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Flashbacks and Recollections München
Nationaltheater
05/12/2026 - & May 13, 15, 23, 25, July 10, September 20, 24, October 9, 10, 2026, March 3, 5, 6, 9, June 30, July 11, 2027
John Neumeier: Lady of the Camellias
John Neumeier (choreography), Frédéric Chopin (music)
Laurretta Summerscales (Marguerite Gautier), Jakob Feyferlik (Armand Duval), Florian Ulrich Sollfrank (Monsieur Duval), Soren Sakadales (The Duke), Zhanna Gubanova (Olympia), Jasper Metcalfe (Le Duc N), Ksenia Shevtsova (Manon Lescaut), Oleksandr Ryabko (Des Grieux), Séverine Ferrolier (Nanine), Elvina Ibraimova (Prudence Duvernoy), Alexander Reitenbach (piano on stage), Norbert Graf (An auctioneer), Bayerisches Staatsballett
Dmitry Mayboroda (piano), Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Victorien Vanoosten (conductor)
Jürgen Rose (sets & costumes)
(© Wilfried Hösl)
Some ballet productions are too beautiful and too intelligently conceived ever to disappear from the repertory. John Neumeier’s Lady of the Camellias, now revived by Bayerisches Staatsballett after a six‑year absence, is certainly one of them. More than forty years after its creation for Stuttgart Ballet in 1978, it remains one of the great narrative ballets of the twentieth century, a work whose impact seems only to deepen with time.
The source material of Lady of the Camellias is itself one of the monuments of nineteenth-century Romanticism. Alexandre Dumas fils’s 1848 novel La Dame aux Camélias was inspired by his affair with the celebrated courtesan Marie Duplessis, who died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty‑three. During her brief life, she had become one of the most famous women in Paris, moving effortlessly among aristocrats, artists and writers. Her beauty, elegance and tragic fate transformed her into a legend. Dumas immortalised her as Marguerite Gautier, the beautiful demi‑mondaine who sacrifices love to convention and dies redeemed by suffering.
The story immediately captivated Europe. Dumas adapted it for the stage in 1852 and, despite initial censorship, the play became an international sensation. Giuseppe Verdi attended a performance in Paris and instantly recognised its operatic potential. The result was La Traviata, premiered in Venice in 1853. Though initially unsuccessful, the opera soon conquered the world and ensured that Marguerite’s story became one of the defining myths of Romantic literature and music.
Yet it is perhaps in ballet that this tragic tale achieves its most poignant expression. Neumeier’s adaptation belongs to the great tradition of literary ballets, but it also represented something entirely new when it premiered. Created for Marcia Haydée and Ivan Liska, it demonstrated that classical ballet could embrace psychological complexity and cinematic storytelling without sacrificing beauty or formal elegance. It quickly entered the repertory of major companies and became one of the defining works of modern narrative ballet.
The ballet unfolds through flashbacks and recollections, scenes returning and overlapping like fragments of a dream. Characters seem haunted by their own memories. This structure, revolutionary in ballet at the time, remains remarkably modern today. The result is not simply a retelling of Dumas’s novel but a meditation on memory, loss and regret.
The ballet is inseparable from the extraordinary career of its creator. Born in Milwaukee in 1939, John Neumeier studied in the United States before joining the Stuttgart Ballet during the great flowering of German dance theatre under John Cranko. In 1973, he became director and chief choreographer of Hamburg Ballet, a position he held for more than fifty years, transforming the company into one of the world’s leading ensembles and establishing Hamburg as an international centre of ballet.
Neumeier’s contribution to the art form has been immense. His works, among them A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Nijinsky, The Little Mermaid and Lady of the Camellias, combined literary sophistication, musical intelligence and profound emotional insight. He expanded the possibilities of storytelling in dance, creating ballets that are at once deeply theatrical and unmistakably classical.
The choreography itself is among the most eloquent created for the classical stage. Every gesture appears psychologically motivated, every embrace already tinged with loss. The pas de deux between Marguerite and Armand are simultaneously passionate and fragile, the lovers repeatedly finding and losing one another in movements that seem to arise naturally from the drama itself. The choreography gives physical form to emotions that words could scarcely express.
A play within a play is incorporated through a performance of Manon Lescaut, brilliantly danced by Ksenia Shevtsova and Oleksandr Ryabko. Neumeier uses Manon’s tragic ending as an ingenious device. The two dancers appear intermittently throughout the ballet as ghosts, foreshadowing Marguerite’s impending fate.
Indeed, the essence of Neumeier’s dramaturgy is to blur time. The ballet opens with Nanine, Marguerite’s loyal servant, and then Armand going through Marguerite’s belongings at an auction following her death, thus revealing the gloomy ending before the tragic events transpire. Throughout the performance, the past and the present are astutely interwoven.
This deliberate confusion of time is probably what inspired Franco Zeffirelli in the opening of his 1982 film La Traviata. Other details, such as Prudence Duvernoy, Marguerite’s scheming friend, stealing the necklace that Marguerite drops when she ends her affair with the Duke, are also “borrowed” by Zeffirelli in the scene in which guests steal knick‑knacks at the end of the party.
Equally remarkable is Neumeier’s use of Chopin. Rather than employing the music merely as accompaniment, he makes it the emotional heart of the ballet. The choice is historically apt. Chopin was a contemporary of the world depicted by Dumas and died only a year after the publication of La Dame aux Camélias. His music, poised between aristocratic refinement and melancholy, inhabits precisely the same emotional landscape as Marguerite’s story. The waltzes evoke the elegance of Parisian salons, while the nocturnes and concertos reveal a deep sadness. Dance and music seem inseparable, as though they had always belonged together.
Marguerite Gautier and Armand Duval were danced by Bayerisches Staatsballett’s star dancers, Laurretta Summerscales and Jakob Feyferlik. The two had graced last summer’s phenomenal Romeo and Juliet at the same venue. In addition to her technical brilliance, Summerscales is endowed with incredible stage presence and expressivity. She aptly conveyed Marguerite’s fragility even before showing signs of tuberculosis.
Feyferlik was entirely convincing as Armand, portraying him as youthful and self‑assured. Once in love, he revealed a greater vulnerability and, eventually, jealousy when he embarked on a flirtation with the young Olympia.
As in the aforementioned Romeo and Juliet, Summerscales and Feyferlik were not only technically brilliant but also exceptionally well matched, both in height and, especially, in their interplay as dance partners. Summerscales’s delicacy contrasted beautifully with Feyferlik’s virile agility.
Jürgen Rose’s elegant sets and costumes evoke nineteenth-century Paris with remarkable authenticity without ever becoming excessively realistic. Like all of Rose’s finest work, they possess a lightness and refinement that allows the dancers to remain at the centre of the drama. Visually, this is a beautiful production.
Few ballets are as intelligently constructed as Lady of the Camellias. It is one of those rare works in which choreography becomes a complete form of dramatic expression, uniting literature, music and dance with exceptional coherence. One leaves the theatre not merely saddened by Marguerite’s fate but grateful that ballet can still achieve such artistic richness. Bayerisches Staatsballett is fortunate to have this masterpiece in its repertory. May it remain there for many years to come.
Ossama el Naggar
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