Anna Karenina

The Price of Passion 

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” 

This is the opening line of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina – a novel often described as the greatest ever written. 

Anna Karenina meets Vronsky on a train journey between Moscow and St. Petersburg. Before long, she sees no way back to her husband and family life and is faced with a fateful choice: between her family – and her son – and an all-consuming love. At the same time, dresses rustle and gossip circulates at the social gatherings of the upper-class world to which she belongs. 

Best Premiere of the Year 

“Anna Karenina is not only a novel about families, but about an entire society, with traces of the Russian Revolution, even communism. It is a masterpiece,” says Christian Spuck, the German choreographer who in 2014 created a character-driven classical ballet based on Anna Karenina. 

Ballet Zürich and the Norwegian National Ballet joined forces to produce the performance, and Dance Europe magazine named the ballet Best Premiere of the Year in 2014. Following the world premiere in Zürich and performances in Oslo in 2016 and 2019, the ballet has since been staged in many other parts of the world. 

Powerful

– VÅRT LAND 

Grand Music 

Christian Spuck has chosen music by the composers Sergei Rachmaninoff and Witold Lutosławski for the ballet. The music is performed by piano soloist Håvard Gimse and the Norwegian National Opera Orchestra. In addition, mezzo-soprano Cecilia Yufan Zhang – one of the singers from WOYS (The Wilhelmsen Opera Studio for Young Singers) – interprets a selection of Rachmaninoff’s Russian folk songs. 

Our Position on Historical Russian Works

We condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The ballet Anna Karenina is based on Leo Tolstoy’s novel of the same name, which is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of world literature.

The arts and cultural sector is the custodian of a vast canon of historic works created in or connected to Russia, including music, performing arts, literature, and visual art. We do not support boycotting this cultural heritage, just as we do not boycott other historic works created by artists who lived in different countries and eras. You can read more about our position here (in Norwegian). 

You can also listen to the discussion we hosted on this topic in 2023 as a podcast, or read a transcript of the debate. Please note that both the podcast and the transcript are available in Norwegian only.