Die tote Stadt
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born in Brno, Moravia (now Slovakia) on May 29, 1957, and died in Hollywood, California, on November 29, 1957. He composed the opera Die tote Stadt (“The Dead City”) between 1917 and 1920, based on Georges Rodenbach’s 1892 novel Bruges-la-morte and Rodenbach’s staged adaption Le Mirage, on a libretto by Paul Schott—a pseudonym for his father, Julius, and himself. The opera was premiered December 4, 1920, concurrently at the Stadttheater Hamburg led by Otto Klemperer and the Glockengasse in Cologne, led by Egon Pollak. The soprano lead role of Marie in Hamburg was sung by Johanna Geisler, Klemperer’s wife.
First BSO performances: January 30 and February 1, 2025, Andris Nelsons conducting, with a cast including soprano Christine Goerke as Marietta/Marie and tenor David Butt Philip as Paul, as well as the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Boston Lyric Opera Chorus, and Boys of Saint Paul's Choir School. Arthur Fiedler led an orchestral excerpt from the opera—Pierrot’s Dance Song—with the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall on May 19, 1932.
In addition to the vocal soloists and chorus, the score for the opera calls for 3 flutes (2nd and 3rd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets in A and B-flat, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, bass trumpet (typically played by a trombonist), 3 trombones, bass tuba, timpani, percussion (glockenspiel, xylophone, triangle, suspended cymbal, tam-tam, tambourine, rute, ratchet, military drum, bass drum with cymbal], mandolin, 2 harps, celesta, piano/upright piano, harmonium, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). In a staged performance, onstage instruments include organ, 2 E-flat clarinets, 2 trumpets, and further percussion (7 low-pitched bells or steel plates, triangle, cymbals, tambourine, military drum, bass drum, wind machine), as well as 2 trumpets and 2 (or more) trombones offstage.
“There is no resurrection”: Farewell to Post-Romanticism in Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt
by Klára Móricz
On December 4, 1920, 23-year-old Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) was premiered simultaneously in Hamburg and Cologne. With these two simultaneous German premieres, Korngold’s father, the feared conservative music critic Julius Korngold, wanted to assure that his son’s first full-length opera would succeed abroad before it appeared on their home turf, Vienna, a city both proud and jealous of its famous wunderkind.
As his middle name Wolfgang indicates, the young Korngold had been primed for an exceptional career in music since his birth. In 1910 the Budapest music critic August Beer made the comparison with Mozart explicit by claiming that only Vienna’s 18th-century genius matched the exceptional musical abilities of the then 13-year-old Korngold. The same year, after hearing Korngold’s Piano Trio in D, Opus 1, Richard Strauss supposedly declared that “compared with this child we are all impoverished.” He praised the young genius’s “assurance of style,” “mastery of form,” “originality of expression,” and advanced harmonic language. Yet Strauss warned that it might be impossible for the precocious teenager to fulfil his promise as a more mature composer. Die tote Stadt was supposed to prove that Strauss’s concern was unfounded, and the post-adolescent Korngold was indeed able to produce a mature, original, and relevant opera.
The sexually disturbing topic of Die tote Stadt might seem to be a surprising choice for the young composer, whose parents guarded him jealously from gaining real-life experience. The plot concerns a grieving middle-aged widower, Paul, who, after the death of his beautiful wife Marie, withdraws to the melancholy Flemish Belgian town of Bruges to dedicate his life to the worship of the deceased. His routine is disturbed by an encounter with the dancer Marietta, who bears an eerie resemblance to Marie. Infatuated with Marietta, he attempts to transform her into Marie. When the experiment fails, he strangles her with the tress of his dead wife’s hair, which he keeps as a relic in a crystal case. In the opera, the violent outcome is mitigated by being turned into the conclusion of a nightmare. The dream acts as a cure: Paul wakes up and realizes that the dead cannot be resurrected on earth.
The opera’s libretto is based on the Belgian Symbolist writer Georges Rodenbach’s 1892 novel Bruges-la-morte, which Rodenbach turned into a play, Le Mirage, in 1901. Bruges-la-morte, which appeared first as a serial in Le Figaro, then as a novel, was a literary sensation. French Symbolist writers admired the novel: Mallarmé praised its “infinite poetic quality,” J.-K. Huysmans lauded Rodenbach’s ability to create completely new images and startle the reader “with the most unexpected comparisons.” The novel’s principal character is the town itself, “associated as it is with states of the soul,” and capable of advising, dissuading, and persuading people “to act in certain ways,” Rodenbach wrote in the novel’s preface.
