 33 by Georges Bizet Choreography George Balanchine © The School of American Ballet Musical Direction Fayçal Karoui Staging Patricia Neary Set Up & Adaptation of the Costumes Stephanie Bäuerle Lighting after Perry Silvey Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera
WORLD PREMIERE 28 JULY 1947 UNDER THE TITLE LE PALAIS DE CRISTAL BALLET DE L’OPÉRA DE PARIS, THÉÂTRE NATIONAL DE L’OPÉRA WOLRD PREMIERE OF THE REVISED VERSION UNDER THE TITLE SYMPHONY IN C 22 MARCH 1948 BALLET SOCIETY, CITY CENTER OF MUSIC AND DRAMA, NEW YORK FIRST PERFORMANCE BY THE BALLET OF THE VIENNA STATE OPERA LE PALAIS DE CRISTAL 8 NOVEMBER 1972 SYMPHONY IN C 29 OCTOBER 1976
ANNA KISSELGOFF
“I don’t know about you, but it is impossible for me to listen to Bizet’s Symphony in C on the radio without visualising George Balanchine’s dancers in his ballet of the same name. The score would not even be played today if Balanchine’s choreography had not rescued this neglected symphony from oblivion in 1947. How typical of Balanchine to give the public at large a lesson in both music and dance appreciation.”
George Balanchine in 1949
a classic of the future NASTASJA FISCHER
A visit to the jewellery store Van Cleef & Arpels on New York’s 5th Avenue supposedly inspired George Balanchine to choreograph his ballet Jewels, which was premiered in 1967 by New York City Ballet and has since become the first full-length ballet without a plot or specific roles to acquire a regular place in the repertoire of numerous companies around the world. However, Jewels was not the first work in which Balanchine explored the lustre and fire of precious stones. The fascination and magical allure that jewels held for the choreographer had already found their way on stage twenty years earlier. In 1947 Balanchine had been hired as a guest ballet master by the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris and – after he had staged his works Apollo, Le Baiser de la Fée and Serenade with the ensemble – as if in a fever, he created a piece entitled Le Palais de Cristal in just two weeks. Each one of the four movements was dedicated to a particular jewel, reflected visually in the colour of the female dancer’s tutus – red for rubies, black for black diamonds, green for emeralds and white for pearls – designed by the Italian painter Leonor Fini. A concept that Balanchine would later return to in Jewels. While precious stones had provided the inspiration for the design, the choreography revolved around the Parisian company itself. Impressed by the hierarchy within the ensemble and as a homage to the French ballet tradition Balanchine wanted to choreograph a new piece “especially for the principal dancers”. The music he chose was the Symphony in C major written by the French composer Georges Bizet in 1855 at the age of 17, and to which he had been introduced by none other than Igor Stravinsky.
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A year after its premiere, in the spring of 1948, Le Palais de Cristal was premiered under a different title by the Ballet Society, later to become New York City Ballet. Placing Bizet’s music at its centre, the work was now danced as Symphony in C. Both the costumes and stage designs underwent substantial alterations: in front of a simple blue background the dancers now performed in newly designed costumes by Karinska – with the ladies in white tutus and the gentlemen entirely in black – in keeping with Balanchine’s typical “black and white” aesthetic. Though Balanchine retained the original idea behind the choreography, as he consistently reacted to the dancers’ bodies and choreographed accordingly, he also made significant changes for his New York company, particularly in the second movement. “Symphony in C is not based on a story, but on the music that the ballet is danced to. Bizet’s symphony consists of four movements which each develop different themes and different motifs. As a result, each movement has a different pattern of dance and develops in a new direction. Each movement has its own distinctive ballerina, a premier danseur and corps de ballet”, is how Balanchine describes the ballet’s structure in very simple words. A structure that is comprehensive and richly detailed not only as a result of its large cast: “There are four movements and each one of these movements has a similar structure to three ballets in one: the corps de ballet has a structure of its own, as do the soloists and the first solo dancers. This complexity is not of this world”, is how Elyse Borne, a former New York City Ballet dancer and long-time repetiteur of Balanchine’s works, sums up the work in staging on Symphony in C. The ballet opens with the Allegro vivo. The energetic choreography, characteristic of Balanchine with “crisp” open and sweeping movements, has a dynamism and frequent changing of position that conveys the directness of an overture. The Adagio that follows is completely in the spirit of a St. Petersburg white act. The corps de ballet presents a frame around the pas de deux of the two principals, which accompanies Bizet’s lyrical and gentle music with lifts, balances and extensions. The ballerina, moving across the stage almost in slow motion, steps beyond the choreographic frame, almost abandoning her partner behind her, but nevertheless falling repeatedly back into his arms. The historian Tim Scholl