Máté Kamarás playing His Majesty Death in Elisabeth (2005) | Black-and-white photo; all rights belong to the original owners

Content Warning

This piece discusses depression, death, bereavement, grief, sexual assault, and suicide in the context of art, cinema, and social media. Reach out to these helplines for immediate assistance and support if you are in distress, and avoid this article if you are not in a safe position to interact with such content.

Our family’s Amazon Prime membership was swiftly and furiously killed off mere seconds after the first advert interrupted the film that was being screened at the time, and then we all had to find new ways to make our black screens sing for us again.

Full-length Carnatic music concerts, Bollywood vintage hits, and crappy Netflix replacements (always the fifth or ninth thing you wanted to see; never the first or even the second) tried to rescue us. During that desperate time, a dear artist-friend of mine sketched a wonderful illustration of an actor from Elisabeth: the acclaimed 1992 German-language Austrian musical re-imagining the life and murder of Empress Elisabeth of the Habsburg Empire, as narrated by her assassin. Intrigued by such an enthusiastic recommendation, I gave it a watch and will never be the same again.

Part I: Introducing Elisabeth

Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Courtly Gala Dress with Diamond Stars, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter | Wikimedia Commons

A lonely young girl who stumbles into the heart of an empire, Elisabeth falls in love with His Majesty Death (the personification of her longing to die), and then spends the rest of her life trying to fend off this very handsome reaper who adores her, instead choosing life and the mortal men who only bring her sporadic happiness.

As of my writing this, Elisabeth is likely the most successful German-language musical in existence. Created by Michael Kunze and with music by Sylvester Levay, Elisabeth’s home is gorgeous, decadent Vienna, where it has been performed more than 1,000 times by an ever-evolving cast of actors over the last 33 years. There are also versions of Elisabeth in Hungarian, Korean, Dutch, Russian, and Japanese (performed by both mixed gender and female-only acting troupes), with the musical’s depictions of death and sexual desire varying across cultures and as per regional LGBTQIA+ laws, because Elisabeth’s Death energetically grabs and kisses and fondles and waltzes with suicidal people of all genders.

My friend recommended the 2005 Vienna revival production of Elisabeth because it features the magnificent Hungarian actor-musician Máté Kamarás, who plays a somewhat androgynous embodiment of Death. (Kamarás himself rejects this description, but by Indian standards any clean-shaven man at this point of time is considered an androgynous rarity in our society, so the label fits.)

In Elisabeth, Kamarás’ Death takes the form of a lover who first stalks Empress Elisabeth and then her son Rudolf, wielding his demonic beauty to exploit their suffering mental health and literally seduce them into committing suicide.

Please take two minutes out of your day and find yourself a clip of Kamarás performing Die Schatten werden länger (The Shadows Grow Longer) from Act 1, where Death entices Elisabeth after a devastating loss. In a matter of seconds, you are imprisoned by the haunting sweetness of Kamarás’ voice, the steely perfection of his hunter’s expression, and the crushing effort he hurls into every second of his performance, his forehead turning starry with sweat.

Empress Elisabeth, played with regal determination by the masterful Maya Hakvoort, pushes back using her stubborn beauty and boldness in every song; she sinks the entirety of her faith into her youth, her appeal, her powers of persuasion, and her right to seize contentment in this life—not the next. Death seeks to overpower her during her highest and lowest moments. The Empress dances with him and finds pleasure in his loving attention, but ultimately rejects Death with a vehemence. All of this is narrated by her murderer Luigi Lucheni, played by an electric Serkan Kaya in whose feverish performance of melodic screams you will not find a single missed note.

After I finished watching the musical for the first time, I was so overcome that I had no idea how to really talk to anyone about what Elisabeth did to me.

And so, this piece.

Part II: Infinite Shades and Shadows of Suicide

The following section discusses spoilers and major plot points from the musical Elisabeth, as well as controversial descriptions of depression and suicide. You can skip to the next section if you do not wish to read this.

Elisabeth’s focus is on its titular character and her soul’s triumph over her lifelong urge to die. However, the character arc that crowned the musical for me was the one featuring her son Rudolf’s struggle with depression.

Rudolf’s real life counterpart was a liberal crown prince and womaniser who was traumatised by his father’s conservative court politics and his own unhappy childhood. At the age of 30, he killed a teenaged girl named Mary Vetsera and then himself in the Mayerling Hunting Lodge on January 30, 1889, though accounts vary. The political implications of this act are tremendous, with some history scholars going so far as to speculate that if Rudolf lived to become the emperor, he might have altered the course of World War I and perhaps even challenged the ascent of Nazism with his relatively progressive politics. (Hitler was born just three months after Rudolf’s suicide.)

Emperor Franz Joseph I, who died in 1916, outlived his son by more than 25 years and his wife by more than 15 years. Here are some stamps that feature him in his later years, with ‘Österreich’ referring to Austria while ‘Magyar’ refers to Hungary.