Rodenbach portrays Bruges as a dead person with “the cold arteries of the canals which had long ceased to feel the pulsation of the sea.” For his protagonist Hugues Viane, (whose name is changed to Paul in the opera libretto) “Bruges was his dead wife. His dead wife was Bruges. Both unified themselves in a parallel destiny.” In the black and white photographs included in the first edition of the novel, the town looks empty, bereft of inhabitants. The silence is interrupted only by the sound of bells, which “fulfilled their function of mourners, pouring, without respite, psalmody into the air. With their music was transmitted an augmented sense of the vanity of all things; of the futility of struggle; or the imminence of death.”
In the opera Korngold paints the picture of the melancholy, gray town in mist with the lush sound of bells. Bruges has its own motif, an angular, pentatonic phrase that appears whenever the town is mentioned. We hear it immediately at the beginning of the first act. A specific timbre is also associated with Bruges, which we encounter in the orchestral interlude between the first two acts. As the curtain rises on the second act, we see Paul standing as we left him at the end of the previous act. In the background Bruges appears gradually, a deserted quai in the evening, a canal spanned by a low, curved bridge, old houses, a convent, a bell tower with clock, old trees, behind them a path to the church. The bells, which Korngold renders with celesta and glockenspiel, are tolling.
Like the end of the first act of Puccini’s Tosca (1900), in which a passionate monologue stands in stark contrast with a religious procession, the tragedy of the last act in Die tote Stadt unfolds with the background of the festive Bruges during the Procession of the Holy Blood on Ascension Day, a feast that dates back to the 13th century. First we hear a few bells, then a dreamlike march approaching, and the voices of children singing a hymn in lilting meter accompanied by organ-sounding woodwinds and a continuous tremolo sounded in the celesta. As the procession approaches, the hymn becomes louder and turns into triple meter. Monks proceed singing another hymn, Pangue lingua. The contrast between religious fervor and sexual obsession explodes into violence at the climax of Paul’s nightmare, which plays out to the accompaniment of the religious feast.
There are only four characters in Rodenbach’s novel: Hugues, his house servant Barbara, her kinswoman Sister Rosalie, a béguine or lay religious woman, and the dancer Jane. There is little dialogue in the novel, which made it necessary to include a fifth character, Hugues’s friend the painter Joris Borluut, in the play. Hugues’s dead wife is unnamed in the novel. Both the novel and play end with Hugues killing Jane who, in her effort to win Hugues over from his dead wife, desecrates the relic of the dead wife’s hair.
The libretto, written by Julius and Erich Korngold under the pseudonym Paul Schott, follows the outlines of the play in the 1902 German translation by Julius’s friend Siegfried Trebitsch. They changed the names: Hugues became Paul, the late wife became Marie, her double Marietta, the housekeeper Brigitta, and Paul’s friend became Frank. They eliminated Rosalie and added a few minor roles of Marietta’s friends, Juliette, Lucienne, Gaston, Victorin, Fritz, and Count Albert.
Modeling the juxtaposition of high and low theater on Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, the revised version of which was premiered in 1916, the year Korngold began composing Die tote Stadt, the Korngolds introduced a play-within-a-play in the second act, a rehearsal of commedia dell’arte by Marietta’s theater troupe. As in Strauss’s Ariadne, dramatic, serious opera is relieved by what is meant to depict light, comic improvisation. At the center of this rehearsal Marietta’s friend Fritz, playing Pierrot, sings a slow waltz, “Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen” (“My yearning, my dreaming”), which became one of the opera’s hit numbers. “Pierrot’s Dance Song” brings into gloomy Bruges the sound of Vienna, the mesmerizing dance of Johann Strauss, whose waltzes Korngold reorchestrated in the 1920s. As Marietta doubles Marie, and Bruges, sometimes called the Venice of the North, doubles the Venice of the commedia dell’arte, Korngold’s waltz introduces another layer of doubling: Vienna, the sound of which seeps through the theatrical scenery of Bruges/Venice.
