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Marie Antoinette
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December 2025  | ||||||
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Ballet by Thierry Malandain
No Pause
“She is a statue of beauty when standing or sitting: grace itself when she moves,” the 18th century English writer and artist Horace Walpole wrote about the legendary Queen of France Marie Antoinette. This colourful character from French history inspired the ballet by the French choreographer Thierry Malandain that premiered with his own ensemble, Malandain Ballet Biarritz, in 2019 in the very theatre that Marie Antoinette inaugurated on 16 May 1770 to mark her wedding to Louis XVI: the Opéra Royal Château de Versailles.
Marie Antoinette’s life in Versailles is central to Malandain’s ballet, which the choreographer has created to music by two of her contemporaries – Joseph Haydn and Christoph Willibald Gluck. The piece depicts her arrival at court, her wedding day, the opening of the opera house with Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Persée – as a ballet within the ballet – the attempted escape that would ultimately be her undoing and the infamous parties and balls associated with the Queen.
In his movement language, Malandain’s individual neoclassicism meets also dance elements from another time: he reveals Baroque gestures while faithfully adhering to a vigorous modern style. In his choreography Malandain portrays a queen who not only delighted in luxury, excess and vanity, but who also spent a lifetime as the plaything of others – her mother, court society and the French media – ultimately sinking into loneliness and melancholy.
Her inclination to amusement and entertainment become means of expression for the ballet, which portrays Marie Antoinette in her greatest role as the Queen of France: “…but she was marked by a calamitous fate,” Malandain notes, “because she was a theatre-lover, but the curtain fell forever on her enjoyable comedy with the sound of a steel blade.”
Program and cast
Choreography: Thierry Malandain
Music: Joseph Haydn
Music: Christoph Willibald Gluck
Stage and costume design: Jorge Gallardo
Lighting design: François Menou
Implementation of stage design: Chloe Breneur
Implementation of costumes: Karine Prins
Furnishings Light: Christian Grossard
Rehearsal: Frederik Deberdt
Musical direction: Christoph Altstaedt
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Volksoper Vienna
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The Volksoper is Vienna’s main stage for operetta, opera, musicals and ballet, offering sophisticated musical entertainment. Colourful, eclectic and full of vitality, it is the only theatre dedicated to the genre of operetta.
Operetta belongs to Vienna and Vienna installed it at the home of operetta, Volksopera Vienna, which thereupon became the leading operetta house in the world. First class singers, actors and dancers together with a versatile orchestra cunjure up a musical firework display every evening.
Johann Strauss, Franz Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán wrote their world famous beloved melodies for operettas such as “The Fledermaus”, “The Merry Widow” and “The Csárdás Princess”. A visit to at least one of these operettas at the Volksopera Vienna is a must for every visitor to Vienna!
Also performed are operas from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, as well as classic musicals and ballet. In addition, the Volksoper has a fifth longstanding and proven speciality: it stages soirées, cabaret and burlesque performances under the name of “Volksoper Spezial”.
In the repertory theatre, which seats 1,337 persons, some 300 performances of around 35 different productions are staged every year between September and June.
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