about the site

the author

titles

first lines

essays

translations

acknowledgments

abraxas press

Elvira Madigan and Romantic Love

The Liebestod, or death for the sake of love, had occupied the European imagination long before Romanticism made double suicide the definitive orgasm. From the Orpheus-Eurydice myth, though the often-recalled history of Antony and Cleopatra (read it in Chaucer), to Matteo Bandello’s tale of Romeo and Juliet, to the climax in Wagner’s 1865 Tristan und Isolde—so long as one didn’t actually have to do it oneself, the best exit, the most beautiful and most heroic, for lovers with no future, was the knife in two hearts.

By the 19^th century the truest Liebestod meant death by double suicide. It became a fashion, one which permitted the cover-up of the assassination, in 1889 at Castle Mayerling, of Archduke Rudolf of Habsburg, Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary, and the murder of his seventeen-year-old mistress Baroness Marie Vetsera. These deaths were passed off as the grandest and most mysterious of all such romantic consummations. The story, often simply entitled Mayerling, got a ‘delicate’ Charles Boyer film treatment in 1935, and a ‘turgid’ Omar Sharif one in 1968—epithets from Halliwell’s Film Guide.

In that fateful year 1889, less noticed and utterly more provincial, occurred the double suicide of two other lovers, but off-stage, up in Denmark. The pair had escaped from Swedish opprobrium to a Danish Hotel, later to grub for food in the forest, if Widerberg’s film has followed the facts here. Miss Hedvig Jensen, the Danish tightrope walker ‘Elvira’ from the Danish Madigan Circus, and a married Swedish army officer, Count Lieutenant Sixten Sparre (who wrote poems) found sorrel and raw mushrooms no diet for passion, and ended themselves in the high manner.

Their story passed into Scandinavian music-hall folklore, thanks to a 1932 doggerel ballad by the journalist Johan Saxon¹, then into film folklore in 1943 via Åke Ohberg’s version starring Ohberg himself. It was retrieved for history in 1954 by Arne Ejbye-Ernst’s book Det Danske Mayerling-drama (The Danish Mayerling-drama). In 1967 another Swedish film director, Bo Widerberg, made his Elvira Madigan a masterpiece of the genre. The public loved it and Pia Degermark (Elvira) won an award.

The hacks were less impressed:

‘Lovers on the run, in soft-focus photography: tightrope walker [Pia] Degermark and married army officer [Tommy] Berggren run off together. Though based on a true story (and filmed before in 1943), stylistically this too often resembles a shampoo commercial. Still, it was a big hit, with attractive stars, lush photography, and canny use of Mozart music.’

           —The Maltin’s Guide summary at www.hollywood.com .

Other summaries are similar. Halliwell’s Film Guide:

‘A simple Victorian romantic idyll, based on a true incident; a director’s and photographer’s piece which entrances the eyes and ears while starving the mind.’

Starving the mind? How wrong could one be! Time Out served up more of the same, more crudely:

‘Candidate for the prettiest pic award . . . . Beautifully photographed and set to a Mozart piano concerto [the 2nd movement of the 21st], you may be enchanted by it if you don’t laugh yourself sick.’

Basing a narrative poem (I’ve called it a ‘verse remake’) on a movie is not common practice. Perhaps it looks too easy, and why do it when post-production pulp tie-ins have such a poor reputation and short shelf-life? But to me it was a most natural thing to do when I wrote this version of Elvira Madigan in 1967 after seeing Bo Widerberg’s film. I saw it twice, made notes, and did my writing quickly whilst the images were fresh. In 1997 the film was re-released on video and I’ve been able to check and make a few alterations.

My rendering uses most of the film’s actions, though many out of sync, and the gist of much of the dialogue. Two exact dialogue thefts (from the English subtitles) are marked with left-hand borders—on pages 26 and 46. I’ve added my own slant, of course. In my early thirties, married with two young children, I had my own pitch on love and sexuality. But secondary to physical desire as a theme, I wanted to bring out Elvira’s avidity as a Romantic artist, to whom all sacrifice for the sake of the task was acceptable. It was not far from Widerberg’s vision, this story of impossible and selfish love.

