Programm booklet »Callirhoe«

callirhoe

Ewa Bathelier, Blue

The Vienna State Ballet is part of the Vienna State Opera and Vienna Volksoper

callirhoe Ballet in two Acts Choreography Alexei Ratmansky Dramaturgy & Libretto Guillaume Gallienne after the novel Callirhoe by Chariton of Aphrodisias Music Aram Khachaturian Arranged by Philip Feeney Musical Direction Paul Connelly Stage & Costume Design Jean-Marc Puissant Light Design Duane Schuler Realisation Costume Design Sukie Kirk Staging Nancy Raffa Eric Tamm Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera WORLD PREMIERE 5 TH MARCH 2020, UNDER THE TITLE OF LOVE AND RAGE AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE – SEGERSTROM CENTER FOR THE ARTS COSTA MESA, CALIFORNIA CO-PRODUCTION WITH THE NATIONAL BALLET OF CANADA EUROPEAN PREMIERE 19 TH OCTOBER 2025, VIENNA STATE BALLET – VIENNA STATE OPERA

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

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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.

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ABOUT TODAY’S PERFORMANCE

synopsis Act 1 In 400 BCE in the Greek city of Syracuse, a chorus of women celebrate Aphrodite, the goddess of love. They are joined by Callirhoe, a woman who is so beautiful that everyone compares her to Aphrodite. A group of young athletes, led by Chaereas and his friend Polycharmus, then arrive. Callirhoe and Chaereas lock eyes and instantly fall in love.

Callirhoe’s envious suitors bring in her father Hermocrates and Chaereas’s father Ariston, bitter enemies, in the hopes that they will break up the young lovers. However, the fathers are convinced to put aside their feud and allow their children to marry.

Callirhoe and Chaereas exchange bracelets as a sign of their devotion, and wedding celebrations ensue.

Undeterred, the suitors devise a new scheme. One secretly gives Callirhoe’s maid a bracelet identical to the wedding bracelets, which they use to trick Chaereas into thinking Callirhoe is unfaithful. In a jealous rage he rushes to confront her. Although she pleads her innocence, he does not listen. She collapses in frustration and appears lifeless. Her remorseful maid reveals the plot to Chaereas, and he despairs, as he believes he killed Callirhoe.

The mourning citizens bury Callirhoe. After everyone leaves, she awakens and is horrified to find herself buried alive. The pirate Theron and his crew come to loot the tomb, and they abduct her along with the treasure.

In grief, Chaereas returns to Callirhoe’s resting place with Polycharmus and is shocked to find the tomb entirely empty. They realize she must be alive and hasten off to find her.

Across the sea in Miletus, the nobleman Dionysius laments his wife’s death. The pirates arrive and sell Callirhoe to Dionysius. As soon as he sees her, he forgets his sorrow and falls madly in love. Meanwhile, his servant Plangon suspects that Callirhoe is pregnant. Callirhoe explains that it is Chaereas’s child. Plangon advises her to marry Dionysius to protect herself and her baby, and Callirhoe reluctantly agrees to her proposal. As the wedding begins, Chaereas arrives. Plangon sees his bracelet and deduces that he is Callirhoe’s husband. Loyal to Dionysius and seeking to preserve his newfound happiness, she has Chaereas and Polycharmus arrested.

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Act 2 Now captives, Chaereas and Polycharmus are carted off to the palace of the powerful Mithridates. Mithridates sees Chaereas’s fine bracelet and asks him who he is. As Chaereas narrates his past, it unfolds before him in a vision. Mithridates wants Callirhoe for himself and orders his guards to find her. When she arrives, Dionysius and Mithridates fight over her. However, they are stopped and reminded that, by law, all disputes between noblemen must be settled by the King of Babylon.

In Babylon, Dionysius and Mithridates present their case to the King. Dionysius states that Mithridates tried to seduce his wife, but Mithridates argues that Callirhoe is not Dionysius’s wife because she was already married to Chaereas. Callirhoe and Chaereas are summoned, and their bracelets prove that they are married. Although they want to reunite, they are stopped by the King, who now also lusts after Callirhoe. Refusing to listen to everyone’s protests, he forces her to dance with him.

Suddenly, the palace is thrown into chaos when Egypt declares war on Babylon. The King whisks his court to safety, taking Callirhoe with him and appointing Dionysius general of his army. A vengeful Chaereas enlists in the Egyptian army. In battle, the Egyptian General is wounded, and Chaereas’s resolve to fight for his love is doubled. He leads the Egyptian forces to victory.

After their harrowing ordeal, Callirhoe and Chaereas are reunited. Being remorseful Chaereas begs her for forgiveness, and she is torn. Although she is grateful for Dionysius’s kindness, she realizes that she has only ever loved Chaereas. She chooses to forgive. Dionysius accepts her decision and, as a gesture of his love, has Plangon bring Callirhoe her son.

The mistakes of the past are understood with compassion. Callirhoe, Chaereas, and their son start the journey home.

