This ballet’s plot is inspired by The Corsair, a famous verse written in 1814 by Lord Byron, who towered over an entire generation of English Romantic poets. The protagonist of the verse is Conrad, the “fateful man”, whose face is handsome, but contains dark expressions, it is attractive and repulsive at the same time. When he enters a place, people fall silent in surprise.

The thrilling story, full of adventure, also leaves plenty of room for love, betrayal, life-threatening danger, a shipwreck, and ultimately, escape. Byron’s work was so successful that ballet masters were staging it as early as the 1820s, soon after it appeared. The 1856 Paris production caused a sensation with the stagecraft used in it to depict the shipwreck.

Anna-Marie Holmes choreographed her own version for the Boston Ballet in 1997, which is now being shown to the Budapest audience for the first time in a new version created in collaboration with ballet director Tamás Solymosi and performed by the artists of the Hungarian National Ballet in three different casts.

Conductor: András Déri, Valery Ovsyanikov
Choreographer: Anna-Marie Holmes & Tamás Solymosi
Set designer: István Rózsa
Costume designer: Nóra Rományi
Lighting designer: Kirk Bookman

Cast: Aliya Tanykpayeva (Étoile of the 2013/14 season) / Minjung Kim / Elizaveta Cheprasova / as Medora;Karina Sarkissova / Cristina Balaban / Lili Felméry (Étoile of the 2015/16 season) as Gulnare; Gergely Leblanc (Étoile of the 2016/17 season) / Gergő Ármin Balázsi / Zoltán Oláh (Étoile of the 2012/13 and 2014/15 seasons) as Conrad

Premiere: 21 April 2017 | Opera House
Further dates: 22, 23, 27, 29, 30 April 2017

Score: editions Anna-Marie Holmes. Music edited, arranged, re-orchestrated by Kevin Galiè

More: opera.hu