It took a while, but it appears that Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s
Die Tote Stadt (The dead city) has finally secured a place for
itself in the international repertory. As well it should, for
the score is a thing of luminous beauty that transcends fashion,
evoking a timbral magic of its own whenever Korngold applies
touches of harp, piano, bells, and celesta to the lavish
textures. All of that comes through in all its gorgeous,
passionate, yet clear-eyed audio color on a DVD (also Blu-ray)
of a 2019 production from Munich’s Bavarian State Opera led by
Kirill Petrenko, the first operatic release from the new,
in-house Bayerische Staatsoper Recordings label.
A huge
hit for the supernaturally talented 23-year-old composer at its
dual premieres in Hamburg and Cologne in 1920, Die Tote Stadt
first fell victim to Nazi persecution in the 1930s and then to
dodecaphonic (12-tone) exclusion after World War II. A tinseled
relic of a forgotten era, the conventional wisdom thought — if
they thought about it at all.
But the opera wouldn’t stay
out of sight for long. An excellent, grand-sounding first
recording, also from Munich, under the direction of Erich
Leinsdorf (RCA) got the ball rolling in 1975, and New York City
Opera took it up that year. Götz Friedrich’s haunted production
for Deutsche Oper Berlin was exported to Los Angeles —
Korngold’s final hometown — in 1985 (Korngold’s granddaughter
Katie played violin in the pit orchestra). The 21st century saw
an explosion of productions — among them a Willy Decker
coproduction from the Salzburg Festival and Vienna State Opera
at San Francisco Opera in 2008 — and several video and audio
recordings came out.
The plot can be summed up thusly:
Paul, who has been fantasizing about his long-dead wife Marie,
projects her onto a free-spirited look-alike who happens to have
the name Marietta. Paul’s obsession is expanded into a nightmare
that takes up the bulk of the opera — and to make a long story
short, he is finally convinced that one cannot bring back the
dead.
This being Germany, one shouldn’t be surprised
that the setting has been updated — and yet again, the
perpetrator is a theater director (Simon Stone) making his debut
as an opera director. The specter of a dank, shadowy, medieval
city of the dead — Bruges — at the end of the 19th century has
been thrown out in favor of mostly brightly-lit, square-cut,
somewhat sterile exteriors and interiors of homes in a
present-day European city, all set on a revolving turntable.
Paul’s “shrine” to Marie consists of a tiny walk-in closet
plastered with hundreds of photos of her. There are clever
reference points scattered in the homes that define the time and
place — a current Mac laptop and flat-screen TV, boxes of junk
food, framed posters of 1960s cult films like Pierrot le Fou
(the character Fritz acts out a Pierrot routine in the
second-act party) and Blow-Up (perhaps referring to Paul’s
obsession with photos).
Stone’s trendy, urban homesteads
mostly occupied by carefree, cavorting young people is not
exactly what Erich and Julius Korngold — writing the libretto
under the nom de plume Paul Schott — had in mind. It purposely
slams against the post-Rosenkavalier lushness of the music,
setting the score up as nostalgia for a past that clashes with
contemporary times. Yet it’s easier to identify with issues of
obsession and letting go of the past in this setting of real
people and iconic objects of our time than in previous
productions with nebulous ghosts, canals and shadows, even if we
don’t get much sense of a tote stadt here.
It’s also
advantageous to have two charismatic singing actors with plenty
of stamina in the lead roles — Jonas Kaufmann as Paul and Marlis
Petersen as Marietta/Marie. As ever the tenor with a baritonal
tinge, Kaufmann makes his presence known immediately,
fortissimo, and continues in steady voice throughout as he
inhabits and elevates a somewhat disheveled schlump of a
character. Petersen, who was in her early 50s when this was
staged, manages to convince us that she is a 30-ish, sexy,
kittenish, volatile, free-spirited, constantly in motion
Marietta (a cousin, perhaps, of her signature role, Lulu), as
well as a chilling all-too-real apparition of Marie.
Her
lightweight yet durable, feminine, flexible soprano voice is up
to the high-tension challenge of the part. The two generate a
physical chemistry that extends all the way to the curtain call
— and they deliver a heart-stopping, beautiful rendition of the
opera’s hit aria, popularly known as “Marietta’s Lied,” in Act
I, their stage movements carefully following the contour of the
orchestration.
And let’s not overlook the impact of
Petrenko, now the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic,
who savors every minute of this score, producing lustrous yet
never saccharine playing from the Bavarian State Orchestra with
sharp, passionate strokes and smooth, caressing gestures. He was
a dark-horse choice to succeed Simon Rattle in Berlin and
remains little-known for someone occupying one of the world’s
top conducting posts. But clearly the Berlin musicians sensed
something special when they chose him — and it certainly comes
through here.