THE spoiler paradox posits that knowing how a story ends lends richness to the narrative’s experience by giving more room for analysis: the removal of the element of an ending’s shock provides the audience with the tools to piece the story together. Elisabeth das Musical, telling a darker version of the doomed Empress of Austria, takes full advantage of the spoiler paradox by beginning with a trial of her assassin, Luigi Lucheni, in the afterlife. He calls upon witnesses, the long-dead aristocracy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to support his story: that he was merely fulfilling the wishes of the Empress.
Furthermore, are there any more ways to “spoil” history? The story of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, born a Bavarian princess, is well known, largely through the multiple works about her life. A movie series starring Romy Schneider, now called the Sissi Collection (using her childhood nickname) is stamped on the collective consciousness of Europeans, for it being shown on television sets in the European continent during the holiday season. To this day, her image as a beautiful, flawed, and ultimately tragic figure appeals in fashion (model Cara Delevigne played her in a 2015 Chanel film).
Nevertheless, this musical about her is not very well-known, despite it being hailed as the most successful musical in German, a factor we can attribute to the linguistic hegemony of the English language. According to the website of Vereinigte Bühnen Wien (VBW), which commissioned the musical, it has sold 11.4 million tickets around the world, with performances in 12 countries. The musical premiered in Vienna in 1992, directed by Harry Kupfer, with music and lyrics by Sylvester Levay and Michael Kunze, respectively. It has largely toured along Continental Europe, where it is invariably performed in German (tickets for shows of the 2020 summer season in the Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna are currently on sale). Moreover, it’s popular in Japan and South Korea, where the musical has been translated into the languages spoken there. BusinessWorld had the good fortune of seeing the Vienna 2005 production — mercifully, with English subtitles, a treat available on Amazon for about $60.
The musical covers Elisabeth’s life as a youth in Bavaria, a reluctant Empress in Austria, and finally an embittered woman in disguise who travelled the world, meeting her own end away from home. A brief summary of our subject’s life: born the daughter of junior Bavarian royals, Elisabeth enjoyed a carefree life in her parents’ castles. Her mother’s sister married into the powerful Austrian Imperial family, and was the mother of the young Emperor Franz Joseph. The Bavarian sisters were eager to have a family member wear the crown, thus attempting to arrange a match between their children. To the family’s surprise, the Austrian Emperor fell in love with the younger, more innocent Elisabeth, instead of her more accomplished older sister, Helene. The stresses at court due to her mother-in-law’s manipulations, her own volatile nature, the pressures of being at the top of the royal heap at a young age, as well as an incompatibility with her husband drove Elisabeth away from home and from reality (but not before reluctantly producing three daughters and an heir). The suicide of her only son, the Crown Prince Rudolf, drove the Empress away on restless trips abroad, before finally being assassinated in Switzerland in 1898. While seemingly hating every moment of it, Elisabeth remains to be the longest-serving Empress of Austria, reigning for 44 years.
To add a layer to the legend, Elisabeth was then a legendary beauty, and her clothes and her face served as the goal for the women of the Belle Epoque. It came with a price, however: to preserve her looks, Elisabeth practiced several bizarre beauty rituals (such as sleeping with a mask lined with veal), strenuous physical activity, and her dietary habits (drinking just the juices from a steak for supper) can well be classified today as an eating disorder.
In the musical, Elisabeth’s various complexes and mental illnesses are explained through the character of Death, a blond charmer who seduces her repeatedly. Death in the musical is by no means a Prince Charming, but an abusive and predatory force that takes away all that she loves in an effort to make her succumb to him. Elisabeth is almost always swayed by his promises of freedom, a choice only marginally better than her life of restrictions, which is why she flirts with Death anyway. Death plays a pivotal role in the musical’s game of foreshadowing the role of the Austro-Hungarian empire in the 20th century, which was still an unknown behemoth in the period of the musical’s setting. According to the musical, the decline of the empire, and its resulting consequences around Europe and the world stage, is simply collateral damage in Death’s courtship of the Empress. One of my favorite numbers is “Am Deck der Sinkenden Welt” (in English, “On The Deck of a Sinking World”), the musical’s penultimate song, showing Death killing off Elisabeth’s loved ones — who all happen to be in positions of power. It’s not quite a stretch, when one considers that the First World War was sparked off by the assassination of her husband’s heir, his nephew Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who would not have been in that position had Elisabeth’s son not killed himself (explained in the musical as a seduction by Death dressed in drag; in history, it’s a suicide pact between Rudolf and his mistress, a baroness). As the First World War helped generate the conflicts that came after it, some of which are still tasted today, it could be said that the ghosts of those events haunt even us.
Of course, not much is expected on historical accuracy, but what do they have to work on? The Empress Elisabeth was a fiercely private individual, and for the sake of protecting their royals, the Austrian authorities kept their secrets. However, the gaps in official history make for a lot of the musical’s magic: for example, the musical plays on the idea of public perception being accepted as truth, the chorus (sometimes playing nobles, sometimes playing peasants) repeating gossip that was damaging to Elisabeth’s public persona at that time, but merely seen now as footnotes of history. In the song Kitsch (the electrifying opening number of Act 2),the assassin Luigi Lucheni (who acts as the narrator throughout the musical) criticizes the use of sentimentality and propaganda for creating an inaccurate image for the centuries. At times, the musical serves a critique of society: for example, a song about milk (Milch) sung by dissatisfied peasants works on its own, but a layer of pathos is added by the number following it, a description of the Empress’s beauty routine, which uses the milk the peasants crave.
More often than not, however, the musical is a richly executed attempt to profile individuals who placed their stamps in history, and therefore, on the lives of all touched by the hands of time. I don’t exaggerate when I use the word richly: as an example, for one number, the stage is transformed into a giant chess game where Archduchess Sophie, Elisabeth’s cruel mother-in-law, is shown as the queen, controlling all those around her, ostensibly for the sake of the nation. Huge sets incorporating images of Austria’s imperial regalia are used to create a threatening aura of power. In the aforementioned Am Deck der Sinkenden Welt number, the stage is transformed into a ship that tilts and breaks in half as the aristocrats aboard it shuffles and struggles to hold their place. As for the music, well — its composition in the 1990s adds a layer of drama that would have been inconceivable in the 1800s: electric guitars, for example, are used in a number to show the imperial couple’s entrance and coronation in Hungary, giving modern audiences a taste that to be a royal then was akin to being a rockstar now. It’s all a treat for the eyes and ears if one has the good fortune of an extensive vocabulary in German (or patience with subtitles).
The musical also soars in its more quiet moments, as exemplified in the song “Boote in der Nacht” (“Ships in the Night”). Mindful of her husband’s role in the Imperial Navy, in a final act of affection, Elisabeth gently explains to her husband, in terms he would understand, how love does not heal all wounds. According to her, they are like two ships in the night, who do not meet in the dark, each with different goals, and different loads. Never before have I felt such emotion in a song about boats, and that’s including the soundtrack from Titanic.
The search for a singular theme in this musical named after just one person is impossible. The key to reconciling oneself with this paradox is to understand that the work’s subject herself refused the identities given to her by society. In the musical, Elisabeth declares several times, to the objections of those around her: “I belong to me.”
6 Attachments