Why should you care about his son Rudolf, the suicidal 19th century Austrian crown prince afflicted with a sexually transmitted disease? A book that I read as a companion piece to Elisabeth answers this eloquently:

“And Rudolf, too, became in time a sad but significant precursor. He was the herald of an alienation common to the youth of our day. Over him loomed Franz Joseph, a storybook incarnation of The Establishment. Today The Emperor has been computerized into a system willing to grant its children lordly perquisites and sexual license while remaining resistant to all essential reform […] The shots in the Vienna Woods were fired in 1889. Today and every day hundreds of other unnerved fingers are already crooked into hundreds of other triggers. Each time we hear of another strange young death in a “good” house we hear of another Mayerling.”

Excerpt from Morton, Frederic. A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889. Little, Brown, Boston, 1979

The musical’s version of Rudolf is softer, less controversial, and easier to accept as a victim when you do not know his story. His first moment of glory comes in the Act 2 rendition of the song Die Schatten werden länger (The Shadows Grow Longer). In it, the distressed crown prince flings himself into his bed covers for relief, only to realise when the honeyed singing begins that he is sprawled in the lap of Death himself.

The song is everything that could go wrong and yet is a masterpiece that will be explored and dissected for decades. Unlike his mother Elisabeth, Rudolf is unable to resist Death’s alluring caresses and lyrics. He lies close to his killer for one second but veers away from his fatal kiss in the next. So Death quickly changes tactics. Over the course of three minutes, Death systematically breaks Rudolf’s mind and his soul with a duet that tries to convince the young man (or anyone suffering with suicidal thoughts, for that matter) that ending it all is the most rational choice, the most understandable form of self-defence in a world where you can do nothing but witness the ascent of evil and the collapse of order as people around you refuse to see the truth and the shadows lengthen.

Death suddenly throws Rudolf forward and dances brokenly with his weak, unyielding partner like a puppet, marching the helpless crown prince across the stage and controlling his attempts to escape while coaxing him to accept that last kiss. Rudolf barely escapes with his life by ripping himself free, but Death knows they will meet again for that final embrace soon enough.

Most of Death’s actors in Elisabeth opt for a light touch or a moderately aggressive execution of this grotesque yet suggestive dance. They illustrate the metaphor or symbolise the psychological turmoil, but Kamarás takes the abuse to a wholly different plane. He wrings and throws and squeezes and twists and flips and bends back his co-actors as if they are washcloths, all the while shouting in their faces and snarling in their ears even when his pitch takes a beating because of his exertion. The metaphor is no longer a metaphor in his clenched hands; Kamarás throws aside poetry and directly demonstrates how a person’s suicidal urges shake them boneless before dragging them forever into darkness. A prisoner wrenched around the stage before thousands, Rudolf cringes and stares and bows his head and grips Death himself for stability, seeing the truth of the whole terrible world yet not being allowed to see how he could save himself.

It was the most horrific performance I have ever watched, and the most healing. It flipped my stomach inside out and turned me into a useless pile of shocked flesh for over a week after I first saw it, but settled my soul. Why? Because Die Schatten werden länger was a scaffolding upon which thousands of others could throw their pain over Rudolf’s anguish and spread theirs out for careful and dignified study, deciding how to dismantle it entirely or build it into something that sustains life instead. The song will serve this purpose for generations, as it is already doing.

Elisabeth marked the first time I saw an artistic depiction of a person’s struggle with depression that showed the clean, unmistakable separation between an intelligent person and their all-consuming urge to die, instead of welding the two into one ailing mass and diluting both their inner and outer torments. I am not alone in this; numerous YouTube comments under videos of Die Schatten werden länger speak about the catharsis of seeing one’s own shamefully suppressed war against suicide being handled onstage with such artistic courage and audacity, without becoming a preaching cliché. During and after multiple renditions of Die Schatten werden länger, the applause and screaming go on for so long that Death skulks off while poor Rudolf has to wait and look distraught until the chaos fades and the orchestra can safely begin his next scene.

Elisabeth’s songs are a far cry from the clumsy depictions of suicide in Indian mainstream films, where mass deaths of women guarding their imagined purity are celebrated even today and warm the hearts of male religious fundamentalists. Suicide is also commonly employed in Indian cinema to get rid of pesky female characters and propel their inert male lovers into the heroic redemption arc. Rudolf’s suicide, however, comes after a fight with his father and then a separate emotional confrontation with his mother where she refuses to get involved in his affairs (both meanings apply here). It takes as little as that to bring one to their end.

