The work of an Austrian Wunderkind to whom nobody had yet said “no” – not least his father, who co-wrote the libretto – Die tote Stadt played all over Germany in the 1920s, a nation recovering from both the shame and horror of the Great War and from a global flu pandemic that killed an estimated 50 million worldwide. No wonder there was such an appetite, if that’s the word, for the living dead. There was more to come, of course, and following a ban on his opera, the Jewish Korngold accepted an invitation he couldn’t refuse to Hollywood, where his swashbuckling, money-no-object orchestrations became the music of the movies.
Until recently I’d have said it was a rare treat to hear this work live, in its entirety, but its centenary has seen a cluster of productions, some performances of which had to be cancelled in accordance with Covid restrictions. Like the opera’s hero, Paul, we’re still struggling to return to the land of the living.
But treat it most certainly is to gather the mighty forces for a new production of this work at Deutsche Oper am Rhein, where its Wagnerian volume is coupled with the expansive melodic lines reminiscent of Puccini. There’s scarcely a bar’s rest between the massed brass, panoply of percussion (don’t forget the bells) and the frequently divisi strings, creating those rich complex textures that are the composer’s trademark. The young Korngold must have heard Strauss and thought “Mine will go up to eleven.” There are four (count them) double basses in the Düsseldorf pit and they are having a party. I haven't seen it but I’m guessing that the general marking at the top of conductor Axel Kober’s score translates as “Let rip!”.
The libretto is a very different challenge. Paul is grieving for his dead wife Marie and becomes convinced that Marietta, a dancer on tour in Bruges (someone’s got to do it) is Marie, returned. Marietta plays along for a bit but gets the hump because Paul won’t pay her as much attention as he does the dead woman. She’s got a point. Korngold senior was no great shakes at characterisation or plot, and (the worst) it all turns out to have been a dream.
It's a brave director indeed who would take this on, and a particularly imaginative one who could find the psychological complexity in Paul’s situation and make him someone the audience cares to spend the evening with. American Wagnerian Corby Welch had some belting vocal power and pinned your ears to the back wall of the balcony, but he had little to do but pound up and down in what looks like the props workshop for Carry On Screaming. When this opera first did the rounds, avant-garde film was already exploring Freudian Doppelgängers, ghouls and zombies with groundbreaking cinematic techniques, and yet a century later we’re looking at a shop dummy in a negligée.