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SYNOPSIS

BOOK 1, CALLIRHOE BY CHARITON OF APHRODISIAS

“Envious Fortune, you hound me by land and sea and have not yet had your fill of my misfortunes? First you made my lover my murderer. (…)

Chaereas, now I am truly lost to you, separated by so vast a sea.

You are repenting in grief as you sit by the empty tomb, bearing witness to my chastity after my death, while I, the daughter of Hermocrates, your wife, have today been sold to a master!”

BOOK 3, CALLIRHOE BY CHARITON OF APHRODISIAS

“But Chaereas, looking up to heaven, stretched forth his hands and said, ‘Which of the gods has become my rival and carried off Callirhoe and now keeps her with him, against her will but compelled by a mightier fate? Is this then why she died suddenly, that she might not succumb to disease? So did Dionysus once steal Ariadne from Theseus and Zeus Semele from Acateon. Or can it be that I had a goddess as my wife and did not know it, and she was above our human lot?

But, even so, she should not have disappeared from the world so quickly or for such a reason.

Thetis, too, was a goddess, but she remained with Peleus and bore him a son, while I have been deserted at the very peak of my love. What is my fate? What will become of me, poor wretch?

Shall I kill myself? With whom shall I be buried?

For this was my hope in my misfortune, that if I could no longer share my bed with Callirhoe, at least I would share her grave. My lady, I offer you my defense for staying alive: you compel me to live. I shall search for you over land and sea – yes, if I may, I shall even rise into the sky. Only I beg you, my darling, do not flee from me.’”

movement and meaning MARINA HARSS

In 1978, at the age of ten, Alexei Ratmansky left his home city of Kyiv to pursue ballet training in Moscow. At the school affiliated with the Bolshoi, where he enrolled, he was often referred to as “the boy from Kyiv,” a term of endearment that also signaled that he was from somewhere else. He spent eight years there, the last three under the tutelage of the prestigious teacher of male dancers, Pyotr Pestov. What he learned was a Russian ballet technique that reflected the innovations of Agrippina Vaganova and the more athletic style of Soviet ballet. The Bolshoi was still under direction of the choreographer and ballet master Yuri Grigorovich, who had assumed the post in 1964 and would stay until 1995, and who died earlier this year.

By the time Ratmansky graduated, in 1986, the Soviet Union was on its last legs. But the repertory of the Bolshoi Ballet remained unchanged. It was still comprised mainly of ballets choreographed or staged by Grigorovich, like Spartacus and Ivan the Terrible, as well as Grigorovich’s cinematic, muscular stagings of classics like Swan Lake and Giselle. This is the diet Ratmansky was brought up on: Full evening ballets driven by strong narratives, with an emphasis on drama. Heroic technique went hand in hand with larger-than-life characterizations. The Bolshoi had little interest in the plot-less “pure dance” ballets that had been popularized by George Balanchine and others or even in the experiments that had taken place the early Soviet period or the innovations of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

Even so, during Ratmansky’s final years at the school and afterwards when he returned to Kyiv to begin his career with the National Ballet of Ukraine, things began to change.

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There was an influx of new information coming into the Soviet space: new literature, new cinema, and new art, including ballet. Ratmansky began to experience an unfamiliar repertory, seen on smuggled videocassettes and in the performances of visiting troupes from abroad. He recalls the shock of his encounter with the works of George Balanchine, including Apollo and Stravinsky Violin Concerto: “I was puzzled,” Ratmansky has said, “because I immediately knew that these were the best ballets I had ever seen.” It turned out that a ballet did not need a story or heroic technique to have a powerful impact on the viewer. It could be just music and bodies in space, a canvas for ideas and emotions.

During those years Ratmansky also saw many other ballets: Maurice Béjart’s Gaîté Parisienne, a work whose grounded style revealed the influence of modern dance. And Jiří Kylián’s Symphony in D, which poked fun at the conventions of classical ballet – interesting for a future choreographer with a natural affinity for humor. Meanwhile, he had developed an interest in the absurdist theater of Yuri Lyubimov and the surrealism of Federico Fellini. Ratmansky had a taste for art that did not provide easy answers or clear logic, and that allowed space for the imagination.

It was his curiosity – a hunger, really – that led Ratmansky to leave home as soon as it was possible to do so. In early 1992, soon after the demise of the Soviet Union, he left for Canada, where he joined the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. There, he danced in works by Frederick Ashton and Antony Tudor and Twyla Tharp, as well as more Balanchine. He performed ballets with stories, like Tudor’s Jardin aux lilas, and ballets without stories, like Ashton’s Les Patineurs. He found a particular pleasure in dancing the male solo in Balanchine’s Square Dance, a kind of soliloquy in which the dancer, a poet of movement, holds the audience while doing apparently very little, just a few jumps and turns, interrupted by long pauses. In his stillness the dancer appears to draw the viewer into his deepest thoughts. Within that absence of story, Ratmansky found the ability to go beyond words, to a deeper substratum of meaning.

