Triple bill

To mark the occasion, the ballet director and chief choreographer of the Wiener Staatsballett has once again embarked on a creative process with the dancers in his ensemble and created a large-scale ballet to Piotr I. Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony, which he brings together two icons of New York dance modernism: George Balanchine‘s fragrant Mozart ballet Divertimento No. 15 from 1956 and Merce Cunningham‘s leaping and spinning dance piece Summerspace from 1958, which also seeks contact with the air.

“I try to find interesting proportions of movement in time and space, because music is time. It’s not the melody that counts, but the time it gives you,” George Balanchine once said about his choreographic work. Divertimento No. 15 is one of the few ballets Balanchine created based on a work by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Born entirely from the music – Mozart’s Divertimento in B flat major K. 287 – it beautifully evokes the spirit of the divertissement, originally created to entertain.

With his world premiere of Pathétique , Martin Schläpfer concludes a series of ten works, some of them full-length, that he has created for the dancers of the Vienna State Ballet and the Youth Company as chief choreographer since 2020, giving the ensemble a distinctive artistic profile. With Piotr I. Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B minor op. 74, Martin Schläpfer has chosen a composition as his musical basis that is characterized by emotional flights of fancy as well as stark crashes and deep melancholy. It is a sonorous landscape of the soul and yet a composition that goes far beyond purely autobiographical traits, into whose maelstrom Martin Schläpfer enters with dance images full of drama and power, but also a fragility and beauty that gets under the skin.

Reminiscences of Tchaikovsky’s biography, echoes from his great ballets, images from the history of Russia and reflections on our time are charged by the choreographer as if in a pressure chamber and catalyzed by his movement language into a dance world panorama. “Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique is a composition like a novel and, despite everything that has been read into it, a mystery,” says Martin Schläpfer. “Music that washes over us like water, in which we sink, and then, full of virtuosity, brilliant tempi, a wide range of dynamics and a fascinating wealth of melodies, carries us up again,” says Martin Schläpfer, who concludes the work with a pacification – an unusual epilogue carried by George Frideric Handel’s aria Sweet Silence HWV 205: Imagination of a, according to the aria text, “rest … that is eternally ready for us”.

Im siebten Himmel by George Balanchine, Martin Schläpfer, Wiener Staatsballett Shifting Symmetries by George Balanchine, Wiener Staatsballett Nureyev Gala by Martin Schläpfer, Wiener Staatsballett Mahler, Live by Martin Schläpfer, Wiener Staatsballett A Suite of Dances by George Balanchine, Wiener Staatsballett Un Jour Ou Deux by Merce Cunningham