callirhoe
Madison Young (Callirhoe), Victor Caixeta (Chaereas), Ensemble
about today’s performance
“The Greek novel of love and adventure is almost always centred around a pair of lovers, two individuals linked together who must triumph against a world that opposes them. The lovers, usually left to their own devices – and relying on luck – are distinguished by their extreme good fortune. From privileged backgrounds, they possess and maintain both remarkable beauty and a nobility of character. Possessing these attributes, the protagonists then enter a vortex of dangerous events and seemingly hopeless situations. However, they survive separation and storms at sea, being attacked by robbers or pirates and slavery. Even death is overcome; when it strikes them, it turns out to be coma from which the heroine revives. In Chariton’s hands these motifs formed a catalogue that would stabilise during the novel’s subsequent history as a genre (…), even if within this consistent core, authors would strive to find variations and elaborations. Nevertheless, the macrocosm of the novel would be incomplete if the
ABOUT TODAY’S PERFORMANCE
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story as a whole did not end well. After all the perils the lovers must overcome, a happy ending is an intrinsic element of the form.” Here the afterword of a German edition of Chariton of Aphrodisias’s novel Callirhoe not only points out the essential features of the ancient novel, but also the cornerstones of the remarkable story of its principal characters Callirhoe und Chaereas. During the course of this work made up of eight books, the two lovers must overcome all manner of adventures and strokes of fate in order to be reunited and reach a position where they may live “happily ever after”. In Callirhoe, the author Chariton of Aphrodisias, who immediately describes himself at the beginning of the novel as a writer of stories and “secretary to Athenagoras’s lawyer”, promising to tell his readers a “love story from Syracuse”, not only provided key impulses for the development of a European literary culture – William Shakespeare would later find numerous sources of inspiration here for works such as The Winter’s Tale – he also wrote the “ideal ancient love novel”, one that keeps its readers rapt, combining passion with intellect and a fictional love story with observations of political and social reality. The oldest ancient prose romance to survive in its entirety stands at the beginning of the novel tradition – in several publications Chariton is even described as the inventor of the genre – and is presumed to have been written between 50 BCE and 150 CE. The story of the titular heroine Callirhoe, which unfolds around 400 BCE, whose “beauty is not of a human but a divine nature (…) like Aphrodite herself” is as exciting as it is complex: ignoring Chariton’s promise, it extends across numerous locations and places, bringing human actions driven by emotions together with the caprices and moods of ancient gods such as Eros, Aphrodite and Tyche, whom the characters worship and curse in equal measure. Along with its references to the ancient world and the novel Callirhoe’s importance to literary scholarship, its emotions were primarily what inspired choreographer Alexei Ratmansky to create a ballet based on this work. The burden of beauty with all its consequences and the power of forgiveness become core themes for him. The story ballet was premiered in 2020 with the American Ballet Theatre under the title Of Love and Rage and is now presented as a European premiere with the Vienna State Ballet: “It is a contemporary classical ballet by one of the most important choreographers of the present day, a ‘showcase’ ballet, that only exists in Vienna and a beautiful spectacle for our audience,” is how Alessandra Ferri describes what motivated her to programme Callirhoe as the opening premiere of her term as Director of the Vienna State Ballet. Alexei Ratmansky, already familiar to Viennese audiences through the ballets Pictures at an Exhibition and 24 Préludes and his choreography for the Vienna Opera Ball in 2024, now introduces himself at the Vienna State Opera for the first time with a largescale story ballet that fully expresses his neoclassical ballet language – where academic movement vocabulary is transposed to the present day in a fascinating and, for the dancers, challenging way unique within our contemporary ballet canon. As a consequence, his ballet not only unites Callirhoe’s epic story with the equally powerful music of the Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian but also unites the past with the present and the ancient with the modern. 5
ABOUT TODAY’S PERFORMANCE
ballet goes pop!
OLIVER PETER GRABER
Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978) is not only one of the rare composers to have made a name for themselves in musical history almost exclusively through writing ballets (though he made his international breakthrough with the Piano Concerto opus 38); he is also by some distance one of the most popular ballet composers – in the best sense of the word. Hardly any other composer can boast of achieving such widespread appeal, reaching such a broad audience across a range of genres – especially in his own lifetime. The Sabre Dance from the ballet Gayane prompted Newsweek to suggest that “1948 may be Khachaturian Year in the United States”. Three different recordings, one of which broke through the barrier of one million sales, featured on that year’s Billboard chart of “Best-Selling Records by Classical Artists” in the USA, on top of which there were also “pop versions” and vocal covers partly underlaid with text that mutated into hits on the jukeboxes that were omnipresent at the time, so that the piece also reached places 8, 13 and 28 on Billboard’s “Most-Played Juke Box Records” for the same year.
