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Elisabeth (musical)

Elisabeth is a Viennese, German-language musical commissioned by the Vereinigte Bühnen Wien (VBW), with book/lyrics by Michael Kunze and music by Sylvester Levay.

The show opens somewhere in purgatory, where Luigi Lucheni is being interrogated by a celestial Judge as to why he has murdered the Empress Elisabeth, a continuous punishment for his deed that has lasted for over one hundred years. Lucheni claims that he was coerced to murder Elisabeth by the Emrpess herself and her lover. He tells the Judge that all her life, Elisabeth was the mistress of none other than Death itself. As his witnesses, Lucheni brings back the dead aristocracy of the bygone era and takes us to the past, where he serves as a bitter sarcastic narrator of the events that lead to the transformation of the sweet and innocent Sisi to the revered and infamous Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Hungary.