Dancing Giselle with the great Canadian ballerina Evelyn Hart, he learned a different lesson: that the old story ballets contained layers of dramatic and emotional subtext that could be integrated into one’s performance. Ballet acting doesn’t need to be superficial or rely on convention. It could be layered, and deep, and personal. He explored this lesson even more deeply when he joined the Royal Danish Ballet and performed the works of August Bournonville, which abound in human details. From Balanchine to Bournonville to Soviet ballet to Béjart to Ashton to Petipa; these and many other influences can be read in Ratmansky’s work as a choreographer.

But his own style is not just a mélange of influences, but rather a unique, recognizable blend of many ingredients. Those ingredients include humor, emotional complexity, and sophisticated musicality. A love of the vocabulary of classical ballet and of movement – big, juicy, deep, space-devouring, sharply-accented movement that re-energizes the technique of ballet. The ability to elicit new colors and dynamics from the dancers he works with. A fertile, unpredictable imagination that resists easy interpretation. And a taste for theatricality. As Mikhail Baryshnikov has said of him, “He always has an aggressive agenda as to what a piece is about. It’s always about something, even when there is no story.”

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Story and Dramaturgy Story or no story? Ratmansky has made both kinds of ballets, those with a clear, overt narrative and those without. As well as hybrid works that develop narrative threads, without fully committing to step-by-step story development. But even his plot-less works, like Concerto DSCH (2008) and 24 Preludes (2013), the latter of which has been performed in Vienna, tend to allude, however loosely, to situations and characters. For Ratmansky, music suggests stories, rather than distilled emotion, in the manner of Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco or Divertimento No. 15. This reflects his reaction to music. “For me, even the most abstract and formal piece of music,” Ratmansky has said, “contains dramaturgy.” Take, for example, his Concerto DSCH. Though it does not tell a linear story, it is full of allusions that emerge from the music, which is by Shostakovich: To the parades and Young Pioneers of the USSR. To the heroic imagery of Soviet films.

To the dynamic style of the choreographer Vasili Vainonen, whose choreography for Flames of Paris Ratmansky was studying during the period in which he made Concerto DSCH. To the sensation of walking along the St. Petersburg canals with friends during warm summer nights when the sun never sets. All of these images and feelings infuse the ballet with its style and meaning. But it is left to the viewer to imagine how they fit together and what they add up to.

At the same time, Ratmansky loves and continues to make story ballets. His first international hit, The Bright Stream (2003), was a recreation of an early Soviet farce set on a collective farm with a cast of characters that included a tractor driver, a schoolgirl, and an agricultural student. He has choreographed versions of Romeo and Juliet (2011) and Don Quixote (2010), as well as ballets based on famous works of literature, like Balzac’s Illusions perdues (2011) and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (2004). He is scheduled to make a danced version of Lewis Carroll’s The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland (his favorite book) for Hamburg Ballet this season. And in his Serenade after Plato’s Symposium (2016) he has even turned the dialogues laid out in Plato’s Symposium into choreography that has the feel, look, and rhythm of speech.

More recently, Ratmansky has turned his attention to something that is extremely difficult to capture through the language of dance: the agony and violence of war. As mentioned earlier, Ratmansky’s early years, before ballet school, were spent in Kyiv, Ukraine. His father is Ukrainian, his mother Russian. And the first company he danced for, for six years, was the Ukrainian National Ballet, based at the Kyiv opera house. His wife, Tatiana, is Ukrainian, and both of their families are currently in Ukraine, even as the war drags on. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Ratmansky was in Moscow, creating a new ballet. He immediately left, and has been vocal about his horror at Russia’s aggression.

(The ballet he was in the process of creating, The Art of the Fugue, will premiere instead at the Royal Danish Ballet in November of this year.) Ratmansky’s works for Russian companies have continued to be performed, while his authorship of them has been erased, a practice reminiscent of the Soviet era. A recent performance of The Bright Stream at

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the Bolshoi was listed as “a staging of the Bolshoi Theatre.” In the Russian ballet world Ratmansky, who once directed the Bolshoi Ballet, is a non-person.

Ratmansky has grappled with these historic events in his ballets. In 2022, the year of the full-scale invasion, he made a plaintive ballet for Pacific Northwest Ballet to music by the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov in which ghostly figures searched for some kind of resolution or hopeful sign, Wartime Elegy. A Coppélia for La Scala in 2023 was infused with Ukrainian folk touches – the story takes place in Galizia, part of which is now in Ukraine. But the deepest exploration of the mental anguish and psychological fragmentation caused by war is his recent ballet Solitude, for New York City Ballet. It is both very literal – its central image is drawn from a photograph of a father holding his dead son’s hand – and difficult to pin down. Strange, inexplicable things happen; often it is unclear what is real and what is imagined, what is internal and what is external.

Solitude depicts a reality at the very edge of human understanding, in a realm where language and storytelling fail.

