"Die Tote Stadt" Munich Opera Review.

[+ WilliamM]

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

How a Forgotten Opera Made a Big Comeback

Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” was a hit in 1920. Then it all but disappeared, only to regain its popularity in the 21st century.

 

 

 

 

Jonas Kaufmann, left, and Marlis Petersen in Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.Credit...W. Hösl

By Joshua Barone

• Jan. 3, 2020
   
  

MUNICH — On a recent evening at the Bavarian State Opera here, there wasn’t an empty seat in the house. Even if one had opened up, there were people waiting outside in the December chill, eager to fill it.

 

It was one of those nights that felt like the event of the year — a fact remarkable if only because the work being performed was Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” (“The Dead City”), which had once all but disappeared from the world’s stages.

 

Popularity is a fickle thing in any art form. The works of Bach were long considered outdated, until a 19th-century resurgence established him as perhaps the essential composer. Grand operas by Meyerbeer are now treated as curiosities, yet during his lifetime they were ubiquitous.

 

You can count Korngold (1897-1957) among the artists whose fame has ebbed and flowed over the past century — swept up in the tides of academic taste, the rise and fall of governments, and the willingness of opera companies to think beyond familiar classics.

 

 

 

After early years as a Viennese prodigy — praised by the likes of Mahler and Strauss, and finding career-making success with “Die Tote Stadt” in 1920 — he became a Hollywood pioneer, with a symphonic approach to film scoring (“The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “The Sea Hawk”) that echoes today in the soundtracks of John Williams. And his Violin Concerto in D, despite being little more than a showcase for expressivity, is entrenched in the repertoire.

 

 

 

 

But Korngold was Jewish, and it’s no coincidence that “Die Tote Stadt” — according to the opera’s performance history kept by his publisher, Schott — basically vanished after 1931. His life would have been at risk, as well, but Hollywood work sheltered Korngold from the worst of the Holocaust, and helped him become an American citizen in the 1940s. Exiled artists played a key role in shaping the United States’s midcentury culture; Korngold’s contribution was his film scores.

 

Much of his European music, though, is overlooked, and “Die Tote Stadt” returned only glacially. After 1931, it didn’t appear again until the ’50s, according to Schott. Then it was staged only a handful of times each decade — until the ’90s, when it was given nearly 70 performances. But this year alone, it will have received about that many.

Why now? And who is responsible?

 

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“I was brought up in a time when Korngold was considered a minor figure, a kind of lingering late Romantic who had an ambivalent or perhaps an even hostile sense of the modern,” Mr. Botstein said. “Nobody took this stuff seriously until recently.”

It’s a familiar tale with refugee composers — particularly Jewish ones — who had enjoyed popularity between the world wars. Korngold’s music was deemed degenerate by the Nazi party, suddenly grouped with more combatively modern works like Kurt Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera” and Ernst Krenek’s “Jonny Spielt Auf.”

 

Then Korngold’s music struggled to find a resurgence after the war. It had become unfashionable, especially compared with the Darmstadt School avant-garde of Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio. Performances of “Die Tote Stadt” were more or less limited to excerpts, like the popular aria “Glück, das mir verlieb.” It wasn’t until tonality and a Romantic touch found new favor in the late 20th century that Korngold’s sound achieved more respect and recognition.

 

 

“It’s an opera that can easily be terrible,” Nikolaus Bachler, the Bavarian State Opera’s director, said in an interview. “The music is not a masterpiece, and the tenor is an impossible role to sing.”

 

Yet it has increasingly been embraced, and by some of the world’s largest and most influential houses. Last season, the Teatro alla Scala in Milan staged it for the first time, conducted by Alan Gilbert and starring Klaus Florian Vogt and Asmik Grigorian.

 

And the work’s comeback may have reached its peak at the Bavarian State Opera. It’s difficult to imagine a better case for “Die Tote Stadt” than was made in Munich, with luxury casting in the tenor Jonas Kaufmann and the soprano Marlis Petersen; conducting by the company’s music director, Kirill Petrenko; and a sleekly cinematic staging by Simon Stone. (It was recorded for DVD release and will return for the Munich Opera Festival next summer.)

Mr. Petrenko milked the score’s modernism and led it with a propulsive energy that gave it more madness than sentimentality. He had long wanted to conduct this music, Mr. Bachler said, adding with a laugh that Mr. Petrenko once told him in a meeting, “I’ll do whatever you want, as long as I get to do ‘Tote Stadt.’”

 

At the public presentation of the Bavarian State Opera’s 2019-20 season in April, Mr. Petrenko expressed his affinity for the score. “For me, this music is this amalgamation of reality and dream,” he said. “It corresponds so much to this late Romantic period, with the interpretation of dreams in Vienna, which serves this whole Viennese sound spectrum beginning with late Mahler, early Berg, which Korngold certainly serves but absolutely proves his own individuality in every note.”

 

 

 

Few would argue that Korngold’s music — complimented by Mr. Botstein for its “perfumed beauty” — has the depth of Mahler and Berg. But Mr. Petrenko more or less redeemed the score, by teasing out every corner of that “Viennese sound spectrum” with exuberance and clarity.