elaborates in his work From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival and the Modernisation of Ballet: “Balanchine’s ballerina is not dead, but dying; her repeated falls into the arms of her cavalier become the movement’s leitmotif. As it ends, she falls in a long spiral, until, like Aurora, she lies in her partner’s arms in a perfect fifth position, arms ‘en couronne’.” In the third movement, Allegro vivace, the music becomes spirited and the dancing lively. The leading couple dances swiftly across the stage – sometimes they move spinning through the air, sometimes the ballerina and her partner orbit the stage in vast leaps. In unison with Bizet’s exuberant music, to which the principals lead the corps de ballet through the third movement, the choreography delights above all with the number of jumps and its vivacity makes it the ideal transition into the finale. George Balanchine was regarded as a master at creating closing scenes and with the finale of Symphony in C he produced another gem. The “finale of finales” brings the entire ensemble together on stage. All four groups, consisting of corps de ballet and 35
A CLASSIC OF THE FUTURE
soloists, come together in a breathtaking arrangement of movement that transposes the hierarchical structure of a ballet company into the architecture of the space and the choreography – an allusion to the order, symmetry and formal perfection of classical ballet, meeting an overwhelming desire to dance. Symphony in C is considered one of Balanchine’s masterpieces and also a response to Marius Petipa’s ballet à grand spectacle with an exposition, white act and divertissement. The size of the cast as well as the division into individual scenes make the choreography a classic white ballet that, without a narrative or roles, and without a set design, is about nothing other than a dance between beauty and geometry that – as was always Balanchine’s objective – is derived solely from Bizet’s music and connects the score and the choreography inseparably with each other. Inspired by Petipa’s ballet vocabulary that set the standard for the 19th century, Balanchine’s Symphony in C is another of his “classics of the future”, which will continue to exist by applying an academic classical movement vocabulary in a contemporary interpretation: “Classicism is enduring, because it’s impersonal”, as Mr. B once said.
TIM SCHOLL
“Balanchine’s Palais returns to this nineteenth-century ideal, but his version of the grand ballet is no mere miniature. Rather, the ballet marks a decision to build the ballet/palace on a new foundation: the firm musical footing of the symphony.”
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LINCOLN KIRSTEIN
“Balanchine has been responsible for a philosophy that has treated girls as if they were as athletic as their brothers. He has proved that they can be fiery hummingbirds rather than dying swans, with the capacity of channel swimmers.”
Gala Jovanovic, Liudmila Konovalova, Andrey Teterin, Alexey Popov, Laura Nistor, Isabella Knights
Hyo-Jung Kang, Ensemble
Elena Bottaro, Aleksandra Liashenko, Arne Vandervelde, Masayu Kimoto, Godwin Merano, Ensemble
Brendan Saye, Olga Esina
Fayçal Karoui – Musical Direction
Fayçal Karoui studied at the conservatories of Saint-Maurdes-Fossés and his hometown of Paris. He won a scholarship to work with the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse under Michel Plasson, after which he became Plasson’s assistant. In 2002, he was appointed chief conductor of the Orchestre de Pau Pays de Béarn. From 2006 to 2012, he was conductor of the New York City Ballet, and from 2012 to 2014 of the Orchestre Lamoureux in Paris. His extensive experience in ballet is also reflected in Fayçal Karoui’s collaboration with the Hong Kong Ballet on Swan Lake and with the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam, where he has been a regular guest since 2016. His recent engagements include productions at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, the Opéra de Paris, Opéra comique, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and the Cité de la Musique Paris. He has conducted numerous renowned orchestras, includ ing L’Orchestre National de France, L’Orchestre de Paris, L’Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, L’Orchestre de L’Opéra national de Paris, L’Orchestra Giuseppe Verdi Milano, L’Orchestra dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia Roma, L’Orchestre de Chambre Lausanne, L’Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, the Hong Kong Sinfonietta and the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra. Fayçal Karoui’s interest in bringing music to a broad and young audience led him to found a youth orchestra in 2015, in which 130 children between the ages of 8 and 10 are dedicated to making symphonic music together. In 2013, Fayçal Karoui was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres. In 2015, he received the Prix artistique de la Fondation Simone et Cino del Duca. He made his debut at the Vienna State Ballet in 2014 conducting Sleeping Beauty and has since returned to the Vienna State Opera Orchestra for the ballet productions Balanchine/Liang/Proietto, MacMillan/McGregor/Ashton, Lukács/Lidberg/Duato as well as Kenneth McMillan’s Mayerling and Frederick Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand.
