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Die Tote Stadt
Photo credit: Bill Cooper
“It's worth the price of the ticket to hear Gerald Finley (as Paul's friend Frank) sing the Act 2 Pierrot lied.” The Telegraph
“Gerald Finley stealing the vocal honours” The Times
“Gerald Finley's Frank steals all the scenes in which he appears” FT
“Gerald Finley… brings characteristic presence, compelling interest whenever he's onstage, and with the famous Pierrotlied beautifully sung”Musicalcriticism.com
“Gerald Finley's thoughtful and beautifully sung performance of Frank and Fritz” Musicalomh.com
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Composer |
Erich Korngold |
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Librettist |
Paul Schott (Korngold and his father Julius) after Rodenbach’s novel Bruges-la-morte |
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Venue and Dates |
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden 27, 30 January, 5, 11, 13 17 February 2009 [performance scheduled for 2 February was cancelled due to bad weather] |
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Conductor |
Ingo Metzmacher |
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Production |
Director: Willy Decker Designs: Wolfgang Gussman Lighting Design: Wolfgang Göbbel |
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Performers |
Frank / Fritz : Gerald Finley Paul : Stephen Gould (27, 30 Jan, 11, 13 Feb) Torsten Kerl (5, 17 Feb) Marie / Marietta : Nadja Michael Brigitta: Kathleen Wilkinson Gastone / Victorin: Stephen Ebel Kleine Graf: Ji-Min Park Juliette: Simona Mihai Lucienne: Jurgita Adamonyte |
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Notes |
This production was originally at the 2004 Salzburg Festival
A performance will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 23 May 2009 |
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Click the ROH link below to see Gerry talking about Die tote Stadt and being a baritone
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Backstage photos
courtesy of http://www.geraldfinley.com/
Gerry (Fritz) with Stephen Ebel (Victorin, back row)Ji-Min Park (Kleine Graf),Simona Mihai (Juliette) and Jurgita Adamonyte(Lucienne)
Gerry in Pierrot costume with Ingo Metzmacher
What the critics say
Simon Thomas, musicOMH.com, 28 January 2009
http://www.musicomh.com/opera/roh-tote-stadt_0109.htm
Rating Four out of Five stars
Followers of the Austrian composer Erich Korngold must be exultant that, after nearly 90 years, Die tote Stadt has finally received its UK premiere.
For the rest of us, it's a welcome alternative to the umpteen Figaros, Bohemes and Magic Flutes that are trotted out on an annual basis.
Korngold was an early developer and a late arriver. With two operas already under his belt, he wrote this adaptation of the symbolist novel Bruges-la-Morte, between the ages of 19 and 23. But it's taken a lifetime to reach the London stage, coming hot on the heels of the premiere of his next opera Das Wunder der Heliane, which received a concert performance at the South Bank some 18 months ago. This proves much more deserving of a production than the later, flimsier and over-earnest opus.
The production Die tote Stadt now gets has, like so many "new" productions nowadays, been hawked around various cities (it was seen in Salzburg five years ago and has since appeared in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Vienna and San Francisco). The work, in the hands of German director Willy Decker and his regular collaborators Wolfgangs Gussman (design) and Göbbel (lights), could scarcely have received a more stylish and committed treatment.
Decker is one of the most exciting visual directors around (when are we going to see his beautiful Peter Grimes revived?), and this opera gives him plenty of scope to go to town. The town in question is Bruges but a brooding haunted one, not one of pretty canals and flower-decked houses. This is a dead city of the mind, cloaked in black, with windows into often nightmarish compartments of the psyche.
The use of an inner stage, perfectly reflecting the main area, is inspired. When it first looms from behind a gauze wall like a ghostly echo, the impact is huge. It's an illusory vision; you almost can't tell what you're seeing and the box within a box serves as a potent image for this exploration of inner and outer worlds.
Act 2 is an extended dream sequence, running well into the third act and so taking up a good half of the opera. Walls and ceilings slouch, houses waltz and strange, strange visions hover, as the central character Paul, obsessively mourning his dead wife, goes on a gruelling psychological journey.
After a slightly lumpy start on the first night, American tenor Stephen Gould soon got into his stride and attacked the role with impressive vigour. It's a long and demanding part, matched by Nadja Michael's double role of Marie (the dead wife) and her live counterpart, Marietta. Although vocally uneven, she is extraordinary physically: bald-headed for much of the time, androgynous and almost vampiric, an exceedingly strange representative of the living.
By comparison, Gerald Finley's role is small (even with Frank and Fritz the pierrot doubled) but he brings characteristic presence, compelling interest whenever he's onstage, and with the famous Pierrotlied beautifully sung. Kathleen Wilkinson is a sympathetic Brigitta, the faithful housekeeper who, in Paul's disturbed imagination, floats across the stage strapped to a huge crucifix. It's just one of many arresting images.
Ingo Metzmacher, in his Royal Opera debut, draws every ounce of feeling from Korngold's extravagant score. It'll be too much for some; as with Heliane, it sounds much of the time like an unrelenting climax, with full-on singing and orchestration, veers dangerously close to the saccharine, and in the central act at least seems driven by hysteria. But it's undisputed in its passion and commitment.
This premiere has provoked a much-needed buzz in the press, with the virtues or otherwise of this neglected composer in full debate. The opera and production are bound to split audiences but, if you're prepared to be seduced by Korngold and Decker's visions, you are in for a colourful and often exhilarating ride.
Credit: Bill Cooper
Hugo Shirley,http://www.musicalcriticism.com/ 28 January 2009
http://www.musicalcriticism.com/opera/roh-tote-0109.shtml
Nearly ninety years after its glitzy double premiere in Hamburg and Cologne, Korngold's Die tote Stadt has finally made it to a British stage. Willy Decker's 2004 Salzburg production has already done the rounds, having been seen in Vienna, Amsterdam, Barcelona and San Francisco before arriving at Covent Garden.
Last year the Royal Festival Hall hosted the UK premiere – in concert – of Korngold's fourth opera, Das Wunder der Heliane (1927), and now the composer's rehabilitation would seem to be complete. We have a chance to judge Die tote Stadt on its merits and, alas, talk of a forgotten masterpiece seems, on this showing, to be some way wide of the mark.
A great success at its premiere and numerous subsequent performances in the 1920s, the opera sank into obscurity as Korngold fell foul of Nazi cultural policy, before fleeing to the United States, where he more or less single-handedly defined the language of the Hollywood film score. Vienna had been the scene of his astonishing early triumphs, yet attempts after the Second World War by Korngold to re-establish himself in the city were unsuccessful. His defenders have fought against snobbery regarding Korngold's 'defection' to film music and have pointed to the brilliance of his early achievements, as well as the refinement of later works such as the Symphony in F Sharp. Operatic hopes have been pinned on Die tote Stadt, yet it looks set to remain a rarity.
The main fault with the work must lie with the libretto. This was credited to a certain Paul Schott until in the 1970s it was revealed as the work of Korngold and his father, Julius. Korngold senior was the critic of Vienna's Neue freie Presse and openly promoted his son against, among others, Schoenberg and Richard Strauss (who took over as joint director of the Vienna Opera in 1919). They made several changes to the basic plot of Georges Rodenbach's novel Bruges-la-Morte, on which it's based, yet the most significant is the decision to have most of Acts Two and Three happen in a dream. Therefore, the majority of the action, including a brutal murder, is revealed in a somewhat perfunctory final scene as having never happened.
In the hands of another composer, this might not have been so problematic. However, for all the talent Korngold displays in a score of kaleidoscopic inventiveness, he fails to elicit any sympathy in the characters or situations through musical means. Marietta's Act One 'Lute Song' and the Pierrot's song in Act Two are both justly famous, and the music as we gradually slip into Paul's hallucinatory world at the end of the first act is also highly effective.
The rest of the score, however, remains fragmentary and disconcertingly polyglot. Korngold develops no strategy for binding the whole thing together into any sort of coherent arc and without this each forty-five minute act struggles to hold the attention. The vocal line, particularly for the two principals, is heavily entwined into the musical texture but launches into top notes without any preparation, sounding disjointed and arbitrary. Korngold tries on several occasions to weave his two 'hit' tunes back into the fabric but never convincingly; if Joseph Kerman would chastise Puccini for re-using an irrelevant theme at the end of Tosca, I can't imagine he'd have had many kind words for Korngold's lazy reprise of Marietta's Lied in the opera's final minutes.
Willy Decker's production seems all too aware of the work's main weaknesses but, unfortunately, chooses to emphasise them. Therefore for the dream sequences we are plunged into a bizarre, surreal parallel universe that takes us even further from reality. Portraits of Paul's dead wife form an obsessive leitmotif throughout the production and we have to make do with a pair of these – one whole, one split up – to depict her old room in Act One. The lock of her hair that he treats as a relic becomes a whole head of hair, which a predominantly bald Marietta later mockingly puts on as a wig. There's some clever work with the scenery but Paul, confusingly, witnesses some episodes as if he's dreaming, the action taking place in a distant mirror image of his room, whereas others he seems to experience first hand. The commedia dell'arte scene he both dreams and participates in. And if the desire to emphasise the Freudian undercurrents is justifiable, ultimately we lose track of the conscious surface it informs; we identify less and less with this already distant dream world and it further erodes our ability to become emotionally involved.
German soprano Nadja Michael brings the same lithe, handsome stage presence and physicality to the role of Marie/Marietta as we'd witnessed in her performance of Salome early in 2008. There is no denying her ability as an actor but vocally she struggled. A former mezzo, there are times when she really grabs hold of a note – usually above the stave at forte or louder – and can make a thrilling sound. Here, though, these occasions were rare; more often her intonation was wildly off the mark and she transmitted little of the text. Her tender music in Act One, from the famous aria to Maria's consoling words as Paul dreams, suffered worst, and it was therefore impossible to enjoy some of the score's best moments.
As Paul, American tenor Stephen Gould sang with hugely impressive stamina. His is not an instrument to melt the heart and there were occasional problems with tuning but, if anything, he improved as the evening progressed in one of the most taxing roles in the repertoire. He threw himself gamely into the acting demands of the production but failed to blend dramatically – or vocally for that matter – with Michael. Leading the secondary cast was Gerald Finley's thoughtful and beautifully sung performance of Frank and Fritz. Kathleen Wilkinson captured both the caring and disapproving side of Paul's housekeeper, Brigitta, yet there was something comic about her telling him 'I'm going to church' whilst strapped to a crucifix carried by nuns.