 

 

 

 

His conducting also brought out a new ferocity in Mr. Kaufmann and Ms. Petersen, two longtime collaborators of Mr. Petrenko’s who had never before sung together in Munich, but who performed as if they’d been sharing a marquee for years.

 

Having sung Salome and Lulu at extremes of acidity and fragility, Ms. Petersen was especially well suited to the dual role of Marie and Marietta — the delicately voiced dead wife and her romping, youthful look-alike. Her Marietta was particularly frightening in its transformation from the heartfelt floating top notes of “Glück, das mir verlieb” to the barbed, animalistic intensity of the opera’s violent climax.

 

Mr. Kaufmann, his shadowy tenor pained and passionate, responded with uncharacteristic fearlessness. He has always had a matinee-idol appearance, but now gave a movie-star performance to match. In remembering Marie, his Paul was visibly tormented, with a voice occasionally made ugly by melancholy; and in chasing Marietta he was foolish and crazed, throwing himself over furniture in what amounted to a cardio workout atop heldentenor high notes.

 

Mr. Stone’s staging was characteristically hyper-realistic; the appliances of Paul’s handsomely modern home were plugged into the wall, and the kitchen cabinets were stocked. (The set design was by Ralph Myers.) “Die Tote Stadt” is a dream opera, though, and Mr. Stone peppered surrealism throughout each act, with reserve and to shocking effect.

 

The house was modular, and as Paul dissociated and dreamed, its rooms came apart — reconfiguring so that some doors opened to walls, as if it were the Winchester Mystery House, or stacking on one another to create a maze of towers. Never did Mr. Stone’s direction conflict with the libretto; his staging was smoothly effective, as balanced as Mr. Petrenko’s conducting. It was so tidy that, after Paul awoke from his chaotic nightmare, his home calmly returned to its initial shape, like a Rubik’s Cube snapping into place.

 

 

 

With a crowd-pleasing reprise of “Glück, das mir verlieb” at the end, it’s no surprise that “Die Tote Stadt” can so easily win over audiences. There may even come a time, if the opera’s popularity continues on its current path, when it becomes a true repertory staple. But what of Korngold’s other stage works, or those of his neglected contemporaries? They no longer face the political and academic barriers that forced them into obscurity, but if the history of “Die Tote Stadt” is any indication, their fates will be almost entirely reliant on the adventurousness of administrators — and the nudging of influential artists.

“It’s great that ‘Die Tote Stadt’ is making a comeback,” Mr. Botstein said. “But this represents just the tip of the operatic iceberg.

[+ WilliamM]

[sydneyboy]

The production looks like a shocker. Surely in an opera not in the mainstream repertoire “doing it straight” would aid the audiences appreciation.

[bostonman]

The production looks like a shocker. Surely in an opera not in the mainstream repertoire “doing it straight” would aid the audiences appreciation.

 

I would agree. But I think some directors feel that "updating" would also have the same effect. For me, I'd rather first get to know the kind of setting the composer most likely envisioned. (I know that's a generality, but I assume everyone knows what I mean by that.)

[TruHart1]

My personal opinion is that the Munich set and stage movements work with immediacy to show just how much Paul's life after losing Marie (the love of his life, dying of cancer in this production) moves in and out of reality once he meets Marietta, a dead ringer for his late wife, both played by Marlis Petersen in this production.

 

I have been listening to this performance for the past few weeks (full transparency: I am a dyed-in-the-wool Jonas Kaufmann fanboy!) and no tenor in this part I've ever heard sing Paul previously has ever had the ease of the lyricism Herr Kaufmann brings to Paul's often problematic vocal line, including his inclusion of some ugly sounds now and then to indicate the depths of his depression and loss!

 

I got to know Die Tote Stadt through the old 1975 Leinsdorf recording, originally issued on RCA, with Kollo, Neblett and Prey. I liked Kollo as Paul but there were some places in his performance his voice and technique could not manage without sounding a bit threadbare. Nothing Kaufmann sings ever sounds less than obviously what he wants Paul to sound like, and is therefore a nearly perfect interpretation with absolutely no vocal strain.

 

Comparing Neblett's lush, full-bodied, luxurious sound in the 1975 recording to Petersen's leaner, less romantic vocal production is comparing apples to oranges, but Petersen is a much better vocal actress than Neblett was, with her beautiful singing technique, though I did love her sound back then, before her personal and vocal problems began.

 

The big disappointment in the Munich production to me, is the casting of Andrzej Filonczyk as Frank/Fritz/Pierrot, who (to my ear) gives short shrift to one of the most beautiful melodies Korngold wrote for this opera, Pierrot's Tanzlied, "Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen" Listening to the nearly perfect rendition of this aria by Hermann Prey on the 1975 recording, I wish Munich had cast a more satisfactory interpreter. I guess no live performance is ever without flaws, though.

 

Anyway, I look forward to the release of the DVD/Blu-Ray of this production to see the complete staging with this great cast from Munich when it is available!

 

JMHO

 

TruHart1

[+ Charlie]

I saw it many years ago at the NYCO and loved it.

[MscleLovr]

Very interesting thread @WilliamM. Thanks for posting the review.

 

i saw the opera a few years ago at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. The orchestral playing was superb but the production itself was bizarre, with some very racist overtones injected (and I wasn’t sure if this was a reference to the anti-Semitism of the time).