The truth behind the Mayerling incident remains murky. In the year since its publication, Greg King and Penny Wilson's investigation of it in Twilight of Empire, some of their conclusions is already under dispute. In an online review, Jason Colavita takes issue of several of its authors' conclusions), pointing out, that many of the less savory theories were known as early as 1914 in chapters XX - XXII of Francis Gribble's The Life of the Emperor Frans Joseph.
Claude Anet's Mayerling,made into three films (1936, 1957 and 1968)--and a radio version on the Lux Radio Theaterin 1939--voiced by William Powell and Janet Gaynor, frames it as the iconic story of star-crossed lovers, but hardly true to history. The murder-suicide of Archduke Rudolf of Hapsburg and Mary Vetsera had a far less romantic reality, and by 1936, many of its murky elements were already known
Star-crossed lovers aside, there have been other works based on the Mayerling story that stand quite apart from Anet's novel. These include a stage play, another film, a ballet and two miniseries. the majority of them fictionalized. How these works treat the incident differs, of course by the type of medium, the personal views of the authors, how much about the facts or theories on what may have happened became known over time, and the context and attitudes of the time in which each was made.
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| Henry Hull (Rudolf), Dudley Digges (Frans Josef and Pauline Frederick (Elizabeth) in The Masque of Kings (1936) |
The earliest was a play by Maxwell Anderson, entitled The Masque of Kings, which had its first and only run in New York from February to April of 1936, the same year that the Boyer film was released. This play, in blank verse, has been completely forgotten, as is the case of most of Anderson's historical dramas,. If Frank N. Nugent, who reviewed the Anet/Boyer film in 1937 (he liked it much better) is to be believed, the drama, really a political commentary, was confusing and difficult to follow. In fact, it is one of the most fascinating riffs on the Mayerling legend. Anderson makes it all about the futility of the end of Empire. Rudolf, consigned to an impotent, subsidiary role to his father, Frans Josef, is portrayed as an enlightened liberal, and is deeply disapproving of his father's rule. When circumstances conspire to allow him to become King not only of Hungary, but Emperor in place of Frans Josef, he realizes that the only way to perpetuate his hereditary role is to become an authoritarian and anti-liberal continuation of his father, and instead opts to end his life in suicide. Mary Vetsera is presented as a young girl of easy virtue originally in the pay of Frans Josef, who redeems herself in her love for the Crown Prince. She commits suicide herself in the hours before Rudolf ends his own life. In the end, Frans Josef decides to cover up the reality of their deaths. The result is the author's condemnation of the flaws and ultimate decadence of totalitarian rule and the ultimate futility in the modern sense of concept of empire (or more recently, dictatorship).
Maxwell Anderson (1888-1959) was a pacifist, a journalist, playwright, adaptor, film-writer, and Pulitzer Prize winner, well known in the twentieth century, but now pretty much forgotten--his best-known works include High Tor, Lost in the Stars, Anne of a Thousand Days andThe Bad Seed.The Masque of Kings is perhaps the most forgotten of all his works; but a revival might actually be timely as political commentary.
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| Jean Marais and Dominique Blanchar, Le Secret de Mayerling |
One of the most far-fetched of conspiracy theories forms the basis for a 1949 film called Le Secret de Mayerling),starring Jean Marais and Dominique Blanchar. It begins with the body of Mary Vetsera being removed in secret from Mayerling and the start of the Imperial coverup of the death circumstances of Rudolf. It then flashes back to Rudolf's life as an Angry Young Man, involved with rebellion in Hungary. The villainess in the affair with Mary is Marie Larisch. We see Mary as a young schoolgirl, replete with braids, groomed as she matures by Larisch and presented to Rudolf as a new item. After overcoming his compunction over her youth, they have their passionate affair--some of it taking place at Mayerling long before the fatal night. In the end, Frans Josef realizes that Rudolf's complicity with the Hungarians and his request for an annulment, presumably to marry Mary, makes him a security risk to the Empire, has both Rudolf and Mary murdered, and then proceeds to conspire to hide the whole thing. There have been other theories over the years that Mary and Rudolf were murdered at Mayerling in the course of a drunken brawl, but these have been long disproved. This film is the only dramatic work to propose a murder, but to have the Emperor himself as the perpetrator of this supposed double murder is unique.
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| Laurence Naismith as Frans Josef: Requeum For a Crown Prince |
Several decades later, in 1974, the deaths at Mayerling were included as the fourth episode called Requiem for a Crown Princein a British miniseries dealing with the twilight of Imperial Europe entitled Fall of Eagles.This one is framed far more seriously as a docudrama. The episode is narrated by Count Eduard Taaffe, Frans Josef's Prime Minister, and deals with the consequences of the deaths, principally concerning the reactions of the Empress Elizabeth, the Vetsera family and Princess Stephanie, and as scrupulously as possible, the developing conspiracy of the coverup. In many of the Mayerling stories, Taaffe is characterized as the villainous enforcer of Frans Josef's reactionary policies. Here, he provides the dispassionate voice of political reason from the point of view of the grieving Emperor. There's not a hint of Deathless Love.