While the vocal challenges of the opera are immense, the conductor also has his work cut out keeping the diverse elements of Korngold's score under control. Ingo Metzmacher had obviously worked hard with the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, who sounded very much at home in the idiom. While the lyrical moments, which feature some of the composer's most intoxicating touches of orchestration, were beautifully done, there was sometimes a feeling of compromise elsewhere. Although Metzmacher was naturally concerned about balance, there were times when one couldn't help wishing that he'd let the music off the leash and let us hear Korngold's exuberance unfettered.
With an outstanding cast and a production that helps to draw the audience in, Die tote Stadt might have made a stronger impression. Ultimately, it's an interesting yet flawed work that's not likely ever to find its way back into the repertory. I'd be surprised if we have to wait another ninety years for its return, but for anyone interested in opera of the period, it's worth catching.
Credit: Bill Cooper
Neil Fisher, The Times, 28 January 28, 2009
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/opera/article5601854.ece
This was the night that Hollywood came to Covent Garden. And if the celebrity turnout wasn’t high in the audience – I spotted no Oscar-hunting actors in the Grand Tier – there was still ample stardust wafting from the orchestra for Britain’s staged premiere of Erich Korngold’s 1920 opera. This is, after all, the composer still best known for his lush film scores.
Here, however, was a serious chance to reassess Korngold’s serious work, composed long before Hollywood beckoned. And The Dead City is certainly a heady concoction. Its hero, Paul, is so crazed by the death of his wife Marie that he keeps her hair in a box and waits for her to return. “The mists will clear,” someone sings early on – but that takes two religious processions, a dissolute clown show, and an encounter with the mysterious Marietta, who just happens to look exactly like Marie.
I won’t be giving away the plot if I tell you that much of this is Paul’s dream; at least not given Willy Decker’s production, which grabs every opportunity it can to heighten the hysteria. Houses bob about like coffins. Portraits of the dead wife pop out of the gloom. And when Paul conjures up Marie’s living spectre, a mirror image of both him and his living room is beamed eerily across the stage.
It’s dazzling stagecraft, but Decker’s hyper-theatrical interventionism can seem overripe. Instead of making Marietta the passionate counterpoint to Paul’s morbid obsession, Nadja Michael’s bald seductress is cast instead as some sort of avenging angel, adding yet more symbolism to an opera that should be stressing heart over head. As a result, the central, simple message – love and living over death and piety – seems obscured.
If the music does find a way through, that’s down to the conductor, Ingo Metzmacher, who does a masterful job with a monster of score; the whole has an aptly bleached, surreal air that brings out the Romantic nostalgia without ladling on the sugar. And the orchestra play brilliantly for him.
Yet he is badly let down by the two leads. Stephen Gould’s Paul makes a valiant fist of a punishing role, but his voice is hard-edged and his acting stolid. Michael’s stabbing soprano, meanwhile, lacks the transportive glow that Korngold’s music needs, even if she is a ferocious actress.
That leaves the baritone Gerald Finley stealing the vocal honours, on double time as Fritz and Frank: happily, he gets one of the hit tunes of the show, the Pierrotlied, and sings it with lustre.
Credit: Bill Cooper
Eduardo Suárez, El Mundo, 28 January 2009
http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2009/01/28/cultura/1233167361.html
Credit: Bill Cooper
Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph, 28 January 2009
Covent Garden's Royal Opera House hosts the first production of Die tote Stadt - and it's an overdose of gorgeousness.
Precocious and pretentious, Erich Korngold's third opera, Die tote Stadt, is a rich tapestry of sumptuous fin de siècle decadence. Many think it sublime; others smell phoney baloney. A sensational success in inter-war Europe, written when the composer was only 22, it's based on a Belgian Symbolist novel that resonates with themes that recur in both The Picture of Dorian Gray and Hitchcock's Vertigo.
In dank, eerie Bruges (the tote Stadt or dead city), the recently bereaved Paul broods endlessly on a portrait of his dead love Marie. All that excites him is an encounter with Marietta, a pert little dancer who resembles Marie so uncannily that he begins to think that she is her reincarnation. Dream and reality mingle as Paul travels a psychologically tortuous path through his neurotic fixation on the past, but the situation is so full of illusion and ambiguity that it is difficult to get a grip – or give a damn.
Korngold's score is highly sophisticated and virtuosic. The orchestration is dense but ravishing, and the vocal lines are even lusher than those of his contemporary Richard Strauss. But too much of the opera is spent in rapturous mode, the characters emoting ecstatically in long deliquescent phrases, as waves of sensuality wash up from the pit. So much gorgeousness soon becomes enervating, and the only episode that really enchanted me was a mocking harlequinade (an idea borrowed from Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos?) in the second act, where the gloop dries out and the mists briefly rise.
Willy Decker's production has been round the houses since it was first seen at the Salzburg Festival in 2004. It arrives at Covent Garden looking good, colourful and eventful and not over-burdened with further layers of confusing imagery. It doesn't evoke the still grey waters of Bruges, but then neither does Korngold. This is an opera mostly set inside people's heads, not on the streets.
Under Ingo Metzmacher's masterful baton, Nadja Michael gives a highly intelligent if not ideally glamorous performance as Marie/Marietta and Stephen Gould copes manfully with the technically challenging tenor role of Paul. It's worth the price of the ticket to hear Gerald Finley (as Paul's friend Frank) sing the Act 2 Pierrot lied.
This is the first professionally staged production of Die tote Stadt in Britain. My guess – and, I fear, my hope –- is that it will also be the last.
Credit: Bill Cooper
Edward Seckerson, The Independent, 29 January 2009
They called Erich Korngold "the Viennese Puccini" and his steamy psychodrama Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) was the operatic smash hit of the 1920s. But that was before the Nazis drove him to Hollywood. There's a element of silver-screen wizardry about Willy Decker's staging – staggeringly the first ever at the Royal Opera House – and when the mysterious dancer, Marietta, sweeps into the reclusive widower Paul's life, awakening thoughts that his departed wife Marie might somehow be resurrected, the vivacious Nadja Michael has the confident air of a glamorous Hollywood starlet ripe for recognition.
But, of course, she is Paul's worst nightmare and, as his dark night of the soul sinks ever deeper into chaos and hallucination, Decker quite literally holds up a mirror to his denial and lets us into the reality – that this is an opera about letting go. Paul's refusal to acknowledge his beloved wife's death has opened the door of his heart to an imposter and, at the close of act two, in one of the evening's most dramatic visual coups, Decker has the wife's portrait replicate over and over in the darkness as Marietta's seduction moves into top gear. "I want you in the dead woman's house", she screams.
Paul keeps his dead wife's hair in a glass case like a holy relic so you can imagine what a field day Decker has with the religious symbolism; all that Catholic guilt simmering away. And there are at least two crucifixions – both of the women in Paul's life.
But the biggest nightmare of all (and one reason for the opera's neglect) is the inhuman difficulty of the two leading roles. Paul – the tenor role – is long and heroic with an impossibly high and demanding tessitura. Stephen Gould should receive some kind of award.
Nadja Michael was more of a problem. She is a compelling stage animal but this is a pushed or "manufactured" soprano voice (she was a mezzo) without the essential "spin" at the top, and as early as her gorgeous "Lute Song" she was in trouble, hopelessly compromised by poor support and sour intonation. Gerald Finley (Frank/Fritz) could teach her a thing or two about grateful legato.
But the evening is really about Korngold's prodigious gifts, and a score which in itself is iridescent with desire. Ingo Metzmacher and the augmented Royal Opera Orchestra dispatched it with almost indecent relish.
Credit: Bill Cooper
Erica Jeal, The Guardian, 29 January 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jan/29/die-tote-stadt-review
This is not the first time Erich Korngold's best opera has been played in the UK, but it is the first time it has been staged here, and it has a lot more going for it than the 89-year wait and the "more-corn-than-gold" gag might suggest.
Written in 1920, it is very much of its time. This is simultaneously a fascination and an insurmountable problem, one that even Willy Decker's focused, stylishly eerie production, which has travelled widely since its 2004 Salzburg creation, cannot disguise.
Nor can a solid orchestral performance under Ingo Metzmacher, though the music is less of a problem. Korngold throws everything at his sprawling score; if it were a little shorter it would be an over-rich, guilty pleasure.
The action is the real problem. The largest part of the opera is taken up with the longest dream sequence to be found outside of Bobby Ewing's bathroom, in which Paul is taunted by what seems to be the depraved doppelganger of his dead wife. The characters are always in an emotional frenzy, but very little happens until the cathartic murder, which is over in a flash. This is psychodrama without the drama.
Still, Covent Garden does it proud. Stephen Gould brings a burly, exuberant tenor to Paul, and Gerald Finley sings Fritz's aria beautifully, though elsewhere his lyrical baritone is pushed. Nadja Michael has tuning problems but embodies Decker's scary harridan conception of Marie/Marietta, and moves like a dancer. Level-headed opera fans should join the trainspotters in the box office queue now.
Credit: Bill Cooper
George Hall, The Stage, 28 January 2009
http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/23288/die-tote-stadt
For some strange reason, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s 1920 hit The Dead City was not performed at Covent Garden in its heyday. But now that the composer - still best known for his Hollywood film scores - is enjoying a major revival, it has its belated UK stage debut. And welcome it is, too. The score is an outstandingly accomplished example of late-Romanticism at its most gorgeous. Korngold’s technical skills are second to none and the Covent Garden players revel in the score in an incisive reading under conductor Ingo Metzmacher.
The story is strange but compelling. In the ancient city of Bruges, Paul is in perpetual mourning for his dead wife, Marie, until he meets and becomes fascinated by the young dancer Marietta, who is her double. Lively and emotionally promiscuous, Marietta taunts him for his obsession with a dead woman, until he strangles her with his dead wife’s hair. Then he wakes up. Only Marietta’s first visit to his home was real. Paul decides to leave Bruges and the memory of his former life behind.
Willy Decker’s staging, imaginatively designed by Wolfgang Gussman, emphasises the fantastic unreality of much of the action. Stephen Gould brings authentic Heldentenor power to the central role, with Nadja Michael committed as Marie/Marietta, even if her pitching has some dubious moments. It’s a worthwhile show and a work that lovers of Strauss and Puccini will fall in love with.