Callirhoe Callirhoe is a very different kind of ballet, the product of a less dramatic moment in history. It premiered, under the title Of Love and Rage, at American Ballet Theatre just before the start of the Covid pandemic, in early 2020. No-one knew at the time that we would be locked indoors for much of the following year. It is also an anomalous work for Ratmansky: A monumental spectacle, driven by constant action, set in a series of faraway lands, in the distant past. In a way it is a return to the ballets Ratmansky grew up with, Soviet classics like The Fountain of Bakhchisarai and Spartacus – ballet’s answer to movies like Ben-Hur and Cleopatra. Everything about the ballet is big: the cast, the story, the sets, the music.

The libretto is based on a Greek novel written sometime between the first century BCE and the second century CE, entitled Callirhoe, by the writer Chariton of Aphrodisias.

It is one of only five complete novels in prose to have survived from antiquity. These include, also, Daphnis and Chloe, by Longus, which has also been made into a ballet, by both Frederick Ashton and Michel Fokine. Like that tale, Callirhoe is both a romance and a tale of adventure, replete with star-crossed love, adventure, pirates, supernatural intervention, sudden reversals of fortune, and even a war, between the Egyptians and the Persians. The action begins in Syracuse, then moves across the Mediterranean to Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, then on to Babylon and Tyre, cities in the Persian Empire.

The period is the time of Alexander the Great. With the help of the French theater director Guillaume Gallienne (acting as dramaturg) and the designer Jean-Marc Puissant, Ratmansky distilled this action-packed story to its barest elements: a couple of young lovers whose union is constantly challenged by jealousy, lust, greed, and power. Puissant’s sets use architectural details to move the action from one location to another. A broken mask, representing Callirhoe’s beauty and trials, hangs above the stage.

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The music is by Aram Khachaturian, the Armenian composer who also provided the score for Spartacus, another ballet set in the Roman empire. Much of the music is drawn from the 1942 Khachaturian ballet Gayane, a Soviet idyll set on a collective farm in Armenia. Ratmansky combined the Gayane score with quieter music drawn from Khachaturian’s piano works, orchestrated by the British composer Philip Feeney.

Two passages will be familiar to the Viennese audience: the Sabre Dance, which has been included in everything from cartoons to Olympic skating routines, and an adagio for strings that Stanley Kubrick used to evoke the eerie calm of outer space in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Interestingly, Khachaturian’s score includes several unusual percussion instruments, like the flexatone, a strange contraption that consists of a metal sheet that is shaken, causing two beaters to strike it, creating an eerie, wobbly sound reminiscent of the electric saw.

For Ratmansky, this music, and the novel’s epic subject matter, represented a challenge, he has said: “This big dramatic music forces me to find a bigger vocabulary than I have used in the past.” The choreography, especially for the men, is even more muscular and full-bodied than usual in his ballets, and the choreography includes large ensemble dances reminiscent of the folk-dances from the Caucasus. Callirhoe gives us Ratmansky at his most expansive and exultant.

But there was another, perhaps deeper motivation for Ratmansky’s choice of subject matter. As he said during the creation process, “I deliberately chose the ancient story in order to be able to incorporate my passion for the art of that period.” He is a great admirer of Graeco-Roman art and for years has collected images of funerary urns, masks, wall paintings, sculptures, altars, temples, and ruined villas. Just as Concerto DSCH reflects Ratmansky’s knowledge of the iconography and triumphalism of early Soviet art, Callirhoe is a collage of his impressions of classical art, which he has documented in trips to ancient sites and museum collections around the world. Veiled figures, inspired by a Greek statuette of a dancer in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, perform funeral rites; processionals evoke the decorations on Greek amphorae.

Dancers crouch and twist their torsos, in an echo of Myron’s statue of a discus thrower from the fifth century BCE. Bodies are entwined like the figures on the Elgin Marbles and the Pergamon Altar. And, as in his Serenade after Plato’s Symposium, the dancers “speak” and argue with each other, using a language of the body, a visceral, 21st-century version of balletic pantomime.

The ballet contains non-stop action. Callirhoe and Chaereas, both young and beautiful, see each other, fall in love, and marry. Envious rivals trick Chaereas into believing Callirhoe has been unfaithful. In a fit of rage, he confronts her, and she appears to die, though, as we soon realize, she has actually fallen into a kind of deep sleep. (A similar thing happens in Shakespeare’s play The Winter’s Tale, which may have been influenced

by Callirhoe.) When she wakes up, Callirhoe is kidnapped by pirates and taken across the Mediterranean, where she marries a wealthy man who has just lost his wife. A king steals her away. Another man desires her. Meanwhile, Chaereas has been on a desperate quest to find her and make amends. The question, throughout, is this: Will he find her?

And if he does, will she forgive him?

