In Mayerling, Everyone is a Victim. And the Audience Enjoys It Immensely

Mayerling. Photo: Helena Maria Buckley.

Author Zuzana Rafajová

Mayerling is a typical MacMillan narrative piece. Three-act, storytelling, supremely theatrical, full of ecstatic, technically brutal duets, heavy period costumes and set design, sexual tension, violence and brothel scenes (It might be worth analysing MacMillan's narrative works to see if he ever produced one that did not include courtesans mondaines...). At the same time, the ballet is set firmly in a real historical period, dealing with real people whose fates are known, working with period context and references, making the ballet extremely layered and clever. But it requires a similarly clever and educated audience, who will need to have at least an inkling of what all those Hungarian costume elements mean, not to mention who Eduard Taaffe, the then Prime Minister of the Reichstag, is and what positions he takes, what political affiliations the Empress Sissi has, and where Crown Prince Rudolf, the hero of the story, stands on the chessboard. For in Mayerling there are as many characters as one has had hot dinners, and navigating between them is probably not entirely easy at first, and MacMillan's adding and amplifying of bigger and smaller scenes is not always entirely helpful.

However, Mayerling is not concerned with politics, but with relationships (which are, at the end of the day, also politics). The central figure is Crown Prince Rudolf, whom we meet at his wedding to Princess Stephanie, during which he flirts with her sister Louise and one of his most prominent mistresses, Countess Marie Larisch, something that his parents, Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Sissi, in particular, do not take very kindly to. After a brief stop in his mother's chambers, Rudolf gets to see his newlywed wife and the first act ends with a brutal, unforgiving rape scene, during which Rudolf holds a gun to Stephanie for good measure and confronts her with a skull, over which he broods like Hamlet on several occasions during the ballet. Rudolf spends his days in brothels and taverns in an attempt to escape the aristocratic world and the fact that his free-spiritedness (which historically involved not only sexual liaisons but also his views on the inner workings of a multinational monarchy) led to him being shut out from any real political power by his father and his opinions disregarded. The whispering voices are then represented by a quartet of Hungarian officers, the question being how much Rudolf is in agreement with them and how much the men are trying to use him for their own cause.

Rudolf is a bohéme. Driven by lust, drugs, and an obsession with death and guns. But he is also the product of an aristocratic upbringing at the Austrian court, which he began at the age of six as the heir apparent. Long hours spent barefoot in the freezing cold, baths in icy water to toughen him up, alarm calls by gunfire, being locked in a wildlife game pen, being completely cut off from his mother and any maternal love. In fact, it is a wonder that such a sensitive child, which Rudolf undoubtedly was, ever made it to adulthood, or that more future heirs did not follow his trajectory of compensation techniques, and that European aristocracy did not die out around the seventeenth century. His lack of emotional growth then manifests itself particularly in unhealthy relationships with women and with himself. Rudolf does not know what to do with women, how to treat them, or rather, how to treat them other than violently, harshly, and lustfully. Simultaneously, however, he is attracted to and is ruthlessly dominated by the strong women in his circle (which is especially apparent in the character of Marie Larisch), because he is clearly compensating for something in his choice of mistresses. Apart from that, though, he is still, at his core, the lost child who longs for his mother...

An escape from the distorted cycle of a life consumed by addiction, gonorrhoea, and above all, syphilis, (which in its final stages also manifests itself as an infection of the central nervous system and uncontrollable attacks of pain alternating with paralysis) happens when he meets the young Mary Vetsera (seventeen years old at the time, but they first met when the girl was six and her mother Helen was Rudolf's lover, but MacMillan does not go into that much detail in his piece). She, unlike, say, the hardened prostitute Mitzi Caspar, accepts the idea of mutual suicide without hesitation, seeing it as a testament to the perfect, burning love that binds her with Rudolf. And so, 30 January 1889 comes, and two shots ring out through the hunting lodge in Mayerling (both lovers have left suicide notes, so there can be no doubt about their desire and agency). Mary is then secretly buried in Heiligenkreuz in an attempt to prevent the already spreading scandalous rumours, bringing the whole of MacMillan's opus to a close, framing the story. As for Rudolf, he is buried in the Capuchin Church in Vienna after his father negotiated a dispensation with the Catholic Church to allow the suicidal prince to be laid to rest in the hallowed ground of the imperial crypt.