Warwick Thompson, Metro, 29 January 2009
Rating four out of five stars
With its ripe, late-romantic music and its opportunities for spectacle, you'd think opera houses would have been falling over themselves to dish up Korngold's 1920 piece Die tote Stadt (The Dead City). But no - this is the British staged premiere, imported to the Royal Opera from Salzburg. It's been worth the wait.
The reclusive Paul meets a flighty young dancer called Marietta, believing her to be the reincarnation of his saintly dead wife Marie. The encounter leads to a sexually explosive and murderous hallucination which releases Paul from the past.
Director Willy Decker provides a sumptuous production with breathtaking scenic transformations and a spectacular dream sequence. Stephen Gould sings the cruelly high and demanding role of Paul with ease - and if his phrasing lacks a certain flexibility, it's a small price to pay for his thrilling juggernaut of a tenor. Nadja Michael (Marie/Marietta) suffers some tuning problems in the quieter, more reflexive passages but still gives a terrifically dangerous performance: she moves about the stage like a knife in search of a victim. And conductor Ingo Metzmacher has a ball with Korngold's lush orchestral writing. I hope we don't have 10 wait 89 years for the next production.
Barry Millington, Evening Standard, 28 January 2009
Haunting melody from Die tote Stadt
Korngold's Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) has, in Marietta’s Song, one of the most haunting melodies in all opera. Indeed, the entire work is pervaded by ravishing music, brilliantly orchestrated, and sets a story about the process of grieving a lost beloved that more than rivals Truly, Madly, Deeply.
Why, then, has Die tote Stadt never been staged in this country before?
Fortunately the Royal Opera has at last given us the work in a more than adequate staging by Willy Decker, first seen in Salzburg and Vienna in 2004.
Die tote Stadt concerns Paul, grappling with the trauma of the death of his young wife, Marie. He meets a dancer, Marietta, who seems to bear an uncanny resemblance to his wife, becomes infatuated then strangles her when she taunts him with a lock of Marie’s hair. Finally realising that most of his encounter with Marietta, including her murder, has been a hallucination, he is ready to move on.
Decker’s production offers few blinding insights or riveting moments. Disappointing too was the singing of the principals. Stephen Gould delivers Paul with a robust, not unattractive heroic tone but lacks nuance and variety. Nadja Michael as Marie and Marietta is appealing in the middle range but frequently tested higher up.
Not an unmitigated success but the knockout power of the score makes its 90-year neglect truly incomprehensible.
Anna Picard, Independent on Sunday, 1 February 2009
Hollywood's hot composer of the Twenties looks to Bruges for a complex tale of love, grief and misplaced passion
Is Erich Korngold more than a Hollywood composer? Raised in Vienna, hot-housed into precocity by his domineering father and lauded as a genius at the age of 10, Korngold had the very worst start in life for a composer living in a century that would venerate outsiders and iconoclasts. First hugely successful then quickly outmoded, in America he shaped popular expectations of the film score as an emigré, thereby ensuring that suspicious ears would catch a whiff of Tinseltown in music written long before the Anschluss.
It is just as easy to see Korngold as a victim of snobbery as it is to portray him as a pedlar of schmaltz. Back in 1927, even smokers were invited to take sides in the clash between Korngold's epic Das Wunder der Heliane and Ernst Krenek's political opera Jonny. Cigarettes named Heliane and Jonny, perfumed and unfiltered respectively, went on sale.
Krenek was the radical. Korngold was the lone footsoldier for Romanticism, still fighting a battle that had long been lost. But had it? For all the tantric perversities of Das Wunder der Heliane, it was written long before Strauss's Daphne, while Die tote Stadt, ignored by the Royal Opera House for 90 years, reveals a thematic rigour quite at odds with Korngold's posthumous reputation.
Based on Georges Rodenbach's symbolist novel, Bruges-la-Morte, the worst that can be said of Die tote Stadt is that it is awkwardly severed into three acts. Far from being "the Viennese Puccini", Korngold shows little interest in proscribing movement or even, as Debussy and Dukas did in their symbolist operas, establishing a sense of place. Bruges itself – a niche destination in Rodenbach's day, destitute, ramshackle and yet to be rebuilt for chocoholic day-trippers – is painted not in the sober greys of Memling but in the greedy gold leaf of Klimt.
Handsomely designed and lit by Wolfgang Gussmann and Wolfgang Göbbel, Willy Decker's coldly provocative Salzburg Festival production tickles our touristic appetites. It has floating processions of pitched roofs and Flemish priests, but ensures Paul (Stephen Gould) looks on from without the old centre of Bruges: a willing prisoner in a black sarcophagus, gorging on his own sorrow. Stirred from morbid obsession by a chance encounter with Marietta (Nadja Michael), a dancer who resembles his dead wife, Marie, Paul slides into reverie. Lulled by erotic fantasy, excited and repelled by Marietta's tawdry glamour, stung by bourgeois shame at his own sexual desire, and, finally, whipped into murderous rage, Paul's dream climaxes as he strangles Marietta with a hank of Marie's hair.
Carefully nurtured and controlled by conductor Ingo Metzmacher, Korngold's narcotic, neurotic score glows and blazes. It's a brazen hussy hell-bent on conquest, adept at mimicry, with shards of dissonance to cut the thick patina of golden strings, tuned percussion and brass. But I cannot tell whether the composer meant his audience to dislike the protagonists, whether Decker has emphasised their selfishness in his production, or whether it's a question of casting. Doubling as Fritz and Frank, Gerald Finley is startlingly secure and suave, but Gould's heroic attempts to cruise an exhausting tessitura are too obviously effortful, and Michael's energetic writhing is poor recompense for threadbare tone and woeful intonation. Far from being self-indulgent, Die tote Stadt is an uncomfortably frank examination of its characters' self-indulgences. I just wish it had been better sung.
Fiona Maddocks, The Observer, Sunday 1 February 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/feb/01/classical-opera-review
The resurrection of Erich Korngold
The 90-year wait to see Die tote Stadt in Britain was worth it, and two fine pianists go head to head in the Diabelli Variations
Obsession and fidelity, guilt, sex, grief and temptation rip their way through Korngold's impassioned Die tote Stadt, which had its British stage premiere at the Royal Opera House this week, a mere nine decades after it was written. Willy Decker's muted expressionist production, designed by Wolfgang Gussmann and conducted by Ingo Metzmacher, opened in Salzburg and Vienna in 2004, and has since been seen in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Barcelona.
One off-putting factor for opera houses, never mind ingrained snobbery, parochialism or ignorance, is the difficulty of casting the piece. The heroic-tenor lead is scarcely offstage, riding the orchestra at high pitch and emotion throughout, while the soprano, playing a double role, must be secure in every part of an ambitious vocal range.
Here a chunky Stephen Gould and the sinewy Nadja Michael deserve medals for effort and stamina, despite strain. Add to all this a slightly sneering attitude towards a composer whose popcorn name seemed more appropriate to his role as a pioneer of Hollywood film music (Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk and similar epics) and you look no further for excuses.
Born in Moravia, Erich Korngold (1897-1957) was the son of a bullying, rear-guard music critic - adjectives not generic to the trade but certainly applicable to Korngold senior, who at once pushed and persecuted the boy. Mahler and Strauss were early supporters. Doors opened for the prodigy, only to be slammed shut once the oppressive forces of nazism and modernism took a grip. After its triumphant run in the 1920s, Die tote Stadt vanished from the repertoire.
The enterprising, non-professional Kensington Symphony Orchestra mounted the British concert premiere in 1996. A creditable Naxos recording introduces the piece usefully, but the relentless hurricane-force score, with its complex layerings and vast orchestral sweep and clatter, tends to be overwhelming in a confined domestic space, not least on grounds of noise pollution. Opera-goers were therefore keen to encounter this neglected hit in a professional staging.
Korngold's source is Georges Rodenbach's poetic novel Bruges-la-morte - a fashionable influence on Rilke, Mallarmé and Zweig. (Alan Hollinghurst minutely explores this ghostly fin-de-siècle artistic world in his 1994 novel The Folding Star.) Psychology leads art into deep waters: Paul is obsessed by his dead wife, Marie. He encounters a lookalike dancer, Marietta, murders her with a relic of his wife's hair, then wakes from his lurid nightmare, returning to the comforting armchair of his idée fixe. So just another rum operatic scenario, starring Bruges, otherwise thinly represented on the lyric map.
Longueurs aside, the score has Straussian urgency, Puccinian heat and melody. Metzmacher's analytical grasp, and the brisk, no-nonsense playing of the ROH orchestra, glittering with additional organ, cowbells, wind machine and strident offstage trumpets, revealed true musical voluptuousness, rather than the flab that some expected. To hear it was rewarding rather than redemptive.
Decker's staging takes a narrow, Freudian-casebook approach: windowless room with phantom tableaux vivants. The dead Marie is represented by splashy blow-ups of Sargent's portrait of doe-eyed Elsie Palmer. The dancer and her troupe of sinful, wimpled nuns - don't ask; the reference is to Meyerbeer's Robert le diable - rise from their tombs like a marmoreal herd of rare-breed horned cattle. Gerald Finley, animated in support as Frank/Fritz, lavished characteristic feeling in his party-piece aria "Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen". Kathleen Wilkinson, as the steadfast housekeeper, Brigitta, provided necessary stillness, no small relief.
Hugh Canning, The Sunday Times, 1 February 2009
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/opera/article5618425.ece
The Covent Garden production of Die Tote Stadt, despite limitations, is a rare and gripping example of integrated music theatre
Richard Strauss and Giacomo Puccini, the dominant figures of the early 20th century, hover over the score of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s third opera, Die tote Stadt (The Dead Town), which the Royal Opera presented on Tuesday night, its British stage premiere. Based on a lurid novel, Bruges-la-Morte, by the Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach, Die tote Stadt was a brilliant success on its double world premiere in Cologne and Hamburg in December 1920. Several important opera houses, including the Vienna State Opera in Korngold’s home town, had jostled to give the first performance of a work by an already famous wunderkind, the son of Vienna’s most influential critic, Julius Korngold. The Austrian capital staged Die tote Stadt in January 1921, and within two years the opera had been seen in 15 more theatres, including New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
Even by the standards of Strauss and Puccini, its progress was triumphant, but Korngold’s world came crashing down in the 1930s with the rise of the Nazis. He fled to America, where Hollywood embraced him as the composer of scores for several Errol Flynn films. He won an Oscar for The Adventures of Robin Hood and nominations for The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, and The Sea Hawk.
