Mayerling

Kenneth MacMillan's Mayerling is one of the darkest and most psychologically intense works in the ballet canon. Based on the real-life Mayerling incident of 1889, it traces the catastrophic unravelling of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary — a man consumed by political frustration, sexual compulsion and a fatal obsession with death. The ballet culminates in Rudolf's murder-suicide pact with his teenage mistress, Mary Vetsera, at a remote hunting lodge. Set to a score compiled from Franz Liszt's music and arranged by John Lanchbery, Mayerling demands extraordinary stamina from its male lead, who dances seven major pas de deux across the course of the evening. It premiered at the Royal Opera House in 1978.