Retrospection, presence & perspectives

Catarina Pires, Alisha Brach and Katharina Miffek

The range of Martin Schläpfer’s choreographic work, which has now grown to over 80 works, was clearly evident during his five years as ballet director of the Vienna State Ballet: From the large full-length story ballet Sleeping Beauty to fine body studies such as the solo Ramifications, from deeply moving dance reflections on death and life, hopelessness and questions of transcendence as in Ein Deutsches Requiem to profound psychological explorations of the inner self as in Drittes Klavierkonzert.

Not only his walk through the year as a cycle of life with Haydn’s The Seasons, but also the two ballets based on great symphonies – Mahler’s “Fourth” and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15 – unfolded as grandiose world theatre.

Rashaen Arts and Javier González Cabrera

For his last premiere as ballet director and chief choreographer of the Vienna State Ballet Martin Schläpfer has chosen another symphonic masterpiece: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B minor op. 74. It is farewell music, a kind of requiem in which the Russian composer poured out his innermost thoughts shortly before his untimely death, the true circumstances of which are still unclear.

However, Martin Schläpfer does not want his Pathétique to be seen as a “swan song”, not as a last work for the Vienna State Ballet, but as a new one. Once again, he follows his ever-surprising dramaturgy, which opens up new perspectives and is not interested in a strict narrative, but in poetic images and the emotional resonance of inner conflicts and human experiences in the language of movement. By short-circuiting fragments of his own experience – differentiated observations of people, but also of animals and nature, reflections on current social issues and political developments, but also historical memories – with the music in a way that understands Tchaikovsky’s composition as an equal partner, but never surrenders to its impulses, Pathétique once again creates a very special reality that exists only in the fantasy of the piece, but which knows how to grab us immediately.

Present and past, shadow and light seem to condense in a labyrinthine dance of allusions, reinterpretations and refractions that lead to the heart of the human condition, speaking of the transience of dreams and the burning desire to live, as well as of Tchaikovsky’s “Nevertheless” – the hopeful belief in a better world.

The texture of classical ballet shines through everywhere in Martin Schläpfer’s dance language, its typical poses, forms, movement sequences, including their original symbolism. But they are overlaid by another layer, a second “text”, which bursts out like volcanic eruptions from within the dancers, following a kind of inner necessity, transforming rather than attacking the vocabulary of danse d’école.

»Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony is a giant and I thought long and hard about whether it would be a good choice for a new ballet. I now know that it was the right choice for me and the dancers of the Vienna State Ballet – and the Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera will play this music magnificently.«

This is particularly impressive in the third movement of the symphony, with its almost unleashed dance fury, an eruption of virtuosity underpinned by great emotion in all the grands jetés, pirouettes, battements and falls to the floor, only to rise again in a flash. As in a battle, groups of dancers compete against each other, the women on pointe – like dangerous Amazons – attacking the men like an unleashed army. The lust for conquest collides with existential fear, and the dance reaches the extreme limits of human energy.

In contrast, Martin Schläpfer creates a highly fragile world when he echoes the ephemeral nature of the romantic White Acts in a pas de deux, a dream vision of classical ballet removed from the world, an echo from another time. For fragility and Apollonian beauty are also among the colours of his multi-layered “body sound palette”, with which he finally plunges his choreography in the fourth movement of the symphony into an existential end-time drama, virtually imploding all the previously built-up kinetic energy.

Suddenly, two people sit opposite each other, man and woman, looking at each other, a relationship opens up, but the man’s body trembles, rebels ... Others fight against existence with wildly flailing gestures, physical contractions and silent cries of despair to Tchaikovsky’s shattering Adagio lamentoso – a slow finale in which the composer overrides all the laws of classical symphonic architecture.

We have arrived at a dystopian place, but one in which something flashes through again and again that can be found in many of Martin Schläpfer’s works: the astonishment when faced with the other, the detection of the wonder of a perhaps divine creation. This is told to us through a multitude of dancer personalities, as they have shaped the Vienna State Ballet since 2020 – and thus Pathétique once again becomes a momentum of an understanding of the ensemble that does not aim for uniformity but recognises an individual universe in every person and dancer’s body.

However, Martin Schläpfer’s ability to utilise collective energies to create powerful images is demonstrated by the finale of his Pathétique, which leads beyond Tchaikovsky’s score into an almost sublime serenity with the aria for soprano, violin and harpsichord “Sweet Silence” from George Frideric Handel’s Nine German Arias. “For me, this is an opening, a kind of crawling track out of the overwhelming emotionality of Tchaikovsky’s Adagio lamentoso”, says Martin Schläpfer, explaining his unusual dramaturgy, which also links to the essence of the two works by George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham that precede it in the programme: the stage becomes a utopian space in which there is nothing more than music and dance.