Die tote Stadt

SYNOPSIS

Paul lives a secluded life in Bruges, the ancient town of canals and pallid light. He is grieving for his late wife Marie and has dedicated an entire room of his house to her memory. Neither his housekeeper nor his friend Frank can persuade him to think about anything else but his deceased wife. A chance acquaintance with the young, vivacious dancer, Marietta, who is the spitting image of his late wife forces Paul out of his lethargy. Paul gives her Marie’s lute and winds her silk scarf around Marietta’s neck. When Marietta sings the same melancholy song Marie used to sing, the resemblance almost robs him of his sanity. A short time later, Paul comes to Marietta’s house searching for her and observes a group of travelling entertainers flirting with his new beloved. Paul then attempts to insult Marietta by revealing that he only really loved her for her resemblance to Marie, but eventually he has to admit that he has actually been smitten by her living image. Following a night together, Paul is tormented by his conscience. Marietta reveals that she is only prepared to have Paul ‘completely or not at all’ and is prepared to fight the spirit of the deceased Marie. Paul reacts to the desecration of his ‘church to the past’ by strangling Marietta with the golden braid of Marie’s hair. To his amazement, the body disappears and Marietta enters the room to fetch roses and an umbrella which she had left behind on her first encounter with Paul. Could the travelling entertainers, the night of love and the murder all merely have taken place in his imagination? Paul’s return to reality gives him the resolve to leave the dead city of Bruges for ever.

COMMENTARY

Korngold’s early masterpiece, Die tote Stadt, can trace the genesis of its plot to that of the early twentieth century cult novel Brughe-laMorte by Georges Rodenbach. The story, which also existed in a stage version was performed in German with a translation by Siegfried Trebitsch under the title, Das Trugbild at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 1906. When Korngold read the piece in 1916 he was filled with enthusiasm to turn it into an opera. Author, Hans Müller-Einigen began the compilation of the libretto which Korngold’s father eventually completed under the pseudonym ‘Paul Schott’, a combination of the name of the protagonist of the opera and his son’s publisher in Mainz.  The young composer was fascinated by both the symbolic material and created a shimmering score with dazzling orchestral colouring. The individual elements of the opera are juxtaposed like a kaleidoscope: richly melodic arias, advancing harmony, psychological profundity and almost cinematic transitions between reality and the world of dreams. ‘On the subject of the music’, wrote Korngold, ‘I would like to retain appropriate reticence and only say that I was particularly focusing on the dreamlike, fantastic character of the plot in my efforts to achieve maximum dramatic economy […] and despite the safeguarding of the dramatic functions of the colourful and thematically oriented orchestra allotted the task of creating atmosphere, narrating the story and displaying psychological-dramatic characterisation, I was more than ever before intent on the prominence of the singing individual and the feelings and emotions in the reflection of the vocal melodies.’ Arguably the initial success of the work was due in part to its potential for divergent interpretations. It can be staged as a surrealistic dream work or as a realistic crime thriller with a deluded murderer. Although the opera appears very much self-contained, it is nourished by its contrasts and can be variously narrated depending on the direction of focus on the past or present, death or life, dream or reality, playfulness or gravity. The intermezzo featuring the travelling entertainers appears to stand apart from the dreamlike and elegiac story of remembrance. Despite the fact that the troupe’s zest for life and jocularity forms a contrasting element, they still reflect the macabre darkness of the plot. The young people re-enact the awakening of the nuns from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, in a half joking manner. Marietta is assigned the role of Héléna who is re-awoken from the dead. For Paul who can no longer distinguish between dream and reality, but also for the audience which does not know whether it is experiencing a real or only imagined scene, it is never revealed whether Marietta is actually a revenant of Marie. Since the opera’s fi rst performance, the historical images such as canals, old Flemish facades, churches, bells, crosses, women’s hair, jewellery etc. have become reference points for new interpretations. It has even been possible to incorporate contemporary art forms into the work. During the 1920s, the costume designers preferred to dress the singers in Art Nouveau clothes, the stage designer Ludwig Sievert undertook the innovative step of creating an angled stage set with distorted perspectives in the manner of The cabinet of Dr Caligari for the new Frankfurt production in 1921. It is well within reason to set the action in a contemporary setting (Simon Stone at the Theater Basel in 2016) and offers great scope for the inclusion of images from thrillers or horror films (Mariusz Trelinski in the Teatr Wielki in Warsaw in 2017). Following its simultaneous premiere at opera houses in Hamburg and Cologne on 4 December 1920, Die tote Stadt, completed by Korngold at the age of just 23, would go on to be one of the greatest stage successes of the 1920s. The Viennese first performance followed in 1921 featuring Maria Jeritza who achieved great fame as Marietta and an influential figure in the subsequent success of the opera at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.