Richard Bratby

The opera that wouldn’t die

After a century of political suppression and critical sniffiness, Erich Korngold’s one-time smash hit Die tote Stadt is back

Stephen Gould as Paul and Nadja Michael as Marie/Marietta in the Royal Opera’s 2009 production of Erich Korngold’s Die tote Stadt. Credit: robbie jack/Corbis via Getty Images

When Erich Wolfgang Korngold completed his third opera, Die tote Stadt, in August 1920, he’d barely turned 23. Yet such was his reputation that what followed was practically a Europe-wide bidding war for rights to the première. The young composer had his pick of companies and conductors (the Vienna State Opera tried and failed). In the end – almost unprecedentedly – Die tote Stadt was launched on the same night in two cities simultaneously. Audiences in Hamburg and Cologne both erupted into applause, but Korngold, who could be in only one place, had chosen Hamburg – where he was so dazed by the response that Richard Strauss, who was present in the audience, had to remind him to go up and take his bow.

With Die tote Stadt, big moments always seem to come in twos. The opera’s story revolves around a double: the plot starts from the moment when a grieving young widower, Paul, encounters a woman who precisely resembles his dead wife, Marie. He finds a mirror of his pain in Bruges, the ‘dead city’ of the opera’s title – not today’s tourist honeypot, but the decaying port of the late 19th century, a bell-haunted ghost-city of empty streets and shimmering canals (think Don’t Look Now). And curiously enough, after receiving only one professional production in the UK in the 102 years since its première, Die tote Stadt is about to get two within the next 12 months. English National Opera is to present it (for the first time in the company’s history) in March next year. But ENO is pipped to the post this month by Longborough Festival Opera, the little company who could, famed for staging an ecstatically received Ring cycle in a home-made theatre outside Moreton-in-Marsh.

Die tote Stadt has received only one professional production in the UK in the 102 years since its première

‘The idea of putting on Tote Stadt is as crazy as putting on the Ring cycle,’ says Justin Brown, who’s conducting the Longborough production.

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