Die tote Stadt

Korngold’s rousing Hollywood film scores for Anthony Adverse (1936), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1939), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) and The Sea Hawk (1940) are so iconic that it is easy to overlook the fact he started out as a prodigy composer in his German homeland. Having won unstinting praise for his early music (not least from Mahler and Richard Strauss), Korngold premiered his third opera, Die tote Stadt (The Dead Town), simultaneously in Hamburg and Cologne, sealing the 23-year-old’s international reputation. The powerful psychodrama is based on Siegfried Trebitsch’s stage adaptation of Georges Rodenbach’s 1892 novel Bruges-la-Morte. Much of the action of Die tote Stadt takes place as a dream sequence. The central character, Paul, cannot come to terms with the death of his young wife, Marie, and keeps his house as a shrine to her. He meets a dancer, Marietta, who is Marie’s spitting image; falling unconscious, he experiences a vision in which the true nature of his feelings for Marietta are tested. In an attempt to break the hold Marie still has on Paul, Marietta performs a seductive dance while stroking a skein of Marie’s hair, which Paul, in a rage, uses to strangle her. As he slowly realises it has all been a terrible nightmare, we hear the haunting strains of “Glück, das mir verblieb” (“Joy, that near to me remained”), Marie’s “Lute Song”, sung by Marietta in Act I.