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Ultimately, Callirhoe is a tale of forgiveness, and about the return from rupture to order, what the Ancient Greeks called “Homonoia,” or concord. “For the Greeks this was an important virtue, a way for like-minded people to be on the same wavelength,” Stephen Trzaskoma, classicist and translator of Callirhoe, has said. In this sense, it is a very Ratmanskyan subject. Many of his ballets, including his versions of Le Baiser de la Fée, The Firebird, Cinderella, and Romeo and Juliet, end with an image of harmony restored, violence expiated. It is an idea that matters to Ratmansky.

And so it turns out that Callirhoe is perhaps less different from the rest of Ratmansky’s repertory than it at first appears. What is sure is that, like Ratmansky’s other ballets, it will push the Vienna dancers to the fullest, stylistically, dramatically, and technically.

Their effort to transcend themselves will become part of the drama of the story. As Ratmansky has said, “some things cannot be said in words, and for those things, there is dance.”

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the power of forgiveness

ALEXEI RATMANSKY IN CONVERSTATION WITH NASTASJA FISCHER

What first inspired you to transform the complex story of the novel Callirhoe into a ballet?

As a choreographer, I am always in search of scores and stories. Usually, the music comes first, and in the case of Callirhoe it was Aram Khachaturian’s magnificent score for the ballet Gayane that immediately captured my imagination. I have loved his music for a long time, but the original “Soviet” storyline attached to the work felt unworkable. What the score itself holds, however, is raw energy – deeply rooted in ancient Armenia, full of melodic power and rhythmic vitality. The turning point came thanks to my dramaturge, Guillaume Gallienne, who pointed me towards Chariton of Aphrodisias’ novel Callirhoe – the oldest complete novel to survive from antiquity. Strangely, it is hardly known, hardly read. When I studied it, I quickly realized it was perfect. Many of the literary devices we know so well appear here for the first time: the feigned death, the awakening in the tomb … twists of fate later taken up by Shakespeare himself.

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Why does the story still matter today?

Callirhoe shows us, across the gulf of centuries, that the essence of human experience does not change. Political developments over the last decade suggest that history repeats itself, that progress is often an illusion, and that we remain people guided by our emotions. The novel reminds us that our ideas of good and evil, of guilt and forgiveness, are never fixed but must be renegotiated again and again. The characters’ circumstances may be different from ours, but at their core they are the same as we are today: their decisions, their struggles, their passions remain timeless.

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What makes Callirhoe herself such a compelling title heroine?

It is the tale of the “most beautiful woman in the world”, but what does that really mean? At first, her beauty appears as a divine gift, yet it quickly reveals itself to be a burden: every man who lays eyes on her falls in love and seeks to possess her. And yet Callirhoe is no passive victim. She is a woman of remarkable strength. Despite the violence she endures, she makes her own choices. In the end, she must decide whether to forgive the man she loves, who has also wronged her – and she does. For me, that act of forgiveness is the key to the entire story. I have thought a great deal about how, today, people so rarely get a second chance. Mistakes of the past often lead to exclusion, regardless of whether someone has changed. But life is a journey, and we are not the same in every stage of our existence. Mistakes may teach us, or not – but I believe it is essential always to leave space for forgiveness.

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How did the creative process unfold?

Because the music was originally composed for another plot, it had to be reshaped. Philip Feeney reworked and expanded the score in close collaboration with us. On that foundation we began rehearsals, where the music, the dramaturgy, and the dancers’ own personalities gradually came together. It is a fascinating process because you never know where it will lead. Ultimately, the challenge is to fuse three very different elements – music, narrative, and dance – into one. When I created the ballet in 2020 with American Ballet Theatre, my ideas were at first met with hesitance. Some questioned why we should stage a ballet about violence against women, as if the subject no longer existed, or could only be treated in a black and white manner. But in rehearsals, the understanding of my vision grew. The ballet premiered just before the pandemic hit. Only a handful of performances were possible before the theaters closed. That is why the work carries a sense of nostalgia for me, and why I am deeply grateful to Alessandra Ferri for bringing Callirhoe to Vienna at the very start of her directorship.

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Your ballet draws strongly on the world of antiquity. What does that mean to you?

With Callirhoe, I enter a world that is very dear to me. I am passionate about ancient Greek and Roman art, and this was a chance to bring the impressions, knowledge, and images I love into a ballet. At the same time, it is about the Greek discovery of beauty – and the aesthetics of Greece are the foundation of classical dance. Ballet itself was born as a rebirth of ancient ideals of harmony, proportion, weight, and bearing, as we see in classical sculpture. The stage and costume designer Jean-Marc Puissant, an artist with great knowledge and sensitivity, has also created a set after extensive research that not only brings historical references with it, but is timeless and lively at the same time.

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How did the characters themselves take shape?

It was a long process. Guillaume Gallienne played a vital role, showing us the dramatic potential within the movement material. In the studio he offered the dancers thought-provoking guidance, advice, and at times warnings. What is most exciting is that the ballet grew out of the rehearsal process itself, it is not a work already shaped by others. Most dancers spend their careers performing existing choreography. In Callirhoe, the movement was created around their own personalities.