In Die tote Stadt, Vienna has even more resonance than Bruges. 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. The depiction of the sexually available dancer Marietta evokes the gender theories of Otto Weininger, another famous Viennese intellectual, who posited that the love of a woman was possible only if one replaced the woman’s “actual physical reality” with a different, imaginary reality, a process that, according to Weininger, turned love into murder. Weininger considered dance a tool of female prostitution: “the better she dances, the more of the prostitute she has in her,” he wrote in his controversial book Sex and Character (1903). The long blond hair of Marie-Marietta, the fetishistic object of Paul’s worship, collapses the distinction between the old tropes of women who strangle their lovers and those who are strangled by their own hair. In Rodenbach’s play Le Mirage, Hugues tells his horrified housekeeper that it was not he who strangled Jane: “I didn’t do it…it was the hair!”
Paul’s fetishistic obsession with Marie’s hair calls to mind Richard Strauss’s opera Salome (1905). Both Salome and Die tote Stadt end with a violent murder of a woman. Both Salome and Marietta are dancers whose dance is erotically alluring and dangerous. The frenzied dance impulse that characterizes Marietta’s music evokes Salome from the moment Marietta enters the stage. Salome’s desire to kiss the severed head of John the Baptist is both necrophiliac and fetishist. Paul’s adoration of his dead wife’s hair and his killing of Marietta to complete her transformation into Marie display a similar psychopathology. Marietta dances with the tress of hair to music reminiscent of Salome’s dance. The sacrilegious dance in both cases triggers male outrage: in disgust Herod orders Salome’s killing; blinded by rage, Paul turns his object of worship into a murderous weapon and strangles the blasphemous Marietta.
The virgin-whore dichotomy of Marie-Marietta can be traced back to before fin-de-siècle obsession with femmes fatales. The dichotomy played out on the opera stage with saints and sinful seducers as the predominant prototypes for women. Wagner’s Tannhäuser, to cite one example, is torn between the pure Elisabeth and the sexually alluring goddess Venus. In Wagner’s operas, women are often sacrificed to redeem the male heroes. Korngold’s “happy” ending still adheres to this Wagnerian trope. Like Wagner, Korngold uses leitmotifs, musical phrases designating characters and objects. Marie and Marietta have their own motifs; so do Bruges and abstract concepts like vision and seduction. Korngold also quotes a motive from Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable (1831), the opera performed by Marietta’s troupe with Marietta dancing the resurrected Hélène.
With the exception of two songs, the score is continuous, like Wagner’s music dramas, with Korngold’s extravagant orchestration matching Strauss’s enormous scores. But, unlike Strauss, Korngold helps his singers by doubling their lines with instruments in the orchestra in a manner similar to that of Puccini and operetta composer Johann Strauss. Like Puccini, Korngold rarely uses overtly modernist, dissonant harmonic progressions. He feels no inclination to venture into atonal territory following the example of his older Viennese contemporary Arnold Schoenberg. Compared to the bold atonality of Schoenberg’s psychological thriller Erwartung (1909), the harmonic language of Die tote Stadt sounds conservative.
Yet the nervous tension of Korngold’s characters is not far off from Richard Strauss’s or Schoenberg’s hysterical protagonists. The supposedly melancholic Paul is passionate, existing in a constant state of strain that risks explosion into violence long before the tragic end of his relationship with Marietta. His vocal role is demanding, unremittingly producing vocal climaxes. In contrast, Marietta’s music is lighter, rhythmically driven, and motivically disjunct, depicting a person who is always on the move and whose limbs are always ready for dance. The high trills in the first act that accompany Paul’s dressing her up like his wife signal danger by evoking Salome’s nervous waiting for the head of John the Baptist. Paul hands Marietta first a shawl, then a lute, preparing the opera’s most famous scene, “Marietta’s Lute Song.” In the lush, continuous music of the opera that pushes unrelentingly toward its end, “Marietta’s Lute Song,” just like “Pierrot’s Dance Song” in the second act, functions as a diegetic song, that is, a song that is heard as such not only by the audience, but also by the characters on stage.
“Glück, das mir verblieb” (“Joy, sent from above”) is the opera’s most famous hit tune, often recorded in various arrangements. Its melancholic, quiet beauty contributed greatly to the success of Die tote Stadt. The simple, diatonic melody is accompanied by the heavenly celesta and harps. First the cello, then the violin doubles the singer, who lingers on suspended notes, so the audience can luxuriate in the beauty of the voice. The meter fluctuates between tripe and quadruple, as if notes in a slow waltz were being stretched occasionally. Marietta sings the first strophe alone. The middle section is divided between Paul and Marietta, with the orchestra sustaining the melody when the two engage in dialogue. The dreamy major key darkens to minor only when Paul remembers a happier past. Slowly, as in a dream, he recalls the second strophe. Marietta joins him in the second line, their voices soaring high together. “If we must part one day,” they sing, “trust that there is resurrection.” Their voices united, their song turns into a traditional love duet.