Until recently, his posthumous reputation has been as a composer of film music, but his presence in the Vienna of the first three decades of the 20th century has led to a reassessment of his music, and great claims are made for Die tote Stadt by Korngold’s partisans. “No longer a novelty,” according to his biographer, Brendan G Carroll, in the ROH programme, “but rightly recognised as a significant 20th-century work.”
Certainly, in Willy Decker’s brilliant, widely travelled staging — first seen five years ago in Salzburg, and subsequently in Vienna, Amsterdam, Barcelona and San Francisco — it appears so, even if much of Korngold’s score, even in the hands of the masterly conductor Ingo Metzmacher, seems derivative and uninspired. The opera has two hit numbers — the heroine Marietta’s Lute Song, possibly the 20th century’s most recorded German operatic aria, and Fritz’s charming Pierrot Lied — and a fine love duet, but most of the score, prodigiously orchestrated with liberal homages to Strauss’s most popular work, Der Rosenkavalier, tends to confirm the old jibe that Korngold’s music is more corn than gold.
Certainly, the subject matter of Die tote Stadt, if not its creaky libretto — by Korngold and his father, under the alias Paul Schott — makes it stageworthy. The bereaved Paul, mourning his beloved wife, Marie, becomes obsessed with an actress and dancer, Marietta, who looks like Marie and in his dream takes on the persona of his dead wife.
As types, they are antipoles, and as the fantasy action plays out, Marietta emerges as a bit of a bunny-boiler, taunting Paul, who keeps Marie’s hair in a glass case — a fetishistic religious relic. He eventually strangles Marietta with those very tresses. Except he doesn’t. She returns to pick up the parasol and roses she has left on an earlier visit, and Paul realises he must leave the city of the dead and bury his memories.
Decker and his designer, Wolfgang Gussmann, evoke this world of doppelgängers and disturbing dreams in a dazzling sequence of tableaux, which stretch the ROH’s technical resources to the limit, but rivet the eye when all goes smoothly. The procession of nuns carrying a crucifix to which Paul’s housekeeper, Brigitta, is attached goes a bit over the top, but, hey, weird things happen in dreams, and it mirrors the religious cortege of Act III, in which the bishop is revealed as Pierrot. Decker and Gussmann are clearly fascinated by the idea of the double: we see Paul and Marie in a smaller “duplicate” of his room at the back of the stage, while projections of Marie’s portrait fill the stage.
The principal singers do not make the strongest possible case for Korngold’s lush hit numbers. Stephen Gould’s burly, Heldentenor-ish Paul is vocally effortful and strenuous, while Nadja Michael, for all her slinky, Salome-like seductiveness, sounds ungainly, squally and horribly off pitch as she heaves out her manufactured high notes (a former mezzo, she now sings as a not-quite-soprano). Even the invariably outstanding Gerald Finley (Frank/Fritz) seemed under par and, occasionally, under the note. Maybe they will all relax later in the run, but the production has to be seen, a rare and gripping example of integrated music theatre on the Royal Opera’s stage.
Financial Times, 31 January 2009
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/06f02a32-ef38-11dd-bbb5-0000779fd2ac.html
Puccini + Strauss + Freud = Korngold. That's the equation an increasingly vociferous lobby would have us accept in the light of Tuesday's UK stage premiere of Die tote Stadt (The Dead City), written in 1920 when Erich Korngold was just 23. There is an equally articulate group of sceptics who argue the opposite - that Korngold equals sentimentality, longwindedness and late-Romantic kitsch; more corn than gold.
A staging as convincing as Willy Decker's, which has reached London by way of Salzburg, Vienna, Amsterdam, Barcelona and San Francisco, makes it hard to reach an objective judgment. The opera's plot - about a man so obsessed by the memory of his late wife that he dreams of lusting after and strangling her real-life double - is not quite substantial enough to sustain a whole evening. Its Freudian undertones hardly stand up to analysis: by today's standards it's surely optimistic to think you can get rid of your hang-ups by way of a lurid dream. But Korngold's mastery of the musical fashions of his day - the Salome -like ferment, the Puccinian grace notes, all gift-wrapped in brilliant orchestration - delude us into thinking this is an original score, and its one memorable tune, the nostalgic " Glück das mir verblieb ", does pull the heartstrings.
With these provisos, Die tote Stadt works on its own terms. Decker's production, with 1920s costumes and fluent semi-realistic sets by Wolfgang Gussmann, sits handsomely on the Covent Garden stage and has been well rehearsed by Karin Voykowitsch. Stephen Gould's bear-like Paul makes a believable centrepiece, thanks not least to his vocal stamina: this may not be the juiciest of tenors but Gould uses it musically and without undue effort. The casting of Nadja Michael as Marie/Marietta is more questionable. As we might have expected from her Salome last season, she acts the part with chameleon-like veracity - chill eroticism spliced with balletic chutzpah - but lacks the vocal charisma and note-for-note accuracy that such high-profile roles demand. Gerald Finley's Frank steals all the scenes in which he appears, and Ingo Metzmacher draws suitably suave playing from the orchestra without drowning the singers.
Jim Pritchard, Seen and Heard, 5 February 2009
http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2009/Jan-Jun09/korngold2701.htm
There is a Korngold revival of sorts just now and it seems this is more due to the need for the opera houses to find something new and attractive to audiences rather than to the value of the works themselves. Last year at the Royal Festival Hall with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski there was a very unfortunate, to say the least, performance of Korngold’s fourth opera, Das Wunder der Heliane (see review). Now nearly ninety years after a double - yes double - première in Hamburg and Cologne, Die tote Stadt, has finally reached the UK - although there was apparently a semi-professional concert attempt at it in 1996 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) is inspired by the 1892 novel Bruges-la-Morte by the Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach. In the introduction to his translation into English, Philip Mosley stated that the book is ‘generally recognized as a major work of… the symbolist movement’. I am no expert on this movement but loss and longing seem to be frequent themes, although quite what Rodenbach had against Bruges is not particularly evident. He also turned this story into a play, Le Mirage which was subsequently translated into German by Siegfried Trebitsch as Das Trugbild (1921) and it was this that became the source material for Die tote Stadt. The names of the leading characters and the plot were revised by the two Korngolds, father and son, who wrote the libretto themselves. As a music critic Julius Korngold’s involvement would have had an obvious conflict of interest if he was seen to be involved in his son Erich’s opera, so the libretto was credited to him under the nom de plume, Paul Schott. Korngold’s publisher, was also called Schott and Paul is the protagonist of the opera.
The opera is inspired by fin-de-siècle Vienna, the world of Klimt, Freud and Schnitzler, the Secession artists and musicians such as Gustav Mahler and Alexander von Zemlinsky. That world was poised on a precipice and would soon descend into the abyss of the World War I and become, to all purposes, snuffed out. Against this background the acknowledged young prodigy Erich Wolfgang Korngold grew up and it is to this lost world that his music looks back with longing. By the age of 10 Korngold had played his own music for Gustav Mahler who did more than say that the boy was a genius; he also arranged for him to study with Zemlinsky.
So Die tote Stadt was also conceived in the shadow of Sigmund Freud's theories about the interpretation of dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. Dreams can become mechanisms through which the dreamer attempts to makes sense of the complexities of a reality in which they exist and the rather slim plot of Die tote Stadt is about Paul trying to do just that.
Paul’s wife, Marie, has died at a very young age. He has been in mourning since her death for seemingly quite a while. He has shut himself off from the world, turning the main room in his house in Bruges (the ‘dead city’ of the title) into a ‘temple of memories’, in which he worships her portraits and a braid of her ‘golden blond hair’. He must leave the room sometime as he has met a woman on the street who bears an uncanny resemblance to Marie and he invites her to come and visit him. She is Marietta, a dancer in a troupe currently visiting Bruges to perform Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable. The two share a song about faithful love (the tuneful ‘Glück, das mir verblieb’). Paul’s mind is in turmoil believing that Marie is back from the dead and we are soon transported into Paul’s dream world in which Marie basically tells him to move on. Paul begins a pursuit of Marietta, encountering all of the raunchy members of her performing troupe in the process. After a night together, Marietta ridicules both Paul's religious piety and continuing attachment to Marie. When she wears Marie's hair, Paul goes mad and strangles her to death with it. Marietta become another Marie and Willy Decker’s staging rather ambiguously suggests that foul play may have been Marie’s downfall too.
Die tote Stadt was a great success at its premières and the subsequent performances in the 1920s marking the high point of Korngold’s career when he was only 23. Before the current renewed interest in him began he was often thought of primarily as a composer of film scores. His movie music remains some of the finest of all time, because almost single-handedly he created the symphonic sound of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Since Korngold fell foul of the Nazis in Austria, he fled to the US so his opera sank into relative obscurity. In Vienna after the Second World War, Korngold’s attempts to re-establish himself were unsuccessful even though the city had given the ‘prodigy’ some astonishing early triumphs.
Willy Decker’s production of Die tote Stadt has already done the rounds, having been seen first in 2004 at the Salzburg Festival: it has been given in Vienna, Amsterdam, Barcelona and San Francisco before arriving at Covent Garden. The production is a fairly straightforward affair though little is of course seen of Bruges. Wolfgang Gussman's set is a rectangular, windowless box with black walls with some indecipherable words written on them. There is a raised floor, a white tilted ceiling and a door stage right. There are a couple of armchairs in the set and Paul is constantly on stage from the beginning, remaining there until the very end of the opera even though the libretto suggests that he supposed to make his entrance later - at least according to how the housekeeper Brigitta, greets Paul's friend Frank. Paul spends most of the time slumped in one chair or other clutching either a huge portrait of his dead wife or her hair, which reappears in Act III in a reliquary. At the end of Act I when Paul hallucinates about Marie/Marietta, the back wall vanishes to reveal an exact replica of the set, though placed much further back of course.
Acts II and III are therefore predominantly in this parallel world. At the start of Act II Decker gives us a sight of Bruges when Paul's friend Frank reappears as Fritz, a rival for Marietta's love, sitting on a large blue monopoly-like house which moves with some others across the stage. If the music and the motivations of the characters did not already remind one sufficiently of Strauss’s Salome, then as Act II continues we see something from Ariadne auf Naxos with a actress trying to rehearse with her Harlequin troupe. In a send-up of the Nuns' scene from Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable, we see Paul's housekeeper, Brigitta, on a large cross telling Paul that she is going to church. Little else changes for Act III though we get more pictures of Marie's face and there is another religious procession.
