Stuck in His Narccisstic Cul-de-sac: Vladimir Malakhov as Percy Shelley in Patrice Bart´s ballet “The Flaming Heart”
"The Flaming Heart"
State Ballet Berlin
Staatsoper Unter den Linden
Berlin
June 20, 2009
by Horst Koegler
copyright@ 2009 by Horst Koegler
“Percy Who? That was the unanswered question which seemed written on the face of many a dumbfounded Berlin ballet-fan, when the Berlin State Ballet announced as its latest premiere „The Flaming Heart“, with Percy Shelley as its protagonist. Wolfgang (Goethe) or Friedrich (Schiller) might have been OK. But Percy? With that, for a foreigner, unpronouncable second Christian name Bysshe? Hardly ever heard of!
And so they had to wait for the programme book to be informed that he lived from 1792 through 1832 and is considered one of the most important British poets of the romantic age. And there they could also read that he came from a noble family, studied at Oxford and became one of the most debated free thinkers of his time, an agnostic and anarchist, and, first of all, a notorious womanizer, who seduced his ladies by the dozen, married them, left them, drove them into suicide, while, maybe, loving even more his bosom friend, Jefferson Hogg, if not his poet pal Lord Byron. And there they could also read that he spent his last years in Italy and got ship-wrecked on a sailing spree, after which his corpse was washed ashore, to be finally burnt at the stake, but his heart refused to catch fire and thus blazed as filthy smoke to heaven.