It’s a pity that the quarrel between Bo Widerberg and Ingmar Bergman made the latter dismissive of this film. Widerberg was getting back what in the way of professional rivalry he’d dished out already. After Widerberg’s death in 1997, Bergman said (how sincerely who is to know?) that the film was deeper than he’d thought. He found a darkness in the eyes of the beautiful circus performer. What he didn’t say, nor did any critic I’ve cited, was that there is overt thought here aplenty, about the right to happiness, the vision that sex can give, the hurt to others, and artistic privilege.

There is a bibliography of Danish and Swedish sources of the true story at the web site www.svendborg-bib.dk/elvira.htm, but I have not, I confess, checked out the facts about the real Elvira. My story is a version of Bo Widerberg’s version. From his account I couldn’t tell, for instance, if Elvira had taken other men from their wives. There had clearly been others before Sixten. No viewer of the film would say she’s a femme fatale, but it’s clear that she is not unselfish. She regards sacrifice as her due. One theme is the cost of loving.

I could even make out a case for Sixten Sparre as victim, seduced from his duty as aristocrat, soldier and paterfamilias by a beautiful young circus performer who thought her art above the pain of others. Where was Sixten’s mind when he got himself into this? He cuts off his military braid and hangs it on a scarecrow. He tells an old friend whom he meets (the action of the film has the patterned contrivance of a ballet) that he has gone over to the women. According to the Widerberg reading, Lieutenant Sparre’s desertion is justified by the feeling that love alters one’s vision, one’s perspective.

Sixten is a Mars who has given up arms, revolted by the vision of a bayonet going through layers of flesh into vital organs. 1889 was in the middle of La Belle Époque, the ‘beautiful times’ between 1871 and 1914, when life seemed secure and continued progress certain. But visionaries like Dostoievsky, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, dismissed the liberal conception of rational humanity—and saw that Europe was about to explode beyond all reason.

The 20th century was about to happen. The Mayerling drama was but one prelude of the Austro-Hungarian collapse. On the periphery an unnaturally prescient Sixten Sparre might also have divined the future.

And by 1967, when this film was made, the terrible worst of the 20th century was over. The film’s director could at least partially justify, in 1960s drop-out, flower-power fashion, the denial of every responsibility for the sake of love.

Not being Danish and late to this subject, I am puzzled by one thing. Why is every ballad, film and book about this real couple wrapped into a legend which is given her name, not his? Why was Elvira pitied? Was she more victim or sufferer than Sixten? He was considered more ‘responsible’, more ‘in authority’ perhaps. But Elvira was not a child! The Baroness Vetsera was a child-mistress in the Mayerling case, but Miss Hedvig Jensen, the circus performer?

The circus was not a nunnery. Elvira is in Widerberg’s story one of those fascinating, experienced young women of the European demimonde who were mistresses to dukes, who sat as models for painters. The coin between these ladies and their admirers, however much Victorian gentility and the Hayes Code dressed it in words like ‘grand passion’, was sex and cash. An old story. A very old story. Having said that, Widerberg (and I in following him) chose, for the sake of myth, to keep the story in the realm of the pretty, with only a hint at normal reality.

What the male thinkers who fuelled the Romantic movement had to witness, as it led to the freedom from convention of the 19th fin-de-siècle, was the uninhibited pleasuring of women, as yet of only a certain bohemian type.

If a man had in his heart an 18th century aloofness, a froideur, like that of the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangeureuses, he avoided Romantic Love by treating eroticism as a game. If, once the erotic frisson became de rigueur (a sort of French disease!), one got carried away. And one suffered. Witness Proust: ‘What I here call love is a reciprocal torture.’

A plain, open-weave style suited my verse approach to Widerberg’s thoughtful film. The shapes of the phrases on the page suggest a kind of music and, I hope, help the story to flow and, put very plainly, easy to read.

I’m not making specific links between my poem and the further reflections below. However, the following random thoughts, unoriginal and many times rehearsed, may force readers to think their way through the spaces on the page, the voids in the story.

