MUSIC FOR SISI ELISABETH, Empress of Austria.
A collection of six manuscript scores from the library of Elisabeth (‘Sisi’), Empress of Austria, four of which dedicated to her.
Elizabeth Amalie Eugenie of Bavaria (1837–1898), or ‘Sisi’, married Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria at the age of 16, on 24 April 1854. Her first child, a daughter, was born 11 months later but died as an infant (see below), and a male heir had to wait until the birth of Crown Prince Rudolf in 1858 – he later killed himself and his lover in a murder-suicide pact at Mayerling in 1889 (subject of Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet of 1978). Famed for her exceptionally long hair, and the extreme thinness of her waist – a product of fasting cures, and tight-lacing – Sisi had romantic poetic instincts and a tendency towards melancholy. Isolation at court and recurring health troubles increasingly took her for cures at Corfu and Bad Kissingen (see below). In 1898, while travelling incognito in Switzerland, she was assassinated by an Italian anarchist. A museum devoted to her tragic life is in the Hofburg in Vienna, and she has garnered much recent attention on screen from the series The Empress and the film Corsage.
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