When Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling was premiered in February 1978, it was revolutionary, taking the three-act ballet into real-life realms of psychosis and misery that it had never explored before. True, it featured a prince, but Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, was nobody’s idea of a dreamboat: riddled with syphilis, addicted to morphine, involved in plots against his father, he met his death in a suicide pact at Mayerling with his 17-year-old lover, Mary Vetsera, a scandal that was instantly covered up.
All these years on, it still feels radical. Powered by a score of Liszt excerpts assembled by John Lanchbery (and played with passion by the orchestra under Koen Kessels), set by Nicholas Georgiadis among glowing autumnal colours, its imaginative, inventive confidence is truly astonishing.
