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The Times, November 25 2019 |
Neil Fisher |
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Korngold: Die tote Stadt, Bayerische Staatsoper, ab 18. November 2019 |
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Die tote Stadt review — stylish and tender production has Jonas Kaufmann in his element
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Erich Korngold’s Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) hasn’t been presented by the
Bavarian State Opera for 60 years. However, if local boy Jonas Kaufmann
shows an interest in singing the main part... well, that changes things. The
result is a brilliantly conceived and audaciously well-performed production.
Based on a symbolist Belgian novel, Die tote Stadt imagines its hero,
Paul, trapped by the memories of his dead wife, Marie, the house they lived
in together in gloomy Bruges a shrine to her. When the dancer Marietta
appears in town, he thinks she’s a virtual doppelganger for Marie, while
she’s amused and creeped out by his obsession.
The roles of Paul and
Marietta are punishingly high and long: the opera is set to luxuriously
gift-wrapped orchestration, and the two virtually carry the entire piece
over three gruelling acts (barring the show-stopping Pierrot-lied, here
sweetly sung by the baritone Andrzej Filonczyk). Kaufmann is in his element,
poignant and lyrical in Paul’s grief, but unstinting in heroic intensity. He
has an ideal sparring partner in Marlis Petersen’s flirtatious, tigerish
Marietta. Her agile voice is flecked with more silver than gold (perhaps
Korngold imagined something more luscious), but Petersen is a completely
absorbing, highly physical artist, and the chemistry between the two is
compelling. When Petersen suddenly sings not as Marietta, but the dead
Marie, the switch in her voice is uncanny and chilling.
The framework
for this double act is a stylish and tender production by Simon Stone, with
swish designs by Ralph Myers. Stone’s central gambit is to dismiss the usual
premise — the long second act is an expressionist dream/nightmare, Marie and
her cabaret chums are phantoms — for something much more touching. Playing
with different eras and keeping you guessing as to what’s real and what’s
imagined, the staging explores the soullessness of urban life (where grief
is even harder to endure) as well as suggesting that past lovers never
really do go away; can you ever forget old relationships when you move on to
the next?
Spiked with creepy coups de théâtre (six dead Maries at one
point stalk the stage in their hospital gowns), Stone’s production has
Hitchcockian menace, but it’s underpinned by stark, empathetic humanity. And
it finds its expressive counterpoint in the silky playing of the Bavarian
State Opera orchestra under Kirill Petrenko’s imaginatively detailed
conducting, shorn of easy sentiment and with its dissonant, dark core
carefully revealed. “More corn than gold,” goes the old quip about
Korngold’s much neglected music, but if you treat it like this, perhaps the
dead can really come back to life.
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