Vereinigte Bühnen Wien

Vienna, 1888: on come the lights! The newly opened Burgtheater radiates in electric light and the entire Ringstrasse glows in a new brilliance. Everything is working exactly as the fine ladies and gentleman of society would wish it: the imperial autocracy of Franz Joseph, glittering waltz parties, bourgeois contentment in the wine taverns and the last days of the Gründerzeit enable them to ignore all the political unrest that is seething on the street. Hardly anyone realises that it will not be long before the lights in Europe go out again.

One man who can sense impending disaster is Crown Prince Rudolf. He despairs of this world and the times he lives in, his marriage is a yoke around his neck, his future role a prison. He is spied upon, his friends are beaten up and he is forced to maintain friendly relations with the German emperor Wilhelm II although he detests him. Rudolf writes for the liberal press under the pseudonym Julius Felix and involves himself in negotiations with France, England and Russia that aim to end the dual alliance with the German empire.

His meeting with a young, cultured lady open to new ideas comes like a bolt from the blue. This lady is Mary Vetsera, introduced to the court by her aunt, Marie Larisch. For one moment, both love and liberty appear possible. At the opening of the business exhibition the Crown Prince is at last able to speak the words in public that form his political credo. The coalition of those who want an open Europe urges him to pledge his support. This places him in a political corner from which there is no way out. Reality swiftly catches up with him again in the shape of the authority of his father, the emperor. He still tries to protect his love and to persuade Mary to go abroad. But her love of him is too strong: she stays. Rudolf sees only one course of action: since they cannot live together, they must die together. In Mayerling. While waltzes are being danced in Vienna, while the spies are watching and while the Austrian emperor courts the German emperor, the shots are fired in the hunting lodge that end not only the lives of Rudolf and Mary but also the hopes for saving the disintegrating empire.