As distinct from friendship, parental love, duty to community; as distinct from what in many cultures is due respect for one’s spouse; as distinct too from sexual fulfilment by whatever means, Romantic Lovers turned their backs on society’s priorities and said, ‘We know what we desire and we deserve it.’

I want, therefore I will.

High on the list of their needs, later their personal rights, or so theory had it as the matter grew into coherence—nurtured by wealth in the European renaissance and onwards—was the right to beautiful erotic fulfilment with a beautiful idealised lover.

The notion enlarged. It grew too many excrescences for its own good, if ideas have a good. It was always an invention.

Sexuality, thus beautified, was therefore high in worth, as quasi-Christian service had been in medieval Courtly Love. Self-sacrifice for the beloved was higher than obligation to community or to intellectual causes. ‘If I give my all, I want your all too.’ There is willing, mutual enslavement, bondage in both fantasy and practice. The Romantic Complex warped humanity.

The Romantic Lover is, or wishes to be, wholly and submissively attached, the exclusive property of someone reciprocally owned. He or she expects to be obsessed. Lovers childishly, masochistically, expect their obsession to change their priorities and direction in life. They offer much, or think they do, overwhelming in their empathy and concern (or so they think) for the other.

For is it not worth it for both of them? Erotic obsession charges them with visionary potency. The world is magical, deep-down-new. To such lovers their partners are divinities.

But why is the Liebestod so significant? Why is death the ultimate, refining touch, the consummation devoutly to be wished? This was a potent creation. Magnificent, not sane. And only death ends such madness and its contradictions.

Lovers, like normal people, also fantasise about more than they have. When stressing one’s obligation to be oneself and to get in touch with one’s own feelings, contradiction becomes inevitable. For wasn’t it the other who was to be worshipped?

Subjective extravagance reneges on communal obligation, on duty to one’s talent, on loyalty to friends. The Romantic Lover is not rational or socially obligated. And for that there is a price to pay. One is cut adrift from society’s terra firma.

And what about doubts?

As Lover, I fear I may have been deluded, that my love will not be reciprocated (enough), and almost certainly not for ever. Liebestod makes sure that if I can’t have him or her, no one else will.

Romantic Love is infantile, a yearning to regain the comfort of home; it’s unnecessary to call it the womb. As a prepubescent child I, later the Lover, am wholly within myself, not yet alienated into exile outside myself. Then as an adult I yearn to overcome my out-of-touch feeling by becoming wholly, psychically and physically, integrated within another. Self-transcendence, integration: I want my fragments to cohere.

Romantics also feel that they must not be content with an ordinary lover, for they would be missing out on the dangerous and alert. The femme fatale or demon lover is the sky-diving of the psychologically lost, of the mentally dissatisfied, of the too demanding. One painful attraction of romance is that lovers are aware of its frailty. They know highs don’t last but they want a fix while the source is still available.

The Elvira myth deserves to be re-dressed for a new era. The early 21st century, like the mid-20th, is still ego-driven, but as far as one theme goes it is less likely to see the erotic as beautiful, mysterious and life-enhancing. I don’t know what today would make erotic love worth dying for, even in theory, which is to say mythically.

The task is for someone else. My Elvira Madigan is merely a link. Subsequent mythographers must decide how much to recover from the life of the real Hedvig Jensen. Then, how should they remould from Widerberg’s film the things I have downplayed or omitted? There is the Fate theme evident in the garment Elvira is knitting, in the bad hands dealt her by the fortune teller. There is the enigmatic scene where Elvira, dressed in a curtain, attends the hotel concert given by a travelling orchestra, old acquaintances of hers. Remakers must above all decide what to invent to suit themselves and the age they live in. It is hard to imagine one future version that is not more hard-boiled than mine, for instance. Danes visit Elvira’s grave; the evidence must still exist to reveal just how from an actual life can radiate such diverse kinds of myth.

Alan Marshfield

¹ The following Swedish doggerel is by the journalist Johan Lindström Saxon (1859-1935). To such commemorations myths owe their origins.

                                               (back)

top of page                                                               Elvira Madigan