The Hamburg Ballet’s last director, John Neumeier, led the company for 51 years, transforming it from a provincial troupe into an internationally respected house.
His successor, Demis Volpi, lasted just 10 months.
On Tuesday, Hamburg State Opera said in a news release that its board and Volpi had agreed to terminate his contract at the ballet four years early. The announcement followed weeks of crisis at the company after it emerged that five principal dancers had resigned, and that more than half of the company’s dancers had sent a letter to a local lawmaker to complain of a “toxic working environment” under Volpi.
In Tuesday’s release, Volpi said that “despite intensive efforts,” he could no longer realize his artistic vision and had agreed to depart “in the interests of all involved.”
Volpi, an Argentine choreographer who previously led the Ballet am Rhein in Düsseldorf, did not respond to a request for an interview, and a spokeswoman for Hamburg Ballet said it would not comment further.
It was not immediately clear what Volpi’s departure would mean for the company’s coming season, which Volpi had announced in March and is to include the premiere of Alexei Ratmansky’s “Wonderland,” based on Lewis Carroll’s novels. Nor is it clear how the company will handle productions of Volpi’s work. A new version of Volpi’s “Surrogate Cities” is scheduled to premiere in July. And Volpi’s “Demian,” based on the novel by Hermann Hesse, is scheduled to be performed in December.
The crisis at Hamburg Ballet began in early May when German newspapers widely reported dancers’ complaints about its artistic direction under Volpi, as well as accusations that he was insufficiently present during rehearsals.
Alexandr Trusch, one of the dancers who resigned, said in an interview with the broadcaster NDR that everything that Neumeier had achieved at the company risked “being thrown out of the window.”
In an interview with the Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper last month, Volpi rejected the idea that he did not spend enough time in the studio and was surprised that the dancers had not discussed their concerns with him personally. “Open dialogue and respectful interaction have always been important to me,” he said, adding that he would “continue to dedicate myself with all my strength and heart” to his work.
The stakes were high for Volpi from the outset. His predecessor, Neumeier, an American who made his career in Germany from an early age, ran the ballet for more than five decades. The company was almost entirely identified with his choreography and aesthetic, with few other choreographic voices featured.
Manuel Brug, a longtime critic for Die Welt, a German newspaper, said in an interview that the dancers who complained and had spent their careers working with Neumeier were “spoiled brats” used to working only one way.
In his first season, Volpi had programmed a wide variety of work — by Pina Bausch, Justin Peck, Aszure Barton and William Forsythe, as well as his own ballets and ballets by Neumeier — perhaps asking more, technically and stylistically, than the dancers were accustomed to. Brug said some dancers had complained about the “abstract” dances, even though almost “every company” in Europe does such pieces.
The events, Brug added, have damaged the company and will make it hard to attract a significant leader. “Who will come now?” he asked.