The Royal Ballet applauds the Vienna Ballet at an evening honoring its director, Martin Schläpfer.

The dance world bids farewell to Swiss ballet director and chief choreographer Martin Schläpfer, a prominent director and chief choreographer of ballet companies who has spent the last five years at the helm of the Vienna State Opera Ballet. In four weeks, he will retire and head to the mountains, he says. “I'm already 65 years old and I've been directing ballets for 35 years...and I didn't even want to be a choreographer. I started because there wasn't any money to pay for a creation.” Before then, the Teatro Real has decided to showcase his final legacy, the piece titled 4 , which he created in the midst of the pandemic to the music of Mahler's Fourth Symphony .

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He had just joined the Vienna staff and wanted to familiarize himself with each and every dancer, hence the large company he brought with him. So it's no surprise that, considering this contemporary program—which complements Hans van Manen's legendary Concertante —it remains in Madrid for only three days, from May 23 to 25, with a total of four performances, which are filled with season-long subscribers. It's not easy to secure a good occupancy rate with this type of performance at the Real. And that's a shame, because some incunabula from recent dance history will probably never see the light of day again, as is the case with this abstract Concertante that Van Manen—now in his nineties—created in 1994 for the Netherlands Dance Theatre's youth company.

The piece has lost none of its charm, with that neoclassical coolness with which it constructs a timeless interplay of schematic relationships, sometimes in duet, sometimes in trio. After all, we're talking about the choreographer who, along with Jiří Kylián, is the leading exponent of the Dutch school of ballet, a corpus that contributed to the evolution of contemporary creation over the last half-century. And the Viennese dancers rightly and clearly defend it in Madrid, dressed in the iconic design by Keso Dekker, Van Manen's eternal collaborator, and gliding over the Petite Symphonie Concertante by Swiss composer Frank Martin, performed from the pit by the Teatro Real Orchestra. A luxury.

Although ambitious and highly precise, this '4' does not quite become a defining piece that captures the joys and torments of Mahler.

However, the main course of the evening offered by the capital's opera house is Schläpfer's Mahlerian Symphony 4 , which, although ambitious and highly precise, does not end up becoming a decisive piece that captures the composer's joys and torments, which is what this Symphony truly encapsulates.

The visit of death expressed by the macabre violins and the grotesque glissandi of the cellos in the second movement finds no worthy resemblance in the dance, as if its development were stranded in the aesthetic so as not to fall—and rightly so—into a dramatic dance. But it fails to shock the viewer. Because perhaps that is what one expects at the end of a career as remarkable as Schläpfer's, who has also given a new creative and contemporary impetus to the very classical Viennese company: in 2022 it was chosen as "Best of the Season" by Tanz magazine.

In the last five years, he has introduced new productions in Vienna of John Neimeier's The Lady of the Camellias , Christopher Wheeldon's The Winter's Tale , and his own version of The Sleeping Beauty. Will he continue to create even in retirement? we asked him. "Maybe I'll write, because I don't want to create anymore. I actually never wanted to choreograph: I started because there wasn't enough money to pay for a new job," he says, as the last light of day redefines his friendly face on the terrace of the Teatro Real.

Maybe I'll write, because I don't want to create anymore. I never actually wanted to choreograph: I started because there wasn't enough money to pay for a new job.

Martin Schläpfer's name isn't a household name, nor would it be for so many football coaches if football hadn't been so heavily promoted in the media over the last half-century. But he has more than 80 pieces to his credit, from Swan Lakes and Sleeping Beauties to his own creations based on symphonic works, such as this one by Mahler or Tchaikovsky's deeply moving Pathétique , which the Vienna Ballet staged alongside George Balanchine's Mozart Divertimento and Merce Cunningham's Summerspace , with six dancers advancing like birds to the atmospheric piano accompaniment of Morton Feldman's music.

“The most important thing is to program,” warns the Swiss choreographer, as if imploring an effective response to the public's right to be cultivated. He has been doing this for decades: programming. First at the helm of the Bern Ballet, then with the Mainz Ballet, and, before arriving in Vienna, with the Ballett am Rhein in Düsseldorf, which he directed for ten years. And in all of them, he made a difference.

This repertoire of state ballets that follows the opera house circuit has not had an easy time reaching Spanish theaters.

Curiously, this repertoire of state ballets that follows the opera house circuit hasn't had an easy time reaching Spanish theaters, lacking their own companies and with opera seasons that leave little room for dance. So when it's finally revived, it runs the risk of seeming obsolete, with vocabulary that has passed the test of time. The contemporary repertoire is becoming a classic, from which only the authentic milestones are salvageable.

In any case, it's worthwhile that Schläpfer's work has had its window at the Real. And the theater's commitment to a contemporary dance program, with the involvement of the orchestra itself, is commendable. It also features a spectacular Marina Monzó in the Lied de Jubilo for soprano from the last movement of Mahler's Symphony.

Schläpfer didn't take even five years to bid farewell to Vienna. "It's very tiring, it's a very conservative world," he argues. In her place, the Austrian Opera is happy to welcome the star Alessandra Ferri, who arrives in September with the accolades of "the greatest Italian ballerina of the last half-century." Also, ballerina Liudmila Konovalova (Moscow, 1984), principal dancer of the Vienna State Opera Ballet, has gained a certain degree of independence to launch her own project. And Ferri can't refuse, as she did the same as soon as she had the chance.

Konovalova, who in June 2019 was honored by the Russian Embassy in Vienna for her contribution to cultural relations between Russia and Austria (what a time!), is already deciding on the poster for her upcoming film and has plans for her own production, which will be released within a year. Currently, she is, of course, an artist representing Austria, and holds Austrian citizenship.