Symphony Hall erupted with music that could be felt Thursday night as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, in collaboration with the Boston Lyric Opera Chorus, and the Boys of the St. Paul’s Choir School, gave the BSO premiere of Erich Korngold’s three-act opera Die tote Stadt (“The Dead City”).[i] Such alliances are crucial as funding for the arts is in a traumatic state of decline, particularly in our post COVID milieu. As BLO artistic associate Anne Bogart claims, “By embracing shared resources and creative synergies, they [the BSO and BLO] are not only strengthening their own positions but also enriching the city’s artistic ecosystem, offering a blueprint for cultural resilience and innovation in challenging times.”[ii]

This article will review this performance while providing a brief, dialectical analysis of the drama. For more insight into Korngold’s history, and a teaser for the concert, see Laura Stanfield Prichard’s article “BSO to Revive the Dead City” in this publication (HERE).

The preconcert talk by Harvard University’s Prof. Carolyn Abbate offered insight into some of the production history and the geographic context of Die tote Stadt, but it was a bit scattered and relied too heavily on YouTube videos. However, Abbate did center the opera in a post-World War I context of traumatic loss and illustrated how Die tote Stadt, which Korngold wrote when he was a mere 23, gave a foretaste of the film scores he would pen during Hollywood’s golden age.

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Die tote Stadt meditates on love and loss … obsession and redemption.  It is based on the 1892 novel Bruges-la-Morte by the Belian symbolist Georges Rodenbach, which the author revised into his play Le Mirage (1901). Rodenbach inherited the theme of unrequited love from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.  In turn, Bruges-la-Morte would pave the way for the 1926 novella Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler, which Stanley Kubrick adapted in his swansong Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Korngold also draws upon the mythological Pygmalion, which George Bernard Shaw captured in his celebrated play of the same name seven years prior.

It also tells of a descent into a surreal dreamscape which fuel the protagonist’s obsession to restore his beautiful, deceased wife as he eventually comprehends the futility of such a hollow endeavor. Love and loss.  Life and death.  Dreams and reality. There is even a play within the play performed by Marietta’s eccentric theater troupe whose colorful garb reflected the diversity of its casting. Dialectical themes pervade this piece about a dead woman in a dead city.

Other dualities emerged. The name of the female lead, Marietta, is a variation of Marie: protagonist Paul’s late wife. Marietta is a singer and dancer who, in the first act, exclaims, “I like sad songs although I am happy.” Her name, which sounds like “little Marie,” means both “bitter” and “beloved.” The setting moves from realism to reverie, which, during the second act, intimates a combination of Dorothy’s arrival in Oz and Dante’s excursions in The Divine Comedy. The lesson comes at the end through Paul’s sagacity that chasing apparitions can only lead to masochistic delusions. The bereaved Paul traverses a dead land yet encounters the Procession of the Holy Blood marking the Feast of the Ascension (cleverly evoked by a choir of men and boys in hallway), when the post-Easter Jesus ascends to Heaven in the Acts of the Apostles.  It is Paul’s futile attempt to allay his pain over the loss of his wife by envisaging her into a replica, only to discover, in the dreamscape that is Act II, that she is the object of his confidant’s (Frank’s) affection. Marie’s scarf, which Marietta wears, is later replaced by a tress of Marie’s venerated, golden braid in the climax of Paul’s dream when he strangles her with it.

A plethora of other Christian themes and symbols pervade the opera. The character of Brigitta, executed with resolute acumen by Karen Cargill, enters the story as Paul’s housekeeper.  Had this been a Greek tragedy, she would double as the coryphaeus who warns the hero of the folly of his hubris. By Act II she has become a beguine whose appearance is bathed in the wake of the dead city’s church bells. At its core, Die tote Stadt is a pageantry of death and resurrection.

