VIENNA On 9 April, the Ballet Company of the Vienna State Opera will present  Pathétique – the last premiere under the direction of Martin Schläpfer. To mark this occasion, the ballet director and chief choreographer of the Vienna State Ballet has once again embarked on a creative process with the dancers of his ensemble, creating a large-scale ballet to Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6. This new work is paired with two icons of New York dance modernism: George Balanchine’s delicate Mozart ballet Divertimento No. 15 from 1956 and Merce Cunningham’s Summerspace from 1958 — a piece full of leaps and turns, equally seeking contact with the air. After the premiere the triple bill will be on stage:  11, 14, 21, 26 April, 3, 7, 11 May, 5, 7, 10 June 2025.

The premiere also includes a special highlight for art lovers: the stage and costume design for Summerspace was created by Robert Rauschenberg, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday in 2025. Known primarily for his objects called Combines, the pioneer of American Pop Art was a close collaborator of Cunningham in over 20 joint projects.

“I try to find interesting proportions of movement in time and space because music is time. It’s not the melody that counts, it is the time it gives you”, George Balanchine once said about his choreographic work. Divertimento No. 15 from 1956 is one of the few ballets he created to a work by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Born entirely out of the music – Mozart’s Divertimento in B flat major KV 287 – it perfectly captures the spirit of the divertissement, originally created as entertainment. Its chamber music character is matched by a select cast consisting of five female soloists, three male soloists and a corps de ballet of eight female dancers for a choreography in which Balanchine skilfully and subtly inscribes a complex array of geometric patterns within the space while allowing his dances to unfold in their individual variations with great power, remarkable verve and unique character. 

Following the premiere of his Duets in June 2022 at the Vienna Volksoper, Summerspace is another work by Merce Cunningham to join the repertoire, marking the first time that one of the American’s pieces will be performed by the Vienna State Ballet at the Staatsoper. No other choreographer has challenged collective assumptions about the art of dance as radically as Cunningham with his abandonment of the connections between movement, music and stage and costume design, his development of a dance technique that establishes new links between different parts of the body and his rejection of traditional ideas of the theatre space. In Summerspace six dancers appear to pass through the space like birds in the detached atmosphere of a balmy summer day. “It was about space, as the title indicates”, Cunningham explained. “I decided to number the entrances and exits (...) and to link them by all the possible trajectories.” This yielded 21 possibilities, for which he defined different forms of movement and whose running order and tempo were fixed according to random principles of aleatoric. In addition to Robert Rauschenberg, who created a pointillistic floral landscape with his stage and costume design, Cunningham also enlisted an outstanding contemporary artist for the musical score: Morton Feldman composed an atmospheric piece for two pianos.

With his world premiere Pathétique, Martin Schläpfer concludes a series of ten works – some evening-length – that he has created as chief choreographer since 2020 for the dancers of the Vienna State Ballet and the Youth Company, giving the ensemble a distinctive artistic profile. For the musical foundation, Martin Schläpfer has chosen Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74, a composition marked by emotional highs, dramatic plunges, and deep melancholy. It is a sonic landscape of the soul – far beyond purely autobiographical features –in whose currents Schläpfer immerses himself with dance images full of drama, strength, and a fragile, haunting beauty. Reminiscences of Tchaikovsky’s biography, echoes of his great ballets, images from Russian history, and reflections on our own time are charged like in a pressure chamber and catalyzed through Schläpfer’s movement language into a panoramic dance vision. “Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique is like a novel and, despite everything that has been read into it, remains a mystery”, says Martin Schläpfer. “It is music that surrounds us like water in which we sink – only to be carried upward again by its virtuosity, brilliant tempos, wide spectrum of dynamics, and fascinating melodic richness." Schläpfer closes the work with a moment of peace – an unusual epilogue carried by Georg Friedrich Handel’s aria Süße Stille, HWV 205: the imagination of a “the peace ... that awaits us for eternity”, as the aria’s text suggests.

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