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MARTIN SCHLÄPFER – Choreography Marsch, Walzer, Polka Martin Schläpfer has been Ballet Director and Chief Choreographer of the Vienna State Ballet as well as Artistic Director of the Ballet Academy of the Vienna State Opera since 2020/21. Born in Altstätten, Switzerland, he studied with Marianne Fuchs in St. Gallen and at the Royal Ballet School in London. As a member of Heinz Spoerli’s Basel Ballet from 1977, he soon became one of the most charismatic soloists. An engagement with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet took him to Canada for a season. In 1990 he founded in Basel the ballet school Dance Place. As director Martin Schläpfer formed three distinctive companies: the Bern Ballet (1994 to 1999), ballettmainz (1999 to 2009) and Ballett am Rhein (2009 to 2020). After the Ballett am Rhein was voted “Company of the Year” four times, the renowned magazine tanz named the Vienna State Ballet “Highlight of the Year 2022”. Martin Schläpfer’s œuvre comprises more than 80 works created for his companies, the Bayerische Staatsballett Munich, Het Nationale Ballet Amsterdam and Stuttgart Ballet, and has been staged by Zurich Ballet, among others. For the Vienna State Ballet, he has created the large-scale works 4, Sinfonie Nr. 15, Die Jahreszeiten and Sleeping Beauty, the Beethoven ballet In Sonne verwandelt, as well as creations for the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert, the Opera Ball at the Vienna State Opera and the Youth Company of the Ballet Academy. His close relationship with Hans van Manen led to the world premiere of Alltag in 2014, in which Martin Schläpfer returned to the stage as a dancer, as he had done two years earlier in The Old Man and Me by the Dutchman. After winning the Prix de Lausanne as “Best Swiss Dancer” in 1977, choreographer and director Martin Schläpfer went on to receive numerous awards, including the Kunstpreis des Landes Rheinland-Pfalz (2002), the Spoerli Foundation Dance Prize (2003), the Prix Benois de la Danse (2006), the Gutenberg Medal of the City of Mainz (2009), and the German Theatre Prize Der Faust in 2009 and 2012. Martin Schläpfer received the Swiss Dance Prize in 2013 and the Taglioni – European Ballet Award in the category “Best Director” from the Malakhov Foundation in 2014. DEEP FIELD, based on a commissioned composition by Adriana Hölszky, was nominated for the Prix Benois, in 2015 he received the Music Prize of the City of Duisburg. In 2010, tanz magazine named him “Choreographer of the Year”, followed by the same award from Die Deutsche Bühne in 2018 and 2019, and another nomination from tanz in 2022. Schläpfer has been a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts since 2017. In 2018 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, followed by the Grand St. Gallen Culture Prize in 2019. In 2023, he was a member of the jury for the Prix de Lausanne. 43
BIOGRAPHIES
MARCO GOECKE – Choreography Fly Paper Bird Marco Goecke, born in Wuppertal, completed his dance training at the Ballet Academy of the Heinz Bosl Foundation in Munich and at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. After graduating, his first engagements took him to the Berlin State Opera and the Hagen Theatre, where he created his first ballet in 2000. This was followed by several works for the Noverre Society with dancers from the Stuttgart Ballet and an invitation to the New York Choreographic Institute. In the 2005/06 season he was appointed Choreographer in Residence of the Stuttgart Ballet, for which he created his first story ballet, The Nutcracker, which was later also filmed for the ZDFtheaterkanal. After winning the Prix Dom Pérignon in Hamburg, Marco Goecke received numerous commissions for international companies such as Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, the Norwegian National Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet Seattle, Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, Staatsballett Berlin or Ballett am Rhein Düsseldorf Duisburg. From 2006 to 2012 he was also associated with the Scapino Ballet Rotterdam as