Because the ballet has only ever been performed by one company, I was especially curious to see how the Vienna State Ballet would embrace it and how the choreography might evolve in their hands. Already I have considered reworking or refining certain passages. When a dancer brings great individuality or strong physical presence, it can shift the very nature of a character. The interpretation changes, opening up new possibilities.

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The stage and costumes draw on ancient culture. Does this influence the movement language as well?

There are echoes, but not in a stylized way. In Callirhoe, for example, the corps de ballet is not mere background; it has a dramaturgical role, almost like the chorus of ancient tragedy. It comments on the action, signals key moments such as Callirhoe’s supposed death. There are, of course, quotations from well-known sculptures and poses that a trained eye will recognize. But my goal was never a museal reconstruction. I wanted to create a living, gripping, and challenging ballet, with a narrative that moves forward and choreography that excites. The entire company, from corps members to principals, dances with extraordinary intensity. They must be not only dancers, but also athletes and actors. As always, my choreographic language is rooted in the classical vocabulary, but – I hope – it speaks in a voice of today. What I value most in classical dance is that it is not a rigid system but one that keeps evolving. Its vocabulary offers an extraordinary foundation that can adapt to any AR

THE POWER OF FORGIVENESS

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era. Looking back over three centuries, one sees how dance has been shaped by history and society – from the French Revolution to the fall of the Russian Empire, from the rise of acrobatics to the ever-greater athleticism of sport. Even today, ballet is transformed by new technologies and modern lifestyles: linoleum floors, improved pointe shoes, nutrition, training methods like Pilates – all these expand the expressive range and the possibilities for dancers. It is a mistake to say classical ballet is dead or outdated. On the contrary: it is alive, it continues to change, and it offers fresh inspiration to artists and audiences alike.

“This ballet isn’t archeology.

It is for the stage (...) It’s about a great love and adventures.

A first love, which then returns as mature emotion, cemented by the experience of horrible misfortunes.”

ALEXEI RATMANSKY

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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.

BALLET GOES POP

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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.

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BALLET GOES POP

His typical stamping, driving ostinati and repeated short motifs that brilliantly build momentum in continuous circles before projecting this moving energy melodically in a vast arc, his quaint instrumentation, improvisatory qualities and clear evocations of the music of the Caucasus, enriched with his preference for the rhythms and forms of dance together with chromatic lines that rise through organ points and the interval of the “grating” second – to name just a few characteristics of his personal style – create the impression of strength, vitality and joie de vivre.

If one had to choose the most invigorating piece of 20th century ballet music, the lezginka from Gayane, to which one can imagine a wonderful “typewriter choreography” would probably come out right at the top of the list.

As a result, “Armenia’s greatest composer”, as he is often described – the anthem he composed was sung from 1944 to 1991 in the Armenian Socialist Soviet Republic – drew on the works created by Russia’s “Mighty Five”, French impressionism, the many streams of Caucasian musical traditions (including Uzbek influences) and as a big Miles Davis fan, jazz and the popular music of his time to achieve the feat of giving his nation an unmistakable voice within so-called tonal music, which was ultimately recognised in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2013.

A piece of advice from Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) would become the guiding maxim of his composing career: “Writing a concerto is very difficult. There needs to be some kind of idea.” His “two-and-a-half ballets”, as he often liked to remark jokingly according to his son Karen, because his first ballet Happiness more or less carried the nucleus of Gayane inside it, contain as many of these as remain alive but unused.

It should not be forgotten that Khachaturian also found his way to Vienna: the Vienna Philharmonic played his Second Symphony, his Piano Concerto (with Alexander Jenner as the soloist) and excerpts from his ballet Gayane on 5 March 1961 with Khachaturian himself conducting in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein. By contrast, the cover of the recording of his Violin Concerto made on 2 - 3 June 1959, also in the Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein with Mischa Elman (soloist) and Vladimir Golschmann (conductor), is firmly credited with the Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera.

BALLET GOES POP

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ARAM KHACHATURIAN

“I believe that I have not composed a single work in which the essence of the culture and art of the people has not somehow found expression.”

musical order The arrangement by Philip Feeney consists of the following compositions:

ACT 1 I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII

arrangement Philip Feeney and Sonatina for Piano Gayane Prologue Gayane No. 2 Gayane No. 11 Reprise from Gayane No. 11 Gayane No. 9 & No. 7 Gayane No. 8 Gayane No. 31 Gayane No. 6 Lezginka Gayane No. 14 & No. 15 Gayane No. 25 Gayane No. 26 Children’s Album 2 – Sounds of Childhood, No. 7 Funeral March Gayane No. 29 Gayane No. 32 & No. 33 Gayane No. 27 Andante con anima from Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in D Flat major op. 38 Gayane No. 12 Children’s Album 2 – Sounds of Childhood, No. 2 An Evening Tale Gayane No. 39 Gayane No. 7 Uzundura Gayane No. 43 Gayane No. 50