Over the next few days, I spent every minute of my free time running to the strangest corners of the internet to hunt down every version of Die Schatten werden länger that I could find, purely to see how each of Rudolf’s actors brought to life their interpretation of a suicidal man. Andreas Bieber’s Rudolf, for example, staggers in a daze under cold blue lights like a shell-shocked survivor whose legs cannot bear his weight. Lukas Perman’s Rudolf pulls out a voice through his stomach and intestines that is soaked with hurt. Fritz Schmid’s Rudolf is alert but brittle with an aged weariness he has gained too early. Jesper Tydén’s Rudolf is rigid and distracted because his hard, focused gaze is already fixed on the other world. Thomas Harke’s Rudolf bends back into impossible angles to show just how far he is gone. Thomas Hohler’s Rudolf grins with helpless happiness when Death touches him, before snapping his features back into a princely glare. A Dutch Rudolf looks as if he has not slept for weeks and fumbles to button his jacket after Death releases him. Another Dutch Rudolf smiles stiffly to mimic wellness and get back some of his personal space. A Korean Rudolf clutches his heart and frowns up at the sky but later appears close to tears. A Hungarian Rudolf sings like one who is intoxicated and flinches at every sudden movement.

At the end, all I learned was that suicide has infinite shades and shadows, and that no two suicidal people look alike. Wherever I go now, I recognise countless Rudolfs in the faces of those around me, and it is nothing short of cosmic horror.

Yet, it is necessary.

Part III: Conservatism and the decline of art

The original 1992 performance of Elisabeth starring the melodious Pia Douwes in the titular role featured veteran German actor-singer Uwe Kröger as His Majesty Death. Kröger plays a far more non-binary Death with near-angelic detachment and an almost operatic delivery of his lines and lyrics. Even so, when it is time for him to shine in the minute-long Mayerling Waltz sequence, he claims the scene for himself by pulling off a dance move that requires inhuman levels of strength and sensuality, rightfully triggering audience screams and cheers for over 20 years. I cheered as well this year, albeit through a grainy screen and burning with envy as I watched the audience throwing flowers onstage for him after the show, wishing I could do the same. I consoled myself with Instagram hearts and Spotify playlists of his songs.

Both Kröger and Kamarás were under 30 during many of their early Vienna performances for Elisabeth. I point this out because I was splayed out on the floor in shock when I saw these rising actors taking command of such a controversial and taxing role during a time I had always regarded as being fiercely conservative. In particular, Kamarás joyously acted with a senior colleague cast as his love interest, while middle-aged Indian megastars in 2025 call us to the theatres to watch censored cuts of them creeping around actresses young enough to be their children. They have the power to demand better roles but they choose not to.

This is not to say that good art should exclude sexual elements; instead, we need more intelligent portrayals of explicit themes in art to counter the far more common bad faith portrayals. Here, again, Elisabeth excels.

Kamarás’ visibly erotic interpretation of Death is peerless but still divides Elisabeth fans to this day. As for me, I think the existence of his performance is even more necessary and braver today than it was 20 years ago. Watching the 2005 ProShot version of the musical in 2025, I was shocked by how subversive it felt to be experiencing Elisabeth in a world where supposedly liberated Western BookTok influencers now extol the virtues of “clean” books (thereby implying the existence of “dirty” classes of literature) and the Indian film censor board orders even the mildest trace of spice in a film to be turned into sawdust. Conservative Indian rabble-rousers across religions wail about Pride marches and women dancing at bars but fight viciously online for their right to marital rape and honour killings. Bollywood answers their complaints with films that are choked with degrading yet tedious sex scenes (if they make it past the censor board) and wasted violence and CGI explosions and scowling terrorists wearing more eyeliner than I did during my Evanescence years.

On the other side of the world, Kamarás’ performance of Death as he pursues an empress and then a prince is fearlessly passionate, all bared teeth and furrowed forehead and gleaming sweat and dishevelled hair, and you can hear how he endangers his precious voice to give it to you.

After encountering Kamarás, I was excited to dive into the newer, post-COVID productions of Elisabeth to see how the set design, camera work, character interpretations, and costuming had leapt ahead along with the changing decades.

They had not.

While the actors and musicians still give us their all, I observed that many recent German-language performances of Elisabeth employ basic set pieces more suited to a Scandinavian classroom than a beloved international production. Newer versions of the musical toned down the intimacy between the characters, undid the androgyny of Death by masculinising him, or even cut out a climatic kiss that takes place onstage (whilst leaving the heterosexual iteration of that same kiss undisturbed).

Though I still retain hopes of seeing Elisabeth live in Vienna one day, I realise with a cold stab of fear that perhaps its best German-language run really ended around 2006, and that there are not enough professionally shot versions of the musical to capture the breathtaking performances of all the myriad actors who flitted in and out of the supporting roles in those years. I hope to be proven wrong soon.

To end, let me say that I am filled with far more gratitude than what 2,500 words can express because Elisabeth and Kamarás have elevated my expectations to such a lonely, starlit height that I am now closer to Crown Prince Rudolf than myself: lost in my present and miserably waiting for better art, better romances, better politics, and a better future.

Funnily enough, Elisabeth includes a song, Die fröhliche Apokalypse, parodying people like me who do exactly this.

As I discover other productions of Elisabeth, though, I note that more than one Rudolf has graduated to take up the role of His Majesty Death, and in that transition I find untold solace and inspiration.