And yet we know that love is not possible between Paul and Marietta. Although Marietta sings the song, it does not belong to her. Its melancholy tone is alien to this full-blooded dancer. Like the shawl and the lute that Paul hands to her, the song is also an attribute of Marie—Marietta appropriates it only momentarily to fulfil Paul’s fantasy about the possibility of resurrection. Paul’s taking over the song after the middle section signals his ownership. A version of the last line of the song returns in the next scene in which Paul, feeling guilty, sees the ghost of his dead wife. Downward sliding chromatic lines announce the ghost materializing from thin air. To the tune of the last line of the lute song, she reassures Paul that their love “was, is, and will be.”
The lute song, which we encountered in the Act I as a song of hope and illusion, ends the opera on a more somber note. Awakened from his disturbing dream that acted as a Freudian catharsis therapy on him, Paul seems ready to face reality and leave behind his past. The last step in his cure is the rewriting of the song that tied him to Marie. He sings only one strophe, in which he combines and reformulates the previous two. Instead of calling back past happiness (“come back to me, my faithful love”), Paul now takes leave of it (“farewell, my faithful love”). Instead of declaring that “Death won’t separate us,” he admits that “Life is separate from death.” And most significantly, instead of believing in resurrection, Paul accepts that death is final.
After a successful run for a decade and a half, Korngold’s Die tote Stadt, like all works by Jewish authors, disappeared from the opera stage in German-speaking countries. Already in 1922 its Munich performance under Hans Knappertsbusch was disturbed by a Nazi demonstration. In 1936 in Vienna the opera’s production was blocked by growing Nazi influence. Only in 1955 was Die tote Stadt revived in Munich’s Bavarian State Opera.
Recent productions have fallen under the spell of Alfred Hitchcock, whose 1958 Vertigo portrays a lovelorn protagonist who tries to resurrect his dead lover by creating her double, with similarly tragic consequences. Hitchcock’s influence has mainly effected approaches to Korngold’s optimistic ending, which directors often make more sinister. In a famous production for the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1983, the director Götz Friedrich left Paul holding a revolver in his hand, indicating that his upcoming departure meant he would join his wife Marie in the other world. In Robert Carsen’s staging in the Komische Oper Berlin in 2022, Frank and Brigitta return at the end dressed as asylum attendants to commit Paul to a mental institution. In 2001 Inga Levant staged the ending in Strasbourg even more pessimistically. Singing his last lines, Paul cuts his wrist and staggers to a closed door with the sign “no exit” above it. Post-World War II audiences seem to have been disinclined to accept Korngold’s lieto fine.
The young Korngold’s first full-length opera was both a promising beginning for the composer and an end of an era. His next and last opera, Das Wunder der Heliane (“The Miracle of Heliane,” 1927), could not repeat the success of Die tote Stadt, which already felt like a belated work of a bygone time. Instead of reinventing opera by rendering it less sentimental and more socially engaged, in Die tote Stadt Korngold summed up all that World War I had erased. The opera’s success might have been due both to people’s insistent clinging to old values and to their realization that they would have to let them go. Wagner and his leitmotifs, Strauss and his extravagant orchestra, passions turning into perverse obsessions, hysterical women strangling their lovers or being strangled by them, Puccini’s sweet and strong sentimentality, operetta’s alluring tunes verging on the commercial, Expressionism, Decadence, and Symbolism, all make an appearance in Korngold’s score. Like Marie’s ghost, these features of fin-de-siècle Vienna all appear behind a veil.
But, while meant sincerely, Korngold’s announcement that there is no resurrection proved to be false in the end. All the musical styles he had marshalled in Die tote Stadt reappeared again in the twenty-one film scores that he wrote for Warner Brothers between 1934 and 1946. Hollywood was less fussy about stylistic relevance and cared only about effectiveness, which Korngold, who remained a wunderkind with unmatched technical ease in composition, never failed to provide.
Klára Móricz
Klára Móricz is professor of music at Amherst College. She is author of Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music (2008), In Stravinsky’s Orbit: Responses to Modernism in Russian Paris (2020), co-editor of Funeral Games in Honor of Artur Vincent Lourié (2013), and editor of Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition, vol. 24, Concerto for Orchestra (2017).