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And this was just the beginning of the “Sabre Dance boom”; it would continue to be heard in films, cartoons, shows, radio and TV productions, ads (some of you might still remember the TV ad for Kosakenkaffee) etc. in many nations, and remains to this day an obligatory part of the repertoire for request and spa concerts. Just as before him Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) was associated first and foremost with the Prélude in C sharp Major opus 3 no. 2, the Sabre Dance would become synonymous with Khachaturian – and Gayane the composer’s most successful work, even if some years later the Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia from the eponymous ballet Spartacus would at least come close to Gayane’s popularity – again via the indirect route of being used as a media soundtrack. Both ballets adorned postage stamps and motifs from the ballet Gayane even found their way in notated form onto the reverse of the 50 Dram note issued by the Central Bank of the Republic of Armenia. It is perhaps less well known, however, that the Sabre Dance is a typical piece of functional ballet music – typical in as far as it was only written very late on in the working process for Gayane and at someone else’s suggestion. According to Khachaturian (roughly quoted here) work on the Sabre Dance began “around 3 pm, I finished at about two in the morning, and they were rehearsing it by 11.00 am.” Such tight production deadlines for writing functional music for ballets “overnight” are not rare, as the author of this article can attest from his own work as a composer – and necessity is the mother of invention! “Cuts” and “edits” made retrospectively by choreographers, often without consultation, also require ballet composers to possess a healthy amount of resilience – though according to several anecdotes Khachaturian proved rather thin-skinned in this respect. A variety of sources maintain that during the final performance of his ballet Spartacus he would attend in his lifetime, he left the auditorium in the middle of Act One. When encountered in the street not far from the theatre, he apparently said that: “If I had stayed, I would have caused a terrible scandal! They cut four bars of my music!” But what is it that makes the Sabre Dance and Khachaturian’s music overall “pop”? One primary reason might lie not only in its simplicity, but above all in its fundamental emotional approach. The composer Rodion Shchedrin (1932-2025), who died on 29 August this year, frequently offered the view (roughly quoted here) that “today’s composers usually write as if they are planning to commit suicide afterwards” or “many contemporary scores are evidence of impending suicide.” This cannot be said of Khachaturian’s music which – even in the context of tragic events occurring in stage works or difficult circumstances in Khachaturian’s own personal life – is usually, if not always, a celebration of optimism, open to a positive future and an affirmation of life as well as a sanguine struggle for existence. At this point, without wishing to make a truism of discussing his music’s political dimension against the background of the Soviet Union, one should note that the underlying emotional make-up of Khachaturian’s music also meant that he did not need to make any substantial changes in his musical approach in the face of the imposition of so-called socialist realism, making him an ideal candidate to become a figurehead for Soviet musical creation. 21
BALLET GOES POP
Madison Young (Callirhoe), Ensemble
Rinaldo Venuti (Polycharmus), Victor Caixeta (Chaereas), Ensemble
Madison Young (Callirhoe)
ALEXEI RATMANSKY – Choreography The Ukrainian choreographer based in America Alexei Ratmansky trained at the Bolshoi Ballet School in Moscow. His performing career included positions as principal dancer with the Ukrainian National Ballet, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet. He has choreographed ballets for the Mariinsky Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet, Royal Swedish Ballet, Dutch National Ballet, New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Australian Ballet, Kiev Ballet and the State Ballet of Georgia, as well as for artists such as Nina Ananiashvili, Diana Vishneva and Mikhail Baryshnikov. From 2004 to 2008 Alexei Ratmansky was Artistic Director of the Moscow Bolshoi Ballet. In 2009 he became Artist in Residence at the American Ballet Theatre. After 13 years, he moved to the New York City Ballet in the same position in 2023. Since 2024, he is also Associate Artist of the Dutch National Ballet. For the Bolshoi Ballet, Alexei Ratmansky choreographed full-length productions of The Bright Stream (2003) and The Bolt (2005) and restaged Le Corsaire (2007) and the Soviet-era piece Flames of Paris (2008). For the American Ballet Theatre, he created the ballets Seven Sonatas (2009), The Nutcracker (2010), Dumbarton (2011), The Firebird and Symphony #9 (2012), The Tempest (2013), The Sleeping Beauty (2015), Serenade after Plato’s Symposium (2016), Songs of Bukovina (2017), Whipped Cream (2017), Harlequinade (2018), The Seasons (2019) and Of Love and Rage (2020), among others. In 2009, he choreographed the dance scenes for a new production of Verdi’s Aida at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. With the Ballet Zurich he presented his reconstruction of Petipa’s and Ivanov’s Swan Lake in 2016. His most recent works include Coppélia for the ballet of La Scala in Milan, Solitude for the New York City Ballet and Trio Kagel for the Dutch National Ballet. Alexei Ratmansky received two Golden Mask Awards from the Russian Theatre Union for Dreams of Japan (1998) and Jeu de Cartes (2007), two Prix Benois de la Danse for Anna Karenina (2005) and the Shostakovich Trilogy (2014), as well as Critics’ Circle National Dance Awards for The Bright Stream (2006) and the Shostakovich Trilogy (2020). In recognition of his artistic achievements, he was appointed Knight of the Order of Dannebrog by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark in 2001. In 2013, he was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. In 2021, the Vienna State Ballet presented Ratmansky’s work for the first time with Pictures at an Exhibition, followed in 2022 by a new staging of 24 Préludes. For the Vienna Opera Ball 2024, he choreographed La Séparation to the Waltz in C minor, Op. 39 No. 1 by Mykola Lysenko.
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BIOGRAPHIES