There aren’t enough superlatives to rate the performance’s two leads: soprano Christine Goerke in the role of Marietta and tenor David Butt Philip who played Paul in place of Brandon Jovanovich who was ill. Both bellowed the libretto (which Korngold wrote with his father, the latter donning the pseudonym Paul Schott) shaking the Greek and Roman statues that stand guard above the second balcony — not a facile task seeing as every corner of the stage teemed with orchestration. Goerke’s voice erupted volcanically. Philip’s set off Richter-scale tremors. The cadence and tone of both blended lavishly through robust ascents and silken descents.  It was advantageous to have the translation of the German text captioned on a screen. This enabled the audience to focus on what was occurring on stage instead of dividing their attention between the performance and their bulletins. Some of the libretto birthed pithy quotes: both romantic (“death shall not our bond erase”) and comical (“art is free”). The countenances of Goerke and Elliot Madore, who played Paul’s friend Frank, gave expression to otherwise minimalist staging.

The size of the ensemble prevented Die tote Stadt from being performed in its intended form.  Symphony Hall is not an opera house. A pit the size of a small pond would have been necessary to sequester this orchestra. The singers stood at the front of the stage, the only props being an urn that held roses and scene-changing Christmas-esque lighting effects — the only choreography being whimsical dance moves by Neal Ferreira that, at one point, seemed to be an awkward karate spin kick, totally apropos for his character’s inflated bravado. The chorus also held roses, which seemed to have served as a tribute to the 67 lives lost 24 hours prior in the Washington, DC collision. However, the vigor and eloquence of the singers more than compensated for what is typically set in a jazz-age drawing room.

The lush and robust score cast an august aura over the audience. Focusing on the drama, it was easy to forget how central the BSO was to the plot progression until they played sans vocalists. It was a performance that intimated a John Williams film score, particularly the orchestral prelude to the second act. The big band enthralled with its power and precision. A few of the measures that accompany the fight between Paul and Marietta over the Procession of the Holy Blood would later be used by Bernard Hermann for the famous shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho. One wonders if Luis Brũnel and Salvador Dalí took inspiration from this opera when, ten years later, they collaborated on the film L’Ăge d’Or. Some of the sexual imagery and religious themes in Die tote Stadt are reflected in this bizarre 1930 cinematic escapade. Korngold would write close to a dozen film scores that decade.

The size of the production seemed to have overshadowed the mostly seated Andris Nelsons, who has been at the helm of the BSO for a decade. He seemingly focused on the players as opposed to the lead vocalists. This is understandable due to the size of the orchestra, whose synchronized bowing was fastened to his baton.

One cannot evade the influence Freud would have on Korngold. As Klará Móricz writes, “The symptoms of Paul’s condition can be explained in psychoanalytic terms advanced by Sigmund Freud, whose essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ appeared in 1917 in Vienna. The cure, proposed in the opera, is achieved by reliving the debilitating trauma in a dream.”[iii] Indeed, the entirety of Act III serves as Paul’s epiphanous denouement. His dream, and his obsession with transfiguring Marietta into Marie, was insalubrious. He emerges as a Shakespearian comic hero with insight into the folly of the human condition aiming for a more enlightened existence.

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After the concert, I was joined by an elderly couple in the parking garage elevator. The woman, seeing my program in hand, remarked, “What a tour de force that was!” When I agreed, she added, “I cannot imagine the stamina required to sing like that.” It was then that I was reminded of Korngold’s middle name: Wolfgang. Indeed, he was a child prodigy like Mozart, his talents praised by some of the great composers of his time. Mahler said that Korngold, who wrote his first celebrated opera at 11, was a musical genius. Indeed, his influence is still felt from Vienna to Hollywood (and now) to Boston.

John Tamilio III, Ph.D. is the Pastor of the Congregational Church of Canton, a Professor of Philosophy at Salem State University, and a professional guitarist who plays solo acoustic and for the Boston-based classic rock band, 3D.  His playing has been applauded by David Brown (Simon & Garfunkel, Billy Joel), Jack Sonni (Dire Straits), and Carter Allen (WZLX).  An aficionado of classical music, particularly the Baroque era, Tamilio’s publications are vast, covering not only music, philosophy, and theology, but the poetry of T.S. Eliot as well.  He resides in Beverly with his wife Cynthia.

[i] Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops did perform “Pierrot’s Dance Song” on May 19, 1932.
[ii] Anne Bogart “Staying Awake Together,” concert program, p. 15.
[iii] Klará Móricz, “’There is no resurrection’: Farewell to Post-Romanticism in Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt,” concert program, p. 31.