|
Back
Giselle Psychoanalysed München
Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz
06/21/2026 - & June 26, 27, 2026
Giselle
Karl Alfred Schreiner (choreography), Adolphe Adam (music)
Ariane Roustan (Giselle), Dean Elliott (Albrecht), Marian Romão (Bathilde, Myrtha), Alexander Quetell (Hilarion), Wyatt Drew Florin, Giergji Meshaj, Nicoló Zanotti (Faunes), Ballett des Staatstheaters am Gärtnerplatz
Orchester des Staatstheaters am Gärtnerplatz, Eduardo Browne (conductor)
Heiko Pfützner (sets), Talbot Runhof (costumes), Wieland Müller-Haslinger (lighting), Fedora Wesseler (dramaturgy), Raphael Kurig (video)
(© Marie-Laure Briane)
The quintessential romantic ballet, Giselle is for a ballerina the Everest of roles. More than any other role, Giselle features two idealized aspects of femininity, the innocence of the village girl (Act I) and an ethereal quality when Giselle is transformed into a Wili, a vengeful spirit of a girl forsaken by her lover and who dies due to his perfidy (Act II).
The story of Giselle was inspired by a fairytale in De l’Allemagne (1822), an exposé of Germany, its customs and traditions including some of its legends, written by the Romantic German poet Heinrich Heine (1797 1856). The tale was subsequently adapted, eventually becoming the story for the ballet Giselle by the poet and dramatist Théophile Gautier (1811‑1872).
Giselle, a naive village girl who loves to dance despite her frailty, is seduced by the peasant Loys, actually the flirtatious Albrecht Duke of Silesia in disguise, who is already engaged to a lady of his rank. Hilarion, gamekeeper and Giselle’s aspiring suitor, is suspicious of the stranger. When he discovers Albrecht’s fancy sword hidden in a neighbouring hut, he confronts the incredulous Giselle and the cowardly Albrecht. He then blows the hunting horn to summon the hunting party of nobles, including Albrecht’s betrothed. Upon realizing she’s been duped, Giselle is bewildered, and dances haggardly in what resembles a “mad scene,” typical of bel canto operas. Grief stricken and exhausted, she collapses, dead from a weak heart strained by excessive dancing and Albrecht’s cruel duplicity.
One of the pillars of Romanticism is “horror,” or the supernatural, as expressed in the writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776‑1822), Adelbert von Chamisso (1781‑1838), Lord Byron (1788‑1824), Mary Shelley (1797‑1851), Edgar Allan Poe (1809‑1849) and others. Act II of Giselle is the supernatural act, in which Giselle is transformed into a Wili, an undead nocturnal creature, as in German folklore, itself derived from Slavic sources.
Giselle is a sort of companion to Amina from Bellini’s La sonnambula (1831). This may be confusing, as the former is a ballet and the latter an opera. While the ballet ends with the tragic death of Giselle from a broken heart, in the opera Amina survives the heart-shattering scene “Ah non credea mirarti” and the perilous sleepwalking, only to be joyously awakened by a remorseful Elvino. Yet both heroines are wronged by their beloved one. More importantly, both are the quintessence of fragility and innocence. Premiered ten years after Bellini’s first huge success, it’s more than likely that Giselle’s composer was influenced by the fragile operatic heroine. Early Romanticism was often centered around helpless, wronged heroines, and the redemption of men by women. More than any other ballet, Giselle mimics operatic bel canto.
Munich’s Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz, the city’s other opera house that specializes in lighter fare such as operettas and musicals, proposed an unconventional Giselle. While it easily offended lovers of classical ballet and the romanticism of one of the most beloved roles for a ballerina, choreographer Karl Alfred Schreiner provided a modern and original psychological re‑reading with rustic elements.
Heiko Pfützner’s brown and beige sets showed a barn, a place where a lot happens in a village. Bales of hay confirm the rustic nature of the setting. Albrecht, an outsider, courts local villager Giselle in the barn under the spying eyes of the villagers. Talbot Runhof’s costumes conveyed the Alpine location. Even in Act II, the Wilis, who were of both genders, were clad in black and in crimson though that act is traditionally known as the “white act” due to Myrtha, the Wilis and Giselle’s spirit being dressed in white tutus against the dark background of the nocturnal forest.
During the first few minutes of the performance, minimalistic music with an East Asian hue is used. For much of Act I, we do not hear Adam’s full score but a chamber version of some of its tunes. Giselle’s solos and variations in this act, the epitomy of femininity, are alas deleted. Mercifully, the full orchestral score is restored in Act II.
Schreiner’s choreography dismantles the venerable ballet to its essence: love of an innocent peasant by an outside of a higher rank, betrayal and a broken heart. The choreographer pursues a more difficult ambition: to inhabit the nineteenth-century masterpiece from within while allowing its psychological premises to resonate with unmistakably modern anxieties. The result is a production that occasionally sacrifices poetic ambiguity to conceptual clarity, but nevertheless emerges as an intelligent, more or less emotionally persuasive addition to the work’s long performance history.
Prince Albrecht may or may not be a prince, but is certainly an outsider. His courting of the local villager upsets the entire village and not just Giselle’s local soupirant. Schreiner succeeds in creating an oppressive Alpine village ambiance, calm on one level but vehemently hostile to outsiders (somewhat like an Amish settlement in North America). Nowhere do we see the royal hunting party or the prince’s parents, but we do see Albrecht’s fiancée Bathilde towards the end of Act I. Seeing her with Albrecht is what breaks Giselle’s heart. Oddly enough, the dancer who portrays Bathilde in Act I is also Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis, in Act II, suggesting a misogynist view of powerful women.
The first act is bereft of its pastoral sentimentality, which to many is the essence of Giselle. For Schreiner, Giselle is more about the devastating collision between innocence and aristocratic privilege. Nonetheless, the village scenes retain their buoyancy through folklore-like moves but without romantic aesthetics.
Schreiner’s most consequential intervention lies in his understanding of the Wilis in Act II. Rather than presenting them merely as supernatural avengers, he frames them as externalisations of Albrecht’s guilt, transforming the haunted forest into a landscape of moral consciousness. This dramaturgical shift subtly alters the ballet’s centre of gravity. The second act becomes less a Gothic fantasy than an interior reckoning, where spectral choreography functions as the embodiment of remorse rather than simply folkloric vengeance. It is an interpretation that owes more to psychological theatre than Romantic melodrama, yet it remains faithful to the emotional architecture of Gautier’s original conception. Sadly, Schreiner suppresses Albrecht’s pleas to Myrtha, thus removing one of the most technically difficult scenes for a premier danseur. Without that scene and Giselle’s variations in the first act, we are left with a paler version of the great ballet.
What ultimately distinguishes this Giselle is its refusal to sentimentalise forgiveness. The closing pas de deux does not propose redemption as a miraculous transcendence but as an act of painful moral recognition. The ballet’s conclusion therefore feels less like supernatural consolation than an affirmation of compassion.
Under Eduardo Browne’s baton the music resists sugary lyricism, favouring rhythmic propulsion and structural transparency. This was especially the case in Act II where the fully orchestrated score was used. Act I’s suppression of the full orchestral score and dissonant Asian sonorities helped create a high degree of Angst and place the story in a contemporary setting, but they also deprive the public of the beauty of Adam’s fully orchestrated music.
Though Schreiner’s take on Giselle has some good ideas, its deletion of the ballet’s most challenging steps for both Giselle and Albrecht is regrettable. Transforming the quintessential Romantic ballet into a psychological drama was a huge challenge. It only worked to a limited extent.
Ossama el Naggar
|