The dream therefore began at the end of Act I with Marie telling Paul their love lives on in the past, present and future and it continues through to Act III until just after Marietta's death. This is excellently realized by Decker as he distorts the physical space on the stage and here, as well as with characterisation, shadows and lighting, he gives us more than a hint of German Expressionist cinema from the time of the opera’s composition. At the denouément in Act III, Decker restores order to the set and from this we understand that Paul is now back in the real world. It becomes fully clear to him that the Marietta he met has nothing to do with Marie and so he is ready to leave his ‘dead city’ and return to life. True to Freudian theory, Paul finally realises that he must make the best of what life has to offer and is ‘cured’.
Korngold’s score is undoubtedly rich and colourful; shimmering here and blaring out there but it basically soars away like Strauss with the vocal line of the two principals often enmeshed within thick musical textures.’ The singers use punctuating stratospheric high notes ad nauseam which too often fragments any suggestion of lyrical sweep. There are only a few sections of pure melody - the occurrences of Marietta’s lute song and the Pierrot's song in Act II wonderfully delivered by Gerald Finley - who sang Frank and also Fritz, the actor. These are outstanding songs and are rightly famous as stand alone pieces but the problem is the music that stitches, or rather really doesn’t stitch, everything else together. Admittedly the music for Paul's slide into his dream state is descriptive and at the end of Act II Marietta seduces Paul to other highly evocative music – evocative that is of Tristan Act II. Likewise moments of ‘colour’ in the score hint at an eclectic mix of references in Korngold’s music comprising, for instance, the xylophone from Turandot, the glockenspiel from Die Zauberflöte, the wind machine from Der fliegende Holländer and the bells from Parsifal.
Ingo Metzmacher is not someone I have particularly admired when I have seen him conduct concerts but I was certainly full of admiration for the way that he kept control of the proceedings and never swamped the singers. The controlled playing of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House evidenced the detailed musical preparation that must have taken place. I suspect that some of Korngold's bluster and grandeur must have been sacrificed to the overall balance but I doubt whether anything really important had been lost as a result of concentrating on clarity.
The demand on the leading two singers is immense and there is a supporting cast of minor roles all well sung by a very international cast. Kathleen Wilkinson, the only Brit present, was slightly quavery as Brigitta, an effect that I hoped was her portrayal of the role of the caring and pious housekeeper. Even doubling up as Frank and Fritz, Canadian baritone Gerald Finley had little to sing but he had on stage immense presence and sang everything beautifully.
German soprano Nadja Michael as Marie but mainly Marietta is lithe, predatory, and bald-headed for most of the time and so quite Nosferatu-like, she frequently throws herself at Paul often legs akimbo. She basically acts the same neurotic personality as her recent Salome at Covent Garden. But however good an actress she might be, the voice is a problem. As a former mezzo she does not have the support for the bright top notes she needs, her intonation is all over the place and I rarely heard a word of the German libretto. This is a case of casting more by what a singer looks like rather than by voice.
Fortunately, there is that choice with dramatic sopranos but not so with tenors of the same Fach. American tenor Stephen Gould was, I understand, apparently unwell at the dress rehearsal but did attempt to sing. It is unlikely that he can have made a complete recovery by this first night so his performance was undoubtedly heroic. There was sharpness and stridency to his first exclamations and his voice never gained much warmth until the Tristan-esque moments at the end of Act II. Despite this, throughout Acts I and II he revealed a voice that is capable of some rare delicate control when Korngold allows him the chance. In Act III he was in fuller voice and showed a palpable jealous rage by some committed acting which made this act the best of the three for both him and the opera.
In the 1920s Korngold’s favourite Paul was Richard Tauber one of the greatest singers of the twentieth century - although I believe with a warm lyrical voice and not a Heldentenor. This hints at performing practices we have lost or cannot deliver now, because I wondered whether Paul could have been sung more lyrically and romantically employing more head voice and mezza voce but this is not within Mr Gould’s compass. I suspect that to hear Paul sung as Korngold wanted, would require a Domingo in his prime.
So to my mind, Die tote Stadt is an operatic curiosity, worth hearing once but probably then best left until another generation needs to hear something different at the opera for a change.
The Scotsman, 5 February 2009
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/14344/Classical-review-Die-Tote-Stadt.4948354.jp
IT'S a rare thing for the house band at Covent Garden to strike up with a totally new sound, but that's what happens when the overture begins to Die tote Stadt.
What we hear is vintage Hollywood: this is appropriate, since its composer Erich Korngold, as provider of the sound for a string of golden oldies starring Errol Flynn et al, was a founding father of film music. But if he was known in the 1920s as "the Viennese Puccini", two other composers are to be heard even more clearly as background presences here: the textures are as intricate and luxurious as those of Richard Strauss, and in the music for the leading role I so much Wagner that you feel the 23-year-old Korngold must have swallowed him whole.
Die tote Stadt – "The dead city" – was a smash-hit in 1920s Europe, but it has only now surfaced at Covent Garden, in a production by Willy Decker that does a signal honour to its Freudian plot.
Paul lives as a recluse in a trance-like state, surrounded by mementos of his dead wife Marie. Marietta, an actress uncannily resembling her, walks into this enclosed world, and induces him to hallucinate a resurrection, an erotic consummation, and a murder: pulling himself back from the brink of madness, Paul at last understands that life must go on.
The lighting and designs brilliantly evoke that madness, with nuns and Pierrots cavorting on a stage-within-a-stage; Gerald Finley (as Paul's confidant) and Nadja Michael (as Marietta) powerfully complement Stephen Gould's heroic performance as Paul himself.
And if much of the evening feels more like a "jeu" than a lived drama, the gorgeously-sung final scene both redeems and justifies the whole enterprise.
Alexandra Coghlan, Oxford Times, 29 January 2009
http://www.oxfordtimes.co.uk/leisure/4084972.Die_Tote_Stadt__The_Royal_Opera__Covent_Garden/
The prospect of a little-known 20-th century German opera about a desolate Belgian widower, ominously titled Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City), doesn’t exactly scream ‘rollicking good time’, but don’t be fooled – the Royal Opera House’s latest venture is a surprisingly, and satisfyingly, full-blooded experience.
And so it should be; composed by Erich Korngold (the Hans Zimmer of Hollywood’s Golden Age, responsible for such memorable film scores as Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk), the opera is stuffed so explodingly full of melody that a Frenchman would have to be forcibly restrained from cutting out the overture and serving it with toast.
Korngold has a style all his own. Described as the ‘Viennese Puccini’, the very discernible influence of Strauss is the single black sock in the otherwise cream-coloured wash of lushly Italianate orchestral sound.
Reflecting the preoccupations of its 1920 post-war audience, Die Tote Stadt meditates on the experience of mourning, asking whether indeed there can be meaningful life after death.
The hero, Paul, fixated by the memory of his pure and beautiful wife Marie, spends his days gazing at her portrait – unable to accept her death.
A chance encounter with Marietta, a dancer who bears uncanny resemblance to Marie, sees him drawn into increasingly depraved and grotesque fantasy, as he struggles between love for the dead Marie and lust for the living Marietta.
Rarely-performed works tend to be either bad, wilfully abstruse, or (most often) both – but none of these is true of Die Tote Stadt. With two relentlessly high and challenging roles for its hero and heroine, a Strauss-sized orchestra, and a plot demanding a psychedelic dream-sequence of dramatic tableaux, it’s simply a work as hard to stage as it is to pull off.
Willy Decker’s production however (originally staged by the Vienna State Opera in 2004) does precisely this. Mirroring the schizophrenic harmonic moods of Korngold’s score, the opera becomes a visual riot of rival iconographies, throwing Dadaist surrealism, commedia dell’arte, Christianity and even a top-hat clad nod to Hollywood’s own Busby Berkeley, into the mix.
Taking much from the French tradition of physical theatre, the production is dominated by continuous movement that literally propels the action forward, dragging the eye hither and thither in ever-increasing frenzy.
For all its visual trappings, Die Tote Stadt stands or falls with its two leads. While tenor Stephen Gould proved a capable if rather unexciting Paul, gaining increasing vocal command after a rather tight start, it was Nadja Michael as the mercurial Marietta/Marie who compelled attention.
A single moment of uncharacteristically dubious intonation aside, she transcended her virgin/whore archetypes, captivating and convincing both vocally and physically, and pulling off the extraordinaryfeat on which the opera’s premise necessarily hinges: creating a woman at once loin-quiveringly desirable and skin-crawlingly repugnant. With its colourful score and even more colourful production, the titular city may be dead, but there’s nothing remotely lifeless about Die Tote Stadt. See it, before it disappears back into the archives for another century.
Colin Anderson, The Opera Critic, 30 January 2008
http://theoperacritic.com/tocreviews2.php?review=ca/2009/rohtote0109.htm
An overdue premiere
Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Die tote Stadt, written to a libretto by one Paul Schott (in fact the words are by the composer and his father Julius) has never enjoyed a full staging in the UK until 27 January this year, having first been seen in December 1920 in Hamburg. There has been at least one concert performance in London but not a staged production. The Royal Opera's current run is of seven performances and BBC Radio 3 will broadcast one of them on 23 May.
Not that Die tote Stadt is unfamiliar - there are two audio recordings available (one conducted by Erich Leinsdorf, the other by Donald Runnicles) and another that can be seen on DVD; and arias from it are familiar to the recital room and the gramophone.
The production being seen at Covent Garden is a co-production between the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival. It is directed by Willy Decker and has also been staged in Amsterdam, Barcelona and San Francisco. It seems that other new productions are planned and, therefore, that Die tote Stadt is back on the map having enjoyed much success in its early days and attracted stellar artists of the time. Rightly so, for Decker's production, which seems faithful to the original creators' intentions, makes for a rewarding, alluring and thought-provoking visit to the theatre.
Musically, Korngold's achievement is to blend musical advancement with winning melody and colourful orchestration and, although breathing the musical air of Richard Strauss and Puccini (which alone is surely a recommendation), also managing to be his own man. Of course, Korngold was to have great success in Hollywood as a film-music composer (but he was already writing in a style that would be ideal in those circumstances).