MUSICAL ORDER

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ACT 2 XXIV XXV XXVI XXVII XXVIII XXIX XXX XXXI XXXII XXXIII XXXIV XXXV XXXVI XXXVII XXXVIII XXXIX XXXX XXXXI

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arrangement Philip Feeney Gayane No. 25 & No. 46 Gayane No. 47 Children’s Album 1 – Pictures of Childhood, No. 2 No Walk today Children’s Album 2 – Sounds of Childhood, No. 3 Eastern Dance Gayane No. 13 Ostinato from Three Pieces for Two Pianos Gayane No. 36 Gayane No. 37 Gayane No. 45 Children’s Album 2 – Sounds of Childhood, No. 9 Toccata Gayane No. 50 Gayane No. 20 Gayane No. 21 & No. 40 Gayane No. 48 Sabre Dance Gayane No. 3 & No. 4 Gayane Suite: No. 3: IV. Gayane’s Adagio Gayane No. 50

MUSICAL ORDER

dialogue with antiquity JEAN-MARC PUISSANT IN CONVERSATION WITH NASTASJA FISCHER

What was your first reaction when Alexei Ratmansky engaged you for the stage and costume design?

This production was my first project for Alexei, and a great moment for me. I have admired his work for decades – his engagement with the DNA of classical ballet productions, through his reconstructions of Petipa’s works, and through his creations, making ballet a contemporary, breathing art form. Personally, my work on Callirhoe felt like a return: I was a dancer myself but also studied art history and archaeology at the Sorbonne University in Paris. Thinking of ways to unite dance and ancient culture in one production seemed particularly appealing to me.

JMP

How did you approach the research for stage and costumes?

Research is always the foundation my work. I design to tell stories, narative or abstract, supporting the text – in this case, the choreography based on the novel – and the artists performing it. For this ballet, the research was especially extensive, as the plot leads from present-day Sicily to Asia Minor and then to present-day Iraq and Egypt. After doing my own research, I felt the need to consult with specialists Dr. Ian Jenkins, curator the British Museum, and Kim Benzel, curator at the Metropolitan Museum. Our conversations quickly expanded to the larger question: How do we present antiquity today?

JMP

DIALOGUE WITH ANTIQUITY

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What is your visual answer to this question?

Within the context of a ballet, made for and performed in a theatre, I applied to the design of the production a similar approach to what was shared with me by these curators: presenting fragments and artifacts as they are and at their best, but without fully reconstructing them. What has been broken is pieced back together like a puzzle; break lines aren’t erased; what is missing, either lost through time, stolen or destroyed by war, is deliberately left open, or blank. The audience sees characters of the ballet in a world where their stories and emotions are humanly believable, while never forgetting they are watching an ancient tale, created nearly 2000 years ago. Beyond its visual interest, I felt it would help a contemporary audience connect with the story of Callirhoe’s life, her emotions and choices.

JMP

Can you give an example of working with fragments?

One discovery for me was the image of a mask from Syracuse, seen on a book cover. It shows the face of a young woman, broken and reassembled. Break lines and cracks run down from her eyes, like tears. This image became a symbol of the story for me: a beauty that lies beyond its initial flawlessness. I placed the book with this image inside my model box and, from then on, the language of the design was clear.

JMP

The plot unfolds across several locations, constantly shifting its focus.

How did this affect the stage design?

The story is so episodic, almost like a series with multiple episodes you “binge watch”. I wanted to take the audience on an epic journey, but without stopping the flow of the action for the sake of design. Like in the Greek amphitheater, where spectators would have witnessed scene changes in full view, I devised a design where scenic elements can easily reorganize in new locations. This transparency challenges the imagination but at the same time it creates intensity, closeness, and a language consistent with antiquity.

JMP

How did you approach the costumes design?

For the costumes, I also worked on quoting remaining fragments, jewelry or known patterns. What is missing remains abstract. Several fashion collections have also ere-interpreted ancient clothes; they inspired me to translate historical silhouettes into more modern shapes, especially when costumes had to be adapted for the needs of classical ballet choreography.

JMP

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DIALOGUE WITH ANTIQUITY

Madison Young (Callirhoe), Ensemble

Rinaldo Venuti (Polycharmus), Victor Caixeta (Chaereas), Ensemble

Alessandro Frola (Dionysius)

Madison Young (Callirhoe), Victor Caixeta (Chaereas)

Victor Caixeta (Chaereas), Men’s Ensemble

Madison Young (Callirhoe), Victor Caixeta (Chaereas)

Ioanna Avraam (Queen of Babylon)

Rinaldo Venuti (Polycharmus), Men’s 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

