'Death and the Maiden': Same music, two visions of mortality

A sharp stroke of the bow slices through the air, and the dark, low tones of viola and cello scrape along the floor. Schubert rendered by four string instruments is cold and grave. String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, "Death and the Maiden" — written at the height of illness and mental anguish — summons a desperate dialogue between a girl's terror of death and the figure of Death himself, who draws her toward rest: the ferocious Presto rhythm of the first movement, the restrained Andante of the second.

Kim Deok-woo, violinist of Quartet21, calls the work "one of the most difficult pieces a string quartet can play, both technically and emotionally."

That celebrated score now meets two choreographers on stage, splitting into entirely different physical languages. Christian Spuck's "Das siebte Blau" (The Seventh Blue) and Alexander Ekman's "Cacti" share the same music but nothing else. Seoul Ballet presents both works as a double bill at the National Theater of Korea, running Friday through Sunday, to mark the company's second anniversary.

Kim and Quartet21 perform live for "Das siebte Blau." He said that every time he played the piece, his first thought was how difficult and dark it was — but that working on this production made him realize the music could be expressed not just through the ears but through the dancers' movements and all five senses. He added that slight fluctuations in tempo during a live performance connect in real time with the choreography, allowing a deep artistic exchange without words. Above all, he said, "I felt Schubert's bright vitality beneath the darkness — as if Schubert himself were alive and breathing."

From the same score, two masters pose entirely different questions and deliver entirely different messages.

For Spuck, "Death and the Maiden" is a primal memory etched into childhood. He first encountered the piece at around age 8 or 9.

"I heard it on the radio during a holiday in Denmark. I didn't understand it at the time, but strangely it kept coming back into my life. I decided that one day I would choreograph something to this music. Because I respect it so deeply, I wanted the choreography to be born entirely from the music itself."

Premiered in 2000 by the Stuttgart Ballet in Germany, "Das siebte Blau" is a meditation on death — and, through it, an affirmation of life. Drawing on a poem by Matthias Claudius, Spuck approaches death not as terror but as a warm embrace.

"In Western culture, death is usually portrayed as something frightening," he said. "But the poem this work is based on presents death as something beautiful, sensuous, something that holds us close. It is a process of understanding that each of us has our own time, and that one day we must learn to let it go."

He went on to say that "it is something deeply moving and very beautiful — a face of life that we must fully accept."

Seven male-female pairs of dancers appear in the work. When deciding on a title before the premiere, Spuck combined the seven couples with his favorite color to arrive at what he called an "intuitive" name. Over the years, the title has accumulated its own symbolism.

"In Europe, seven is a special number, and blue suggests a sense of distance — like the sky or the sea, something receding and fading away," he said. "The two images together came to symbolize the beautiful passage of leaving this world and crossing to another." After seeing the premiere, his mother told him: "Christian, you didn't make a ballet — you wrote a beautiful poem."

Working with Seoul Ballet on a piece he created 26 years ago, Spuck says giving a work to another company is always the start of a new conversation. He has no interest in seeing old choreography "stuffed and mounted in a museum," he said, and promised to keep the work breathing in step with each dancer's individual character.

Alexander Ekman's "Cacti" does not transpose Schubert's narrative into movement. He approaches the music from an entirely different starting point.

"I wasn't trying to explain choreographically what Schubert's narrative means, or what death means," Ekman said. "What I heard in this music was urgency — the sensation of being pushed forward by time, by discipline, by something larger than yourself. I was particularly drawn to the speed and pressure of the fourth-movement Presto."

When "Cacti" arrived, critics took notice. Through the work, Ekman embedded a comic satire of authoritarianism in arts criticism and the human compulsion to define correct meaning. The spark came from a wound he received in his twenties, when he watched a single critic pass judgment overnight on a work that dozens of people had spent months sweating to create.

"In 2010, I was hurt by the concentrated power of a small number of critics who evaluated a work and decided what it meant," he said. "'Cacti' grew out of that vulnerability — and from a desire to laugh at the system surrounding art, including myself."

More than a decade on, that system has not changed — it has only shifted. The critical power once held by a handful of reviewers has dispersed into AI algorithms and mass audiences. "Now, before a work can even sink into the body, it gets reduced to short-form clips, star ratings and quick takes — which makes this piece more relevant than ever," Ekman said. "Why are we in such a hurry to define what something means? The audience doesn't have to find the right answer as if sitting an exam."

On stage, 16 dancers venerate a living cactus as though it were a sacred object — a mirror held up to an audience searching for meaning. "The cactus is not a trap to make the audience feel foolish — it's closer to a mirror," Ekman said. "At some point you catch yourself looking for an official meaning, and the piece makes you laugh at that very impulse."

His approach to generating humor is itself thoroughly paradoxical. "The dancers must not try to be funny," he said. "Humor comes from absolute seriousness. The moment a dancer lets the audience see that they understand the joke, the joke disappears."

For Spuck, Schubert is a lyrical contemplation that moves us to humbly accept and bless the finite time of life; for Ekman, Schubert is a buoyant energy that drives the body to its limits and shatters the hypocrisy of imposed answers.

Lee Yu-beom, a season dancer with Seoul Ballet who appears in both works, said "Das siebte Blau" prompts a return to refinement, fundamentals and detail within fast-moving choreography and music, while "Cacti" offers the pleasure of expressing oneself freely within a broad framework, using improvisation and props.

Spuck said Korean performers combine strict discipline and intense training with a remarkable ability to convey emotion on stage. He was particularly struck, he said, during last year's auditions by the way the dancers did not simply accept instructions but questioned and pushed back — something he found deeply impressive.