The story of Die tote Stadt, based on Georges Rodenbach's novel, Bruges-la-Morte, centres on Paul who is in emotional distress since the death of his young wife Marie. He is a virtual recluse and is surrounded by images of her. Only his housekeeper Brigitte and friend Frank are constants. But a dancer, Marietta, attracts Paul. She reminds Paul of his wife: Marie re-incarnated. Marietta arrives in the house and becomes aware of her similarity to Marie and leaves. Paul starts to fantasise; his thoughts are nightmarish and lustful. In his dreams he seduces Marietta and in doing so is cast adrift by Frank and Brigitte. He then believes that Marietta is trying to destroy his memory of Marie, so he strangles her with his dead wife's hair. Breaking the nightmare, Marietta returns - Paul is now able to move on.
The staging is excellent, the dividing line between reality and imagination well made; so too the domination (through image and keepsakes) of the dead Marie in relation to Paul's sanity. Paul is a heldentenor role, a demanding and never-off-the-stage part. Stephen Gould is a fine advocate of it; he meets Korngold's demands without coarseness or force and is also a credible actor portraying someone unbalanced and pining for his lost love. As Marie and Marietta, Nadja Michael is a splendid actress, very confident, and although her singing is sensitive one must doubt some of the pitching and a loss of tone in the highest registers. There were some balance problems too; she was unable to always be heard above the orchestra, which is not to suggest that the orchestra was too loud but rather that Michael wasn't always able to penetrate through it.
Conducting is Ingo Metzmacher (he also conducted the afore-mentioned Netherlands performances) who is steeped in opera having been director of Hamburg State Opera from 1997 to 2005 and then of Netherlands Opera until last year. He brings dynamism to Korngold's writing, also a dramatic edge and a romantic yield, but he avoids indulgence. Heart and head are satisfied and the 90-minute indivisible first two acts didn't seem a second too long; furthermore the ROH Orchestra responds to Metzmacher on his Covent Garden debut in a manner that suggests that he will return.
The cast (with Torsten Kerl singing Paul on February 5 & 17) includes Gerald Finley and Kathleen Wilkinson as Paul's friends and is, even in the smallest parts, cast to strength. The production including lighting and costumes is complementary to the scenario. So, there is much to relish, certainly in the music, which includes two familiar arias, one for Marietta and one for Frank - here ideally integrated into the whole, and with some striking imagery to sustain Frank's hallucinations, frustrations and violence. Should you not be familiar with Die tote Stadt or have perhaps underestimated it then I suggest a visit to Covent Garden where a rehabilitation is taking place of an opera that really should not have fallen from view.
Michael Tanner, The Spectator, 4 February 2009
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/arts/3322461/city-of-dreams.thtml
At last, after 88 years, Erich Korngold’s almost impressive opera Die tote Stadt has reached the UK in a handsome production, and in every respect the Royal Opera does it proud. If it isn’t quite a major work that’s because it vertiginously occupies a tiny gap between being incredibly derivative from the Strauss of Ariadne auf Naxos, and the sheer sickening over-ripeness and pretentiousness of Korngold’s next operatic effort Das Wunder der Heliane. There are too many times when its predecessors are recalled, and some when one senses Korngold teetering on the brink of being the last word in the Schreker-Zemlinsky complex, with the gamey picking-over of themes of death, obsession and passion, excitedly intertwined with religiosity and violence.
As Antony Peattie says in his very shrewd assessment of the work in the latest edition of Kobbé, Korngold manages to have things both ways, by departing in this and many other respects from his source, the novel Bruges-la-morte by Georges Rodenbach: at least half the opera is a dream sequence, in which the central figure Paul, who is devoted only to mourning his dead love Marie, is assailed by a series of variously lurid incidents, which handily involve his encountering at close quarters a troupe of players, one of whom is a kind of male Zerbinetta; nuns in procession; Marietta, Marie’s double, a dancer and flirt, spending a wild night with the seduced Paul; and Paul’s subsequent revulsion and strangling of Marietta with Marie’s hair, which he has preserved as a sacred relic. These oneiric fantasies take well over an hour, before Paul wakes and finds that nothing has happened.
His friend Frank urges him away from ‘the dead city’ Bruges, which is somehow identified with Marie, and Paul hesitantly leaves, after reprising the Big Tune from Act I which Marietta had derided for its sentimentality, but which we the audience adored and can’t wait to hear again (please listen to Lotte Lehmann and Richard Tauber singing it, most easily found on a Naxos CD devoted to Tauber; it’s one of the most swoon-inducing records ever made).
All this, needless to say, requires a huge orchestra, lots of motifs, squelchy side-slipping harmonies, and some amazing tableaux. It also requires a singer who can dance convincingly (further shades of Salome) and others who can cope with the heavy orchestral textures. At Covent Garden it gets the lot, and anyone who felt unconvinced need make no further effort to appreciate it. Nadja Michael, who last year disappointed me as Salome, is electrifying, though a creamier voice would be ideal, and one that stayed in tune: but her dancing and her hysterics are utterly convincing. Stephen Gould, the tormented Paul, is vocally noisy and dramatically clumsy, but enough of the character’s anguish and vacillation come across. Gerald Finley as the cold Frank and the pierrot Fritz has, as always, an ideal stage presence. Wolfgang Gussman’s sets are wholly appropriate and eerily atmospheric, and Willy Decker’s production is ideal, ducking nothing and elucidating wherever possible. Guiding the whole heavy structure along with the surest of touches is Ingo Metzmacher, now surely the leading exponent of this kind of repertoire, as well as of St François, distant in idiom but fairly close in ambiance. I can easily understand anyone’s recoiling from this brew, and in some moods would myself. If it had led to greater things from Korngold, I think people would esteem it more highly. Anyway, this is a production to relish and revisit.
Roderick Swanston, Times Literary Supplement
http://www.onlinereviewlondon.com/reviews/DieToteStadt.html
The brilliant prodigy Erich Korngold (1897-1957) completed his third opera, Die tote Stadt in 1920 and with it gained his greatest success to date. Richard Strauss attended its first performance and sent little notes to twenty-three year old composer warning him against mischief. Also present, at least at the dress rehearsals, was Alban Berg who was very impressed by the work. The presence of these two great colleagues, for such they were despite ages, helps to locate the score and character of this magnificent opera. Musically a good deal of the opera seems broadly Straussian with its dependence on key-centres and a richly chromatic language. But Korngold is not a Strauss follower; the work has its own musical style and language, and in places its complex chromaticism veers towards the more challenging world of Alban Berg's whose Wozzeck was in progress and which was to be premiered in Berlin five years later.
Part of the phantasmagorical character of the music is due to Korngold's choice of novel on which to base the opera, the symbolist novel Bruges-la-Morte by the Belgian Georges Rodenbach. Though Rodenbach made the city of Bruges more apparent than Korngold does in his opera, Korngold adopted much of the obsessive, almost paranoid, state of the central character Paul into his opera. Paul has been overwhelmed by the death of his beloved Marie to the extent that he stays indoors gazing at a picture of her. As all psychiatrists will recognize he is in so vulnerable a condition that he is open to negative transference, which duly happens with the arrival of Marietta. She seems to Paul to look like a resurrected Maria, but it becomes clear she is no Marie, at least in Paul's imagination. But typically with psycho-symbolic works it is not entirely who the real Marietta is and how much she is a creation of Paul's disturbed imagination.
This is a very fin-de-siécle novel and thus ripe for the shifting chromatic treatment Korngold lavishes upon it. Nowadays people sometimes score Korngold for his move to Los Angeles and the opulent scores he composed for Hollywood movies such as Sea Hawk and Robin Hood. But closer inspection of these movie scores not only reveals how brilliantly composed they are, even if one thinks them misplaced, and how much they are the heirs of his brilliant Viennese years. Ardent modernists used to dismiss Korngold as one of the many composers who could not cope with the modernisms of dodecaphony that surrounded them in Vienna. Nowadays a more sympathetic view is more prevalent which values the renewal and mutation of traditions as well the use of modernisms. It also acknowledges that there is much common ground between Schönberg and Korngold as the presence at, and approval of, Alban Berg at Die tote Stadt shows.
For these reasons it was a great delight to see that the Royal Opera House had eventually staged Die tote Stadt after nearly ninety years, though some of my more despondent friends commented that some of the audience had left after the first act! Some people have great difficulty in absorbing something which is not what they were expecting.
The performance and production were full of excellent things. The production originated from Salzburg, of which it seemed a typical product: thoughtful and provocative. The set designs of Wolfgang Gussmann and the lighting of Wolfgang Göbbel frequently recalled Robert Wiene's Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari of 1919. The doors to Paul's room sloped, and the ceiling was often at a strange angle. Reality seemed permanently fluid and dream-like. Dreams and reality often seemed to merge. This was superbly caught in everything one saw, and made the production match the music. The direction of Willy Decker was equally sensitive to the nature of the music and the text of the opera.
For the most part the same could be said of the music. The ROH orchestra responded excellently to the sensitive direction of Ingo Metzhmacher, making his ROH debut. The orchestral colour, as in so many works by Korngold, is at the heart of the work and Metzmacher shaded the sounds and phrasing of the orchestra with skill and perception. This provided both a character and a backdrop for the singers.
Outstanding amongst the singers was Gerard Finley in the role of Paul's friend, Frank and the Pierrot character Fritz. Combining the two roles makes dramatic sense even though there is no indication that it was intended by Korngold. What is helps to emphasize is the mirror-like correspondence between the real and dream world. Luckily for the audience this allowed us to hear Finley sing the second most famous number from the opera "Mein sehnen, mein Wähnen". Finley is a consummately convincing actor as well as superb singer and he brought both roles to life vocally and dramatically. The reality based, elegant Frank was the perfect for the moody introspective Paul.
Similarly well cast and sung was Kathleen Wilkinson as the faithful maid Brigitta. But neither of the other two main characters matched them. Theatrically both Nadja Michael as Marietta and Torsten Kerl (the night I attended) as Paul were well cast. Torsten Kerl seemed suitably tortured and Marietta suitably flirtatious and elusive. But neither was really good vocally. While Nadja Michael's voice seemed right she was too often uncomfortably out of tune, which affected her performance of the celebrated lute-song. Torsten Kerl on the other hand was vocally more secure but lacked the subtle vocal range displayed by Finley. While he was right theatrically his tortured character seemed too often revealed with vocal clichés.
