Abstract
The beautiful Anna Karenina is married to a strict, if highly respected, government official in St. Petersburg. But for her, the union is a joyless one. When she meets the easy-going officer Count Wronski, it’s love at first sight – but she is initially reluctant to give in to him. Wronski courts her until she becomes his secret lover. But their affair is soon discovered, and Anna Karenina is ostracized as an adulteress. Anna despairs, caught between love and the moral code of matrimony. Nothing can stop the impending catastrophe.
With Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy wrote a novel that achieved international reach. Not only does it tell the story of a love affair that falls prey to prevailing moral concepts, but it also sketches a multi-layered panorama of Russian society at the end of the 19th century. In Tolstoy’s opulent morality tale, Lewin, the honorable landowner, and his wife Kitty, the daughter of St. Petersburg nobility, stand in stark contrast to Anna and Wronski. Their relationship is dominated not by passion, but by responsibility, sincerity, and tenderness, and they find fulfillment in living a happy life in the countryside.
Christian Spuck’s ballet adaption of this demanding novel has found itself a fixed place in the repertoire of great ballet companies the world over. Oslo, Moscow, Munich, and Seoul present the ballet regularly, and the Ballett Zürich was praised for its guest performances of the production in Tel Aviv and Hong Kong. The titular heroine’s fate lies at the center of the story Spuck tells, but the Ballett Zürich’s ballet director also turns his attention to the other main characters’ lives. Set to symphonic music by Sergei Rachmaninoff and Witold Lutosławski, he translates the fate of Tolstoy’s heroes into haunting choreographic images.