Vienna, summer 1914. Europe teeters on the brink of collapse, yet high society undeterred, gathers to celebrate. The Prince of Perosa hosts a masked ball. At its center dance three self-assured women: The much-admired Countess Aurelie is just beginning an affair with the dashing Max von Reisenberg, an affair doomed from the start. He is also courting the beautiful singer Judith, who, in turn, is in love with her sister's husband. Despite this, Judith agrees to Max's advances, but sets clear conditions—one night of love, nothing more. Seraphine, an up-and-coming violinist, also has a romance with Max. But when she becomes pregnant with his child, she decides to raise it alone and rejects him.

The titular seduction, however, is more than a fleeting erotic game. It is about freedom and responsibility, about deception and self-deception, and about the question of what consequences one is willing to bear. What begins as a seemingly lighthearted game, in which the characters stage their own lives as a fairy tale, reveals itself, in the face of approaching war, as a dance on the edge of a volcano.

In Hungarian director Ildikó Gáspár's production, musical numbers from the operetta repertoire will play a special role. She explores the escapist operetta bliss of a society whose glittering surface reveals the cracks of an entire era, a society on the brink of moral and historical collapse. Schnitzler's rarely performed play, in which hunger for life and weariness, humor and despair exist side by side, paints a picture that seems frighteningly relevant today.

(Source: josefstadt.org)