But overall the performance had so many good things for it that the vocal blemishes were considerably outweighed. This was a memorable and convincing production and performance of a work that should not have to wait another ninety years before being stated at the Royal Opera house again.
Matthew Ingleby, Mundoclassico, 13 February 2009
http://www.mundoclasico.com/2009/documentos/doc-ver.aspx?id=7c45cec5-8a65-436d-9707-b409f0dea424
Willy Decker's celebrated production of Die tote Stadt has finally arrived in London. Having done the rounds in Amsterdam, San Francisco and Barcelona, this landmark interpretation marks the first UK staging of Korngold's third and most famous opera - an odd fact, perhaps, considering the composer's near-canonisation in parts of the European opera circuit in recent decades. Decker’s production originated in Korngold's own Austria, where it was a highlight of the 2004 Salzburg Festival, before being presented in Vienna. Though the dead city of its title is literally Bruges (in accordance with the novel by Georges Rodenbach on which it is based), it is very much the spirit of the Austrian capital that haunts this piece.
First performed in 1920, the year after Freud’s essay upon The Uncanny, Die tote Stadt is suffused with both the heavy symbolism of that later death-driven psychoanalysis and the late romanticism of Strauss, Zemlinsky and Mahler. The main protagonist, Paul, is a compulsive mourner who has made his house into a shrine for his dead wife, Marie, worshipping what is in this production a huge and somewhat crude painting of her face, and treasuring a lock of her golden hair in a glass case. When a stranger named Marietta arrives with hair of exactly the same hue and a likeness in face and voice so remarkable that he thinks her a doppelganger, Paul’s obsession transfers from the dead and dumb to the live and vocal blonde.
In this opera, then, the sound world of Der Rosenkavalier meets the image world of the film Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock’s own meditation on the figure of the strangely familiar golden girl – an peculiarly apt and appropriate connection perhaps when we remember Korngold’s flight to Hollywood’s film music industry after the rise of Hitler
Dream sequences follow, in which the theatre-dancer Marietta and her frivolous friends drive poor Paul to distraction, firstly applying vulgar rouge to his immortal beloved’s cheeks as they appear in the portrait, and then – rather chillingly – covering it with a skull. When Marietta goes so far as to desecrate Marie’s hair by wearing it on her own de-wigged bald head, Paul strangles her with it, a scene that reminds one of Robert Browning’s poem Porphyria’s Lover: ‘all her hair/In one long yellow string I wound/Three times her little throat around’. In Korngold’s opera, however, (though not in Rodenbach’s novel) the murder is just the cathartic climax of Paul’s nightmare. A somewhat surprising happy end ensues, in which the patient gets up off the couch and is cured, leaving the room (and stage) in which he has cocooned himself for so long by a door that represents his final choice of life and hope.
This production preserves a sense of ambiguity as to ‘real’ and ‘dreamed’ worlds, by having a separate stage behind the first one that is nevertheless permeable. When we see the blonde head of Marietta as she sits with her back to us in the other distant stage, the lighting makes us focus on it intently, willing us momentarily to participate in Paul’s fetish. When the identical pictures of the dead wife multiply, emerging out of the darkness, one by one, we are offered a potent literalisation of Paul’s mania. These and other thoughtful inspirations of stagecraft enabled a coherent piece of theatre to develop here, by which potentially dated psychobabble was transformed into something rather emotionally and intellectually sophisticated.
Korngold’s music intelligently underlines the drama’s tension between Paul’s need for consolatory escape and his uncanny compulsion to revisit and repeat past trauma, by the frequent interjection of an unsettling discordant bell motif in the midst of lush Straussian string writing. The conductor, Ingo Metzmacher, coaxed some very fine playing out of the orchestra, who sounded as though they were grateful to the composer for this gift of a score.
The vocal lines are frequently very high, demanding great stamina, and the two leads generally rose to their challenge, though there were moments when they both sounded strained. Stephen Gould deserves a special mention for some well controlled singing in a high tessitura, and Nadja Michael’s soprano was appropriately lithe, to match her dancer’s body – though she was occasionally flat on some of the highest notes. Particularly effective was their duet at the end of the famous ‘Marietta’s lied’, whose Puccinian lyrical directness blossomed out of the shifting chromaticism of the first act, and the balance here between unison voices and swelling orchestra was well managed. In the part of Paul’s friend Frank/Fritz, Canadian baritone Gerald Finley gave us perhaps the most incontestably beautiful singing of the evening, and the minor roles were all persuasively performed.
All in all, Decker’s production is a triumph, demonstrating that Die tote Stadt is alive and flourishing. Like Marie, it demands – and deserves - to be seen, and to return to the stage over and over again.
Michael Kennedy, Opera, April 2009
Performance on 27 January
Korngold's third opera, composed while he was in his early 20s, has taken 89 years to reach a British stage (it had a concert performance in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1996). It did so in a co-production with Vienna and Salzburg, where it was seen in 2004; the staging has since toured to Amsterdam, Barcelona and San Francisco. The production is by Willy Decker, with designs by Wolfgang Gussmann and lighting by Wolfgang Gobbel. It successfully evokes the claustrophobic atmosphere of the 'dead city' (Bruges), and looks better on the Covent Garden stage than it did in Salzburg's old Kleines Festspielhaus.
A whirlwind success following its 1920 premiere, today Die tote Stadt is once again in the repertory. But not in Britain. Will this belated Covent Garden performance change the climate? I doubt it, in spite of the first-night audience's enthusiastic response. Korngold now has a large body of UK champions, but his early fame never caught on here. Perhaps we are suspicious of child prodigies, particularly if they are called Wolfgang and their father is a powerful Vienna music critic - not that that should be held against him. Setting a libretto by his father Julius (this was kept a secret for decades) based on the 1892 novella BrugesLa morte, Korngold could not have picked a subject more redolent of post-Freudian Vienna and of post-1918 decadence. As we might say today, it ticks all the boxes. Especially the musical boxes. Strauss's SaLome is quarried, as is Ariadne. It's not surprising that Strauss was impressed by the opera, no doubt flattered by all the skilful imitation.
The plot reflects the then-current fashion for reality mixed with dreams and a dollop of sex and religion. Paul lives like a recluse since the early death of his beautiful wife, Marie. His house (sparsely furnished by Gussmann) is a shrine to her, dominated by her portrait. He keeps her hair in a glass case (Jokanaan's head comes to mind). But he is in good spirits because he has met Marie's lookalike in Bruges and invited her to call. She arrives and is alarmed, quite understandably, by the decor and even more when Paul calls her Marie. She is Marietta, a dancer in a touring troupe. She has no intention of becoming a dead-wife substitute and, after singing her Lute Song, she makes her excuses and leaves for a rehearsal. Paul then has a vision of Marie returning from the dead, but she turns into Naughty Marietta, which is where Freud casts his shadow. Paul now thinks that his nice housekeeper Brigitta has become a nun and that his friend Frank is a rival for Marietta. When Marietta (now looking like the bald prima donna) and her harlequinade arrive, it is a cue for reminiscences of Ariadne converted into blasphemous religious parody.
I won't go into more detail, but Marietta sleeps with Paul and she thinks she can vanquish Marie's ghost. Next day they watch a religious procession and Paul goes all pious about Marie. So what was last night all about, asks Marietta, like any sensible girl. Marietta takes Marie's hair from its case and winds it round her neck, intending to seduce Paul by dancing (remind you of anything else?). But Paul grabs the hair and strangles her. Like a J.B. Priestley Time Play, the action reverts to the start of the opera and the present. Marietta returns: she has left behind her umbrella. Paul shrugs her off and, when she has gone, sings the reprise of the Lute Song for which we have been waiting for ages. He then leaves, purged of his obsession with the dead.
It is difficult to take this tosh seriously, though I fear we are meant to. It is high-class kitsch, and if one guiltily enjoys some of it, that is a tribute to the best of Korngold's music, some of which is undeniably beautiful and supremely well crafted. The Lute Song is haunting; Lehar must have envied it. Korngold wrote it first, several years before the rest of the opera. Originally he planned a one-act work and was dissuaded; it is arguable that he should have stuck to his guns. The orchestration is masterly, although the effect of its plushness on the listener is like being in a Turkish bath-it makes Strauss sound austere. None of the characters moves us to sympathy or dislike, Paul being especially tiresome. Emotionally it is ersatz.
Also, to be really convincing and to make us overlook its tawdriness, it needs singing of the Tauber-Jeritza class. Neither in Salzburg in 2004 nor in London, with different casts, was this forthcoming. At Covent Garden, Marie/Marietta was sung by Nadja Michael, last heard here as Salome. She repeated her Strauss performance - dramatically slinky and vocally erratic. She is a mezzo turned soprano and does not sound comfortable in her new range, judging by her shrill top register. Paul was the American tenor Stephen Gould, a Bayreuth Siegfried for three festivals, not that that means what it once did. He sounded strained, and one half expected that our indulgence would be craved. It is a killer of a role. The best singing came from Kathleen Wilkinson as Brigitta, well modulated, gracefully phrased and with good diction, and from Gerald Finley doubling Frank and Fritz the pierrot. He was wasted in these roles except that he showed true class in the exquisite Pierrotlied.
The conductor, making his house debut, was Ingo Metzmacher. I thought his tempos were often too slow, verging on lethargic, but he obtained some splendid playing and secured good balance between pit and stage. In many ways this was a fascinating evening, but once in a very long while is quite enough, thank you.
George Hall, Opera News, April 2009 , vol 73 , no.10
For some unknown reason, Korngold's Die Tote Stadt — a major hit after its double German premiere in Hamburg and Cologne in 1920, with productions all over central Europe and as far away as the Met in New York — never reached the U.K. in its heyday. Belated amends were made by the Royal Opera on January 27, with its first-ever staging of this late-Romantic masterpiece in the much travelled Willy Decker production, devised for the 2004 Salzburg Festival and seen most recently at San Francisco Opera.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957) was admittedly out of fashion, if not out of bounds, during much of the twentieth century. Banned by the Nazis in his German and Austrian heartland, his once-acclaimed music and the exiled composer himself could not return there until the post-World War II era, by which time the new dispensation of total Serialism among the avant-garde must have made Korngold seem merely a relic of the past. Also damaging in some circles was his highly successful association with Hollywood, which made his other works guilty, by association, of vulgar commercialism. But attitudes change, and in a more aesthetically pluralist age, advocacy on the part of a determined band of supporters has been able to restore much of his output to currency. This could not have been achieved had it not possessed some genuine quality.