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| Edward Watson (Rudolf) and Natalia Osipova (Mary) in Mayerling |
The sober account of Rudolf and Mary's double suicide (or murder-suicide) of Fall of Eagles finds its expressionistic antithesis in Kenneth MacMillan's ballet, Mayerling of 1978. If the Lux Radio Theater conveys its Anet-based story merely by voices, McMillan's decidedly un-Anet-like dance version does it entirely by physical gesture. Like the 1936 film, it uses Liszt's music as the basis of its score, but how differently does music function as a dramatic reinforcement there. In this three-act dance-drama, Rudolf is seen as a passionate, tortured young man, and the tragedy of his life is played out primarily in a series of pas de deuxwith some of the various women in his life: Marie Larisch, envisioned as an old mistress, the fiasco of his wedding-night with the innocent and inexperienced Princess Stephanie, his dysfunctional relationship with his mother, the Empress Elizabeth, the courtesan Mitzi Kaspar, and finally with Mary Vetsera, characterized as a fiery young sex kitten, whose death with Rudolf seems to be an almost logical dénouement when passion, guns and drugs aren't enough. But a surprising amount of detail is also portrayed in larger ensemble scenes, and there are interludes of very intense episodes with three conspiring Hungarians, who fan his conflicting emotions.
Rudolf's fascination with guns and his use of morphine are shown, and his volatile personality is certainly expressed.. There are Hamlet-like echoes too--the Crown Prince's fascination with a skull that he keeps in his apartment (which he seems really to have done) and in his intense interview with his mother, but Rudolf is certainly no Prince of Denmark, bent on revenging his father. Perhaps the most poetic, if over-the-top version of the Rudolf-Mary affair, the ballet is to this date the most timeless version of the Mayerling story. It has had its latest revival in September, 2017, by the Houston Ballet. Though it debuted with mixed reviews--perhaps a reaction to its innovative shock value and violence, it is now considered to be Kenneth MacMillan's masterpiece. And maybe it's fitting that MacMillan died backstage at a performance in 1992.
It would be thought that by 2006, with increasing evidence coming to light, that a 3- hour television miniseries, filmed in Austria, with the title Kronprinz Rudolf, would reveal a lot of the conflicting details of the Mayerling story. It was directed by Robert Dornheim, and starred Max von Thun and Vittoria Puccini as the doomed lovers, and even had Omar Sharif, now in the role of a fictional artist and confidant of the Crown Prince. Many of the subtler details of what is known about the story are here: Rudolf's liberal thinking and his frustration in this direction by his father, his venereal disease and its transmission to his wife (though here, it's syphilis), his last night with Mitzi Kaspar before his suicide--and his attempt earlier to entice the latter into a suicide pact, his friendship with the liberal journalist Maurice Szeps, and his flirtation with Hungarian conspiracies.
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| Omar Sharif as artist Hans Canon and Max von Thun as Rudolf in Kronprinz Rudolf |
But this miniseries has lots of inventions too. To begin with, there's Rudolf's doomed early affair with a Jewish girl in Prague, perhaps inserted to explain his liberal-mindedness and also his later cynicism with regards to women(?). Then there is Sharif's artist character Hans Canon as a liberal confidant, and perhaps the only person capable of telling truths. Canon really existed, but died in 1885. In this version, Rudolf has a cynical affair early on with Helene Vetsera, and it is Helena who encourages Mary, (here an innocent blonde girl--not dissimilar in type to Catherine Deneuve) with what is at first a schoolgirl crush on the Crown Prince, to pursue an affair with him as she matures. Once again, legend and apocryphal inventions tend to smooth over all of the rough edges that seem to have existed in the Mayerling saga. It's a star-crossed lover (Mary) and Rudolf's last stand as a liberal visionary at the end, and very much in the soap-opera tradition that so often creep into the miniseries genre.
Does anybody know what really happened at Mayerling? It will probably always be both sordid and at least a little romantic--that never seems to disappear entirely. Which leaves me to wonder: what would the makers of Babylon Berlin ever do if they made their own series on this material?
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Jason Colavito's rebuttal article to King and Wilson's book: http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/review-of-twilight-of-empire-the-tragedy-at-mayerling-and-the-end-of-the-habsburgs-by-greg-king-and-penny-wilson
The Lux Radio Theater Episode of Mayerling is at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08HJMxTU67Q
The Marais and Blanchar Le Secret de Mayerling can be viewed at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBx8ncE2c-o
Kenneth MacMillan's Royal Ballet production is available only on clips on YouTube, but a full-length Russian production of his ballet can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTNRFY4rztY