The opulence of the story of Mayerling is further complemented by the splendour of the visuals - the sets and costumes were created by Nicholas Georgiadis, and are full of embroidery, fur, lace and period silhouettes (which are especially challenging for the ballerinas in the duets). The male dancers appear in uniforms with high boots, whilst wigs, jewels, tiaras, and other jewellery are a given, as are the omnipresent officer moustaches. This really gives the ballet the appearance of a grand historical fresco, which is not often seen in this day and age of minimalism and concealed symbolism. Musically, the story is told by a score composed of thirty works by Franz Liszt, selected, arranged, and orchestrated by John Lanchbery into a body of extraordinary intensity and drama (there are passages from the Faust Symphony, the Transcendental Etudes, Mephistopheles' Waltzes, etc.).

MacMillan shows himself to be a maximalist in Mayerling — not only on a storytelling level, but also on a choreographic one, where his ballet really becomes a marathon, mainly for the lead performer. Rudolf dances ten pas de deux with six different partners over the course of three acts, along with his own four solo variations, and he barely leaves the stage during the near two hours of pure performance time. The physical demands on the performer are thus unquestionable, and MacMillan is able to put that raw, macho energy to good use, especially in the sexually charged duets chosen (be they rape scenes or purely consensual acts). Far more important, however, is the psychological magnitude of Rudolf's character, understanding it, drawing out its layers, unfolding the relationships with the women of different personalities and roles in his life, upon which the entire ballet sinks or swims.

In Paris, it was Mathieu Ganio who tackled the complex, ambiguous, dark hero, and delivered an unparalleled performance with his interpretation (notwithstanding the fact that on the first night his opening variation seemed surprisingly hesitant). All of the dancers portraying Rudolf hit their own version of rock bottom throughout the ballet, all of them had to search extremely deep within themselves; but it is the subtlety, the careful attention to minute details, the thoughtful consideration of every single moment, and the endless layers of Ganio's take that is truly and utterly breathtaking. His Rudolf is an inherently damaged, alienated, misunderstood young man who at first actually behaves like a sulking child. A petulant teenager defying a father whose views he profoundly disagrees with and whom he deeply despises, whilst, at the same time, an extremely fragile little boy, yearning achingly for a mother's love, seeking it with every glance, every tremble of his outstretched hand to Sissi. Their duet in the Empress' bedchamber, where Rudolf flees before his wedding night, is his despairing cry, gut-wrenching in its sincerity and anguish on both sides. Heloïse Bourdon is this aristocratically flawless, statuesque empress. She looks like an ancient Greek goddess, but her distance stems more from her inability to form a relationship with her son in his childhood than from any fundamental coldness or severe absence of empathy. She feels her son's pain but has no idea how to address it. Moreover, the context in which they both find themselves simply does not allow any space for an exalted display of emotions. That she does care for her son is evident in the last act, where Rudolf devolves into a morphine-fuelled sack of bones, barely breathing, scarcely holding himself together (which is an image Ganio paints with terrifyingly chilling authenticity). 

It is, however, a bit too late for both of them, and Rudolf is not even aware of this sudden motherly instinct of protection. Thus, his last interaction with his mother is a moment in Act 2, when he is forced to watch the emotionally withdrawn noblewoman in a spontaneous, heartfelt embrace with her lover Bay Middleton (Jérémy Loup-Quer), only to find out first-hand the next moment that the same warmth does not apply to him, inflicting another deep wound. The agonizing solo full of crumbling falls, desperately arched back and cramping hands, in which one can observe not only the physical but also the mental trauma, escalating to the point of epileptic convulsions, is yet another of those shattering moments that dig relentlessly beneath one's ribs.

The master manipulator of Rudolf's fate is Marie Larisch, a seasoned noblewoman who knows how to navigate the corrupted world of imperial morals and who refuses to lose even a fraction of her influence over the heir to the throne. She probably knows Rudolf like no other, so she knows who to push into his good graces (and bed) to gain increased favour when she can no longer fulfil the role herself. Larisch, however, is not an obvious, unscrupulous monster either. Naïs Duboscq's performance succeeds in finding that balance between opportunistic calculation and genuine dismay, which seized her and perhaps even touched her profoundly the moment she was faced with Rudolf's gradual mental and physical decay. A world of recklessness and the place of perhaps the only true happiness and contentedness in Rudolf's life is represented, rather symptomatically, by a brothel full of alcohol, smoke, and harlots, ruled by Mitzi Caspar (Clara Mousseigne, who was the only one who lacked the charisma and self-assured vulgarity of a girl of her social status and experience to fully grasp the role). It is in fact quite comical that Rudolf brings his wife Princess Stephanie (Inès McIntosh) into this setting. But not primarily to humiliate her. From the couple's interactions, it almost seems as if Rudolf, in his own sociopathic way, is trying to explain to his wife why he feels so free here, in a place with no expectations, no rules, and no need to play out given social and political roles, and it frankly irritates him when his spouse does not seem to understand. Similarly, his later recoil from his already pregnant wife comes across as a moment of aghast horror of someone recognizing the social surroundings and parentage patterns into which he is bringing a new person, rather than the image of a man repulsed by the body of an expectant woman.