a Choreographer in Residence. Since 2013/14 he has been Associate Choreographer of the Nederlands Dans Theater. From 2019 to 2023 he was Artist in Residence at Gauthier Dance Stuttgart and ballet director of the Staatsballett Hannover, for which he created the full-length world premiere The Lover based on the novel by Marguerite Duras, among others. Of Marco Goecke’s more than 90 works, many are in the repertoire of renowned companies such as the São Paulo Compañia de Dança, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, the National Ballet of Canada, Finnish National Ballet Helsinki, Ballet of the Stanislavski and NemirovichDanchenko Theatre Moscow, Ballet Zurich, Stuttgart Ballet, Ballet of the Gärtnerplatztheater Munich or Ballett am Rhein Düsseldorf Duisburg. In 2005 Marco Goecke was awarded the Culture Prize of the State of Baden-Württemberg, followed by the Nijinsky Award Monte-Carlo in 2006. In 2017 he received the Dutch Dance Prize Zwaan as well as the Danzadanza Prize in the category “Best Choreography”. The thus awarded piece Nijinski, created for Gauthier Dance in 2016, has since been shown with great success on tours worldwide. In 2018, a nomination for the Prix Benois de la Danse followed with the NDT production We say dark things to each other. After being named “Choreographer of the Year” in 2015 in the international critics’ poll of the tanz magazine, he received the renowned award for a second time in 2021. In 2022, Marco Goecke received the German Dance Award and was honoured with the Jiří Kylián Ring.
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GEORGE BALANCHINE – Choreography Symphony in C George Balanchine, born Georgi Balantschiwadse in St Petersburg in 1904, was one of the most influential pioneers of neoclassical ballet. His life, which took him from St Petersburg to various places in Western Europe and finally to New York, reads like a journey through the history of dance over the last 100 years: rooted in the ballet world of Tsarist Russia and strongly influenced by the aesthetics of Petipa, he joined the Ballets Russes and thus the avant-garde movement in Paris and changed his name to George Balanchine. In 1928 he created his first masterpiece, Apollo, for Diaghilev’s troupe, laying the foundations of his own aesthetic. In 1933, Balanchine was invited to the United States by Lincoln Kirstein, a prominent industrialist and patron of the arts, which gave him the opportunity to focus on developing his style with specially trained dancers. Kirstein persuaded him to become director of a new ballet school, with a view to forming his own company. The School of American Ballet opened in 1934 with an educational concept specially formulated by Balanchine. From the training of dancers, which always formed the basis of his understanding of dance, Balanchine’s path led him to choreography – and what was originally intended as a kind of exercise became his first American masterpiece, Serenade. Further works followed at the Metropolitan Opera, for Hollywood and for Broadway, and new ballets were created for his company, which from 1948 became known as the New York City Ballet and soon became one of the world’s leading dance companies. In addition to many new creations, including Concerto Barocco (1941), The Four Temperaments (1946) and Orphée (1948), Balanchine built up an extensive repertoire based on his existing works. He was able to focus on refining his aesthetic, which had one aim in particular: to make dance, with the utmost clarity, the central means of making music with the body. The incarnation of his style, and one of the most important examples of New York modernism in the 1950s, was the ballet Agon. Other important works over the next two decades included Liebeslieder Walzer (1960), Jewels (1967), Symphony in Three Movements (1972), Stravinsky Violin Concerto (1972), Chaconne (1976), Davidsbündlertänze (1980), and Mozartiana (1981). When George Balanchine died in New York on 3 May 1983, he left behind an œuvre comprising 425 ballets, many of which are still part of the repertoire of major companies worldwide, including the Vienna State Ballet.