PAUL CONNELLY – Musical Direction Paul Connelly, trained at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, gained his first professional experience as an assistant at the opera houses in Boston, Santa Fe and San Francisco and made his debut at the age of twenty-four as conductor of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess at the Houston Grand Opera. In San Francisco, he was Music Director of the Affiliate Artists Programme for Opera and was awarded an Exxon/Arts Endowment Conducting Fellowship. At the invitation of Mikhail Baryshnikov, he joined the American Ballet Theatre as Principal Conductor, where he had the opportunity to work with choreographers such as George Balanchine, Kenneth MacMillan, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp and Anthony Tudor. At the same time, he was invited as a guest conductor with the New York City Ballet, Nureyev and Friends, and as Music Director of Baryshnikov and Co. He was also appointed Principal Guest Conductor of the National Ballet of Canada and worked on film and television productions including Baryshnikov’s Don Quixote with the ABT, Live from Lincoln Center and the series Dance in America. His major opera productions during this period included conducting Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice, Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

In 1991, Paul Connelly made his debut at the Vienna State Opera with a ballet gala, followed by Rossiniʼs Il Barbiere di Siviglia. To date, he has conducted there the Vienna State Balletʼs productions of The Nutcracker, Don Quixote, Romeo and Juliet, The Sleeping Beauty, La Fille mal gardée, Giselle, Jewels and Swan Lake.

Engagements throughout Europe followed, including the Staatsoper Unter den Linden and the Deutsche Oper Berlin, as well as the Ballet de lʼOpéra de Paris, where several productions were filmed under his baton, including Giselle, John Neumeier’s Sylvia, George Balanchine’s Jewels and a programme of works by Roland Petit.

Further appearances have taken him to the Opéra de Nice, Opéra National de Bordeaux, Budapest State Opera, Den Norske Opera Oslo, Zurich Opera House, Royal Ballet London, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Dutch National Ballet, Berlin State Ballet, Tokyo Ballet, Finnish National Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Korean National Ballet and the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, where he most recently conducted Alexei Ratmansky’s Coppélia. He also collaborated with the Danish Radio Orchestra and the Orchestre Colonne in Paris. In 2025, he was invited to the Teatro San Carlo to conduct a concert of American repertoire, among others.

Paul Connellyʼs DVD recordings include Mauro Bigonzettiʼs Caravaggio with the Berlin State Ballet, Rudolf Nureyevʼs The Nutcracker with the Vienna State Ballet and Christian Spuckʼs Nutcracker and Mouse King with the Zurich Ballet.

BIOGRAPHIES

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imprint

Callirhoe Alexei Ratmansky Season 2025/26 PUBLISHER Vienna State Opera GmbH, Opernring 2, 1010 Vienna General Director: Dr. Bogdan Roščić Administrative Director: Dr. Petra Bohuslav Director Vienna State Ballet: Alessandra Ferri Managing Director Vienna State Ballet: Mag.a Simone Wohinz Editorial Team: Nastasja Fischer MA, Mag.a Iris Frey Design & Concept: Fons Hickmann M23, Berlin Layout & Type Setting: Miwa Meusburger Producer: Print Alliance HAV Produktions GmbH, Bad Vöslau PERFORMING RIGHTS For the choreography © Alexei Ratmansky For the music: Excerpts from the ballet Gayane with interpolations from the Sonatina for Piano, Children’s Album 2 – Sounds of Childhood (No. 2, 3, 7, 9), Children’s Album 1 – Pictures of Childhood (No. 2) & the Ostinato from Three Pieces for Two Pianos by Aram Khachaturian.

By kind permission of Karen Khachaturian.

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in D-flat major, Op. 38 & Gayane Suite No. 3: IV (Gayane’s Adagio) by Aram Khachaturian. By kind permission of Universal Edition AG, Vienna. Orchestral arrangement by Philip Feeney.

TEXT REFERENCES About today’s performance from Nastasja Fischer (English translation: David Tushingham), the text Meaning and Movement by Marina Harss, the interviews with Alexei Ratmansky and Jean-Marc Puissant as well as the text Ballet goes Pop! from Oliver Peter Graber (English translation: David Tushingham) are original contributions for this programme booklet. / The synopsis and the quote from Alexei Ratmansky (p. 19) are taken from the programme bill from the American Ballet Theatre: Of Love and Rage.

New York 2022 / p: 8 & 9: G. P. Goold: Chariton. Callirhoe.

Cambridge, London 1995 / p. 23: Aram Khachaturian quoted after Sikorski Magazine. 2nd Edition. Hamburg 2015.

Reproduction only with the permission of the Vienna State Ballet/Dramaturgy.

produced according to the Austrian Ecolabel criteria for printed matter (Uz24), Print Alliance HAV Produktions GmbH, UW-NR 715

PHOTO CREDITS Cover: Ewa Bathelier, Blue, from the private collection of Kathryn and Stephen Mee, Sydney / The stage photos by Ashley Taylor have been taken at the stage rehearsal on 6 October 2025 at the Vienna State Opera / p 37: z. V. g. / p: 38 © Attila Nagy Right Owners who could not be reached are requested to contact the editorial team for the purpose of subsequent legal reconciliation.

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