There is no doubt that Die Tote Stadt has quality written all over it. Fêted as a wunderkind by such luminaries as Mahler, Strauss and Puccini, Korngold, as evidenced in his later music, possessed technical skills fully equal to those of any of his colleagues. Here, the super-lavish harmony and orchestral opulence, long-lambasted as old-fashioned, seemed certainly no more so than similar writing in contemporary scores such as Die Frau ohne Schatten or Turandot. A few more Expressionist passages indicate that Korngold was aware of the music of the Second Viennese School of which his overbearing father (and co-librettist, pseudonymously, for Die Tote Stadt), the conservative critic Julius Korngold, so violently disapproved.
In this performance, conducted by Ingo Metzmacher, the Royal Opera House Orchestra relished the challenges of a work that placed them in the center of the spotlight, and the resulting enriched textures were delivered with clarity and a sense of separation; among Korngold's skills, it can be noted that, however vast his orchestral apparatus, he never covers the voices. What was lacking from Metzmacher's interpretation was a sense of late-Romantic sweep that should have lifted not just the score but the audience right off their feet.
Assuming the hugely taxing role of Paul, the man obsessed by his dead wife in the dead city, was Stephen Gould. His vocal resilience throughout a long evening was astonishing, and if anything his basic tone quality improved as the evening progressed. A certain immobility of manner and expression was typical of a production that went for visual gesture rather than dramatic detail. But this was certainly an auspicious Covent Garden debut for an authentic and accomplished heldentenor.
Singing Marie/Marietta was the German soprano (former mezzo) Nadja Michael, who began the evening with some pitch problems and seemed to be having difficulty lifting what is a substantial lyric instrument up to the top notes. She rallied, however, throwing herself into the later, more hectic sections of both score and drama with commitment, though never quite established herself as the star presence the part surely requires.
Making a great deal of a secondary role was Gerald Finley, who seized the lyric opportunities of the Pierrot-Lied he sang as the actor Fritz, as well as conveying deep concern for Paul's mental health as his friend Franz. Mezzo Kathleen Wilkinson rounded out the interventions of Paul's housekeeper Brigitta with considerable warmth of tone as well as personality.
Decker's staging was credited on this occasion to both him and his associate director Karin Voykowitsch, though neither of them showed up for the curtain call. Wolfgang Gussmann's designs had some wonderful moments in realizing Paul's fevered fantasies — the religious processions and the Pierrot routines made an impact, as did the visualization of Paul sitting with the dead Marie in a room that opened up at the back of the stage, mirroring the main setting. But the staging needed a stronger focus on the intimate, irruptive core relationship at the center of the piece.
Nevertheless, the work came over. Amid a host of new stagings of Die Tote Stadt cropping up all round the operatic globe at the moment, Korngold and his most famous opera have certainly made new friends at Covent Garden.
Rob Ainsley, Sky Arts
http://www.skyarts.co.uk/opera/article/die-tote-stadt/
Korngold is hardly an obscure composer: his wonderful, swashbuckling Hollywood film scores virtually defined the genre. And this is hardly an obscure work: the third opera of a child prodigy aged just 23, it was a major hit in the German world in the 1920s, and its beautiful soprano 'lute song' is one of the 20th century's most-recorded arias. So how come this is the UK stage premiere?
As with Korngold's music, what seems easy on the surface contains a lot of complex detail, but reasons might include the following. 1. Banned by the Nazis as Jew's work, the opera never re-established itself in the 20th-century repertoire. 2. The symbol-saturated Freudian dream sequence that makes up most of it clearly appealed to jazz-age audiences as psychologically daring and cutting-edge, but looks corny now. 3. The two principal roles are murderously tiring to sing, the operatic equivalent of Everest without oxygen. 4. For some the music falls between two stools, neither explosively modernist nor lyrically old-fashioned, a sort of Strauss-'n'-Puccini smoothie.
The list goes on. 5. The plot is heavy-handed (Paul is mired in grief for his young dead wife Marie; he spends all the opera having nightmares in which the past - Marie - tries to prevent him from moving on to the future - Marietta, a lookalike dancer he's met; he wakes up, and leaves Bruges with his chum Frank). 6. The Film Thing ('Maybe, Mr Korngold, you should just stick to movie scores, where Errol Flynn can dash around Sherwood Forest to your widescreen gestures and technicolour orchestration?') 7. And what's wrong with Bruges, the 'dead city' of the title? To must of us it's a benignly twee place where you can trough up on chocolate, chips and beer, and claim to be exploring local culture...
There's truth in much of that. But when the opera was staged at last in Britain on Tuesday 27 January 2009, we had the chance to see it with open minds and ears. And, actually, a lot of it is qualified good news. American tenor Stephen Gould was often vocally strained and his Paul came over as someone as likeable as a Sunday morning hangover, but he coped very well with this unimaginably challenging role. Nadja Michael, as Marie/Marietta, often struggled against Korngold's jumbo-jet orchestra (so big it even spills out into the boxes); her high notes could occasionally grate parmesan, and she had her work cut out to be plausible as a dancing vixen - but again, this is a mightily difficult role. We are praising with faint damns. Over in the comfort zone, Canadian baritone Gerald Finley was in lovely voice, especially in the opera's 'other' aria the Pierrot-lied, and Kathleen Wilkinson's housekeeper drew good applause.
A big pluses is Willy Decker's faithful staging. All that night-terror symbolism of nuns, crucifixions, white-suited cabaret singers, skulls and Pierrots - not forgetting weirdo strangulations with dead wife's hair - could easily look plain stupid, now that those once-shocking symbols have been degraded through decades of sketch-show comedy, but it just about works. Particularly neat is the double-stage device for showing Paul's dream.
The winner is the music: gorgeous, full of gesture, richly orchestrated, highly expressive if not always hummable, endlessly inventive. Not quite the intricate cohesion of a Wagner score, but there's palpable structure and purpose here that shows Korngold wasn't just a blustering movie decorator.
This opera comes with caveats. The overall audience reaction heard over interval and post-opera drink was 'in two minds'. (At least that's 50 per cent more favourable than most of the 20th century's.) It can be heavy going, and asks a lot of mere humans. But if you love the sound of Korngold's film scores and want to see how he applied it to an ambitious stage drama, this makes for a fascinating evening. It's flawed, yes - what opera isn't - but there's more than enough good stuff here to make you wonder why it's been off the UK radar so long.
Monique Barichella, Altamusic, 1 July 2009
Translated by Jane Garratt
Resurrection for the dead city
Triumphantly created on the same day in Cologne and Hamburg on 4th December 1920, La Ville mort waited eighty-nine years to be played on an English stage, that of Covent Garden. The Royal Opera House has finally added to its repertoire the master-work of a 23 year old composer whose classical career was smashed by the Nazis.
For too long the music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897 – 1957) was unknown and recognised only by cinema lovers, the composer having created the original soundtrack of numerous Hollywood productions, and particularly of some of the most famous films with Errol Flynn: Captain Blood, Robin Hood, the Private life of Elizabeth [sic], the Sea Hawk. He was even given an Oscar for the first two.
From about the 1970's, his major opera, La Ville mort, slowly began to be produced again, in New York and in Venice, and finally was recognised as one of the important lyric works of the 20th century. With Goldschmidt and Krenek, Korngold is one of the composers of the Degenerate Music (Entartete Musik) forbidden by the 3rd Reich and rehabilitated by a series of fascinating recordings edited by Decca around fifteen years ago.
Korngold was a celebrated and estimated composer when, hunted by the Nazism in Vienna where his father was an important musical critic, he installed himself in Los Angeles. To survive, he devoted himself to the film music even though DieTote Stadt had been performed with immense success in Vienna and then in the Met as early as 1921 and in Berlin in 1924. Curiously, neither Paris, where it was not staged before 2001 in a production by the Rhine Opera, nor London had shown this opera of which the style and the luxurious orchestration irresistibly evoke the Richard Strauss of the same period – Die Frau ohne Schatten is exactly contemporary.
Willy Decker produced a notable spectacle at the Salzburg festival of 2004, in a co-production with the Venice Opera, that next showed the work with the valiant interpreters (Angela Denoke, Torsten Kerl, Bo Skovhus). This same production was produced in Amsterdam in 2005, in Barcelona in 2006 then in San Francisco in September 2008, before arriving at Covent Garden.
For this in house creation, the Royal Opera House called upon a new vocal trio and the remarkable conductor Ingo Metzmacher, current artistic director of the Berlin Symphonic Orchestra and of whom one was able to appreciate recently an exemplary Tristan and Isolde at the Zurich Opera. At the head of a glorious orchestra with sparkling tones, the exactly Straussian direction of the German maestro idealizes the paroxysisms of Korngold's brilliant score of which the inspiration is doubtless uneven but always enticing. It's not an accident that Marietta's Song is one of the more famous and the most recorded arias of the soprano catalogue of the 20th century.
A vampiric Marietta.
After her torrid Salomé in the David McVicar production on this same stage, one awaited with the liveliest interest Nadja Michael's Marie-Marietta. An ex-mezzo recently converted to a soprano, the German had taken on the double role in Amsterdam. She keeps all the promises of the dramatic plan, composing a perverse vampiric, predator, Marietta, but is also engaged and astounding as his Princess of Judéa. One is less convinced by her vocal presentation in a very stretched tessitura where she always is not comfortable, with frequent slippages in the accuracy.
An imposing Tannhaüser at the Bastille and Siegfried in Bayreuth at the last three events, Stephen Gould has of course the capacity for Paul, but voice, which is too heavy, folds itself with difficulty to the more lyric passages demanded by the role. On the other hand, Gerald Finley reveals himself as an ideal Frank-Fritz, offering us the most mastered song and the most musical one of the evening for the famous Pierrot's Serenade, detailed and with refinement. Special mention finally to the perfect Brigitta of Kathleen Wilkinson.
As for the brilliant production of Willy Decker, it does justice to all the dramatic, dreamlike, psychoanalytic and phantasmagoric aspects of Bruges-la-morte, the Symbolist novel of Georges Rodenbach from which the libretto is taken.
Curtain call photos
Reproduced with kind permission from
http://gertsamtkunstwerk.typepad.co.uk/weblog/
