Sissi: The Fateful Years of an Empress 1957

Empress Elisabeth, Romy Schneider nicknamed Sissi, enjoys traveling in Hungary. She welcomes the politically valuable friendship of Count Andrassy, Walther Reyer, but when he confesses he is in love with her, she returns to Vienna to avoid letting the relationship grow too intimate. Her time in Hungary offers only a temporary relief from court life in Vienna, where dutiful Franz Josef remains at his desk and his strict, domineering mother Sophie interferes in the raising of his daughter with Sissi, Archduchess Sophie, Vilma Degischer. Sissi decides to return and meets Franz underway, who was coming to Hungary to bring her back to Vienna. They decide to take a vacation in Bad Ischl, but Sissi falls ill and is diagnosed with tuberculosis possibly fatal. On doctors’ orders Franz Josef must allow his mother to remove his daughter from Sissi’s keeping.

In poor health, deprived of the company of husband and child, Sissi is in danger of losing the will to live as she travels to healthier climates on Madeira and Corfu. Desperately needed psychosomatic therapy appears in the form of her indestructibly positive mother Ludovika, who lovingly nurses Sissi’s illness and restores her zest for life by taking her on idyllic walks. Major Böckl, Josef Meinrad, the clumsy body-guard whose doting admiration for the empress borders on the improper, provides a comical note, as he does in each part of the trilogy.

Finally, Sissi recovers and rejoins her husband on an official visit to Milan and Venice, Austria’s remaining possessions in northern Italy. Italian nationalists have prepared a hostile welcome for the Habsburg sovereigns; the Milanese nobility send their servants, dressed in noble clothing, to a royal command performance at La Scala, at which the orchestra begins with the melody of Joseph Haydn’s Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser but smoothly transitions to Verdi’s chorus Va, pensiero from Nabucco and the disguised servants in the audience sing it in protest against Austrian rule. There is a moment of comic relief when, after the opera, Franz Josef and Sissi receive the disguised servants at a formal reception, where the servants are presented to the imperial couple under the names of their aristocratic masters and mistresses. Sissi is aware that she is not meeting the true nobility, but when the real nobles realize their servants were introduced to the emperor and empress, they shriek in despair and panic at the idea that the imperial couple believe the awkward, common servants were really the aristocrats. In Venice, crowds stand in hostile silence at the couple’s procession by royal barge on the Grand Canal and as they pass, Italian nationalist flags are defiantly unfurled from behind shuttered windows. But the emotional Italians melt when they witness the openly loving reunion between Sissi and her little daughter on St Mark’s Square.