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Im siebten Himmel Schläpfer / Goecke / Balanchine Season 2023/24 3rd updated Edition
PUBLISHER Vienna State Opera GmbH, Opernring 2, 1010 Vienna General Director: Dr. Bogdan Roščić Administrative Director: Dr. Petra Bohuslav Director & Chief Choreographer Vienna State Ballet: Martin Schläpfer Managing Director Vienna State Ballet: Mag. Simone Wohinz Editorial Team: Mag. Anne do Paço, Nastasja Fischer, MA Design & Concept: Fons Hickmann M23, Berlin Layout & Type Setting: Miwa Meusburger Producer: Print Alliance HAV Produktions GmbH, Bad Vöslau PERFORMING RIGHTS Marsch, Walzer, Polka © Martin Schläpfer Fly Paper Bird © Marco Goecke Gustav Mahler: Musikverlag C. F. Peters / Henry Litolff’s Verlag Ltd & Co. KG, Leipzig, London, New York Ingeborg Bachmann: Mein Vogel. In: Ingeborg Bachmann: Werke, Band 1. Gedichte. © 1978 Piper Verlag GmbH, München, represented by Gustav Kiepenheuer Bühnen vertriebs-GmbH, Berlin Symphony in C © The School of American Ballet. The Ballet is presented by arrangement with The George Balanchine Trust and have been produced in accordance with the Balanchine Style® and Balanchine Technique® Service standards established and provided by the Trust. Georges Bizet: Universal Edition AG, Wien TEXT REFERENCES About Today’s Performance and the texts and interviews by Anne do Paço, Nadja Kadel and Nastasja Fischer (English translation: David Tushingham) are original contributions for this programme booklet. Reprint only with the permission of the Vienna State Ballet/Dramaturgy / pp. 24: The Beauty of Dancing Arms by Angela Reinhardt is a for this programme booklet extended article which was first published in: Nadja Kadel (Ed.): Dark Matter. Choreographies by Marco Goecke. Würzburg 2016 / p. 6: Martin Schläpfer quoted after: Mein Tanz, mein Leben. Martin Schläpfer im Gespräch mit Bettina Trouwborst. Leipzig 2020 (English translation: Nastasja Fischer) /
p. 8: Heinrich Laube quoted after Marcel Prawy: Johann Strauß. Wien 1991 (English translation: David Tushingham) / p. 19: Marco Goecke quoted after Das Leben in seinem Absurden, Schönen, Traurigen. Marco Goecke im Gespräch mit Anne do Paço. In: Season booklet Vienna State Opera 2021/22 (English translation: Nastasja Fischer) / pp. 22: Ingeborg Bachmann: My Bird (English translation: Mark Anderson). Quoted after: The Paris Review. Issue 92, summer 1984 / p. 32: Anna Kisselgoff: How Balanchine speaks to the future via the past. In: The New York Times, 18 April 1993 / p. 36: Tim Scholl: From Petipa to Balanchine – Classical Revival and the Modernization of Ballet. Routledge, London, New York 1994 / p. 37: Lincoln Kirstein: Balanchine’s Fourth Dimension. In: Lincoln Kirstein/Nancy Reynolds: Ballet, bias and belief. Three pamphlets collected and other dance writings of Lincoln Kirstein. New York 1983. PHOTO CREDITS All rehearsal photos from the 2021/22 season: © Ashley Taylor/Vienna State Ballet. Cover: © Thomas Wrede: Diavolezza (170 x 120 cm, 2019) from: Gletscherprojekte. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021 / p. 7 & 43: © Andreas Jakwerth / p. 18: © Regina Brocke / p. 33: © Frederick Melton, New York Public Library Digital Collections / p. 42: Archive / p. 44: © Die arge Lola / p. 45: © Martha Swope, New York Public Library Digital Collections. Right Owners who could not be reached are requested to contact the editorial team for the purpose of subsequent legal reconciliation.
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