Honesty of a Choreography

From February 19, John Neumeier's The Lady of the Camellias will be back on the program of the Vienna State Opera. With his ballet version of Alexandre Dumas' novel La dame aux camélias, the choreographer has not only created one of the most impressive dance and artistic explorations of the famous material, but Neumeier has also created one of the most important story ballets of the 20th century with The Lady of the Camellias.

If you have the opportunity to watch John Neumeier in rehearsals, you quickly realize how intense his involvement with his own work still is - and in the case of The Lady of the Camellias, even 47 years after the premiere with the Stuttgart Ballet.

Every emotion, every expression, even the smallest movement is fine-tuned, not only with the soloists, but also with the dancers of the corps de ballet, who bring the world of the Parisian demi-monde to life: "I always change my pieces. But the change is usually a form of clarification.

As you get older, you should learn from experience and be able to express better and more clearly what you have wanted to say for 47 years. It's not about essential changes, the concept of the ballet always remains the same, it's more about nuances," says Neumeier, who rehearsed The Lady of the Camellias in depth with the Vienna State Ballet last year.

With his choreographic interpretation of the tragic love story of the courtesan Marguerite Gautier and the young Armand Duval, Neumeier, who is not only one of the most important choreographers of the 20th and 21st centuries, but has also had a lasting influence on the genre of "literary ballet", has created a ballet in which every movement is an expression of emotion, the characters are created with the greatest clarity, but also with inner intention, and the dramaturgical structure follows the "modern" structure of the novel written in the 19th century.

Neumeier tells the story from the end, working with flashbacks and following the non-chronological, fragmentary plot of Dumas' novel, which is told from different perspectives. To Frédéric Chopin's music, which is congenially matched to the multi-layered voices of the choreography, Neumeier stages "theater within theater" moments, creates rapid scene changes reminiscent of film and a dramaturgy of movement that makes the characters' states of mind just as tangible as the external world in which they find themselves.

Since its premiere with Marcia Haydée and Egon Madsen as Marguerite and Armand,The Lady of the Camellias has been an essential part of a timeless ballet canon, not just a contemporary narrative ballet, but a true masterpiece that moves us to tears and at the same time keeps us glued to our seats.