Regardless of the utmost care Ganio takes with all the nuances of his character and the underlying cause and effect of all his actions, Rudolf still manifests himself as an antisocial psychopath who, for example, considers the aforementioned wedding night with the skull and the gun to be an exceptionally brilliant joke, as an easy way to overpower the scared-to-death young wife, to claim pure dominance (and it should be noted that the paralysing terror in McIntosh's eyes as Stephanie sends shivers down the spine). Their duet is aggressive, violent and revolting in content, and yet the danseur étoile manages to squeeze in a fleeting moment of self-disgust before Rudolf once again goes back to following the learned social formula — you are a man, take what is yours and do not dwell on it too much, no questions asked.

The role of Rudolf's fated Mary Vetsera was played by Léonore Baulac. She shapes her seventeen-year-old baroness in the mould of an innocent, madly-in-love teenager who dreamily, almost religiously, observes the prince's portrait, much like today's teenage girls do with the leads of K-pop bands. She is not the crazed girl on the loose, nor the ill-fated femme fatale, she is a bright-eyed girl ready to do anything for her idol. Including grabbing a gun and fatalistically agreeing that the only solution is to commit suicide together. In her interactions with Rudolf, she is extremely gentle, bordering on maternal by the end, which perfectly complements Ganio's interpretation. Their three duets grow in intensity and drama. Over the course of the first at the end of the second act, Rudolf slowly discovers the power this young girl possesses, even if she does not realize it herself, and it dawns on him that he has possibly just found the final, most important piece of the puzzle in his suicide, which he is incapable of committing on his own. The next duet, set in a haze of opium and paralyzing despair, concludes with a joint grasp of a gun with a clear promise of the future, and Ganio's Rudolf is for a second time in his life absolutely and endlessly happy, however evident it is that he has long since lost his mind.

The final duet, then, is a typical example of a standard MacMillan pas de deux — a combination of overwhelming emotions and characters exhausted to death with acrobatic lifts in which the ballerina is thrown across the stage, over the dancer's head, between his legs, and all over again. To balance the urge for technical bravura and emotional conveyance is not exactly easy then, and for me personally it is these duets that form a crucial point at which, however artfully choreographed, with every step and movement meaningful, I cease to believe in the story they are striving to convey. Not so with the Parisian performances, in which the last dance scene is distressing, wrung to the bone, but not showy. The gradation of the eleventh of the Liszt's Transcendental Etudes roars through the orchestra pit, the choreography intuitively following its climaxes but letting their power shine through in prolonged stops of poses that seem to be growing before one's eyes, even in their stillness, the force of their impact I never fully realized even during The Royal Ballet's performance, for example. The outbursts of energy in the duet are not an outward display of power, but they emerge from within. They are not after the effect and show, which makes them all the more powerful in the end. Looking at the performers, one has no doubt that their characters are at the very limits of their physical and mental strength, that they are barely holding it together, that Ganio’s Rudolf is actually half-dead for the entire third act, with his blank, dark stare boring a hole into one's soul, haunting one's dreams for a long time to come. The emotional exhaustion then bleeds over into the audience, as does a kind of cathartic feeling as Rudolf finally, after his drawn-out meanderings, reaches his long-desired death…

The story of Mayerling is a perverse one, because its real-life history is perverse. The most perverse thing is when certain hugely evocative and suggestive performances lead one into the dangerous waters of latent sympathy and budding compassion for the dangerous, violent psychopaths who destroyed the lives of dozens of people, and ultimately the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the end, everyone in Mayerling is a victim. The audience, however, can only profit from that.

Written from the performances of 30 October and 2 November 2024, Palais Garnier, Paris.

Mayerling
Choreography: Kenneth MacMillan
Music: Franz Liszt
Orchestration: John Lanchberry
Libretto: Gillian Freeman
Set and Costume Design: Nicholas Georgiadis
Lighting Design: Jacopo Pantani
Conductor: Martin Yates