Thomas Mann once named Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina "the greatest social novel of world literature." When reading the novel, John Neumeier was deeply fascinated by Tolstoy's work: not only by the main characters and the plot, but also by the extraordinary variety of thematic connections. It is a story of three families.

John Neumeier states: "Tolstoy himself wrote and published Anna Karenina as a serial story over a number of years. This prosaic openness in the narrative is underlined by the fact that the novel does not end with the death of the title character. My own version must be confined to the timeframe of a theatre performance. Therefore the period of time until the premiere, beared the interesting challenge of combining as many levels of meaning as possible – in such a way that the audience would be able to intuitionally relate to them."