Die tote Stadt
Royal Opera House
The Queen of Spades
Barbican
At last, after 88 years, Erich Korngold’s almost impressive opera Die tote Stadt has reached the UK in a handsome production, and in every respect the Royal Opera does it proud. If it isn’t quite a major work that’s because it vertiginously occupies a tiny gap between being incredibly derivative from the Strauss of Ariadne auf Naxos, and the sheer sickening over-ripeness and pretentiousness of Korngold’s next operatic effort Das Wunder der Heliane. There are too many times when its predecessors are recalled, and some when one senses Korngold teetering on the brink of being the last word in the Schreker-Zemlinsky complex, with the gamey picking-over of themes of death, obsession and passion, excitedly intertwined with religiosity and violence.
As Antony Peattie says in his very shrewd assessment of the work in the latest edition of Kobbé, Korngold manages to have things both ways, by departing in this and many other respects from his source, the novel Bruges-la-morte by Georges Rodenbach: at least half the opera is a dream sequence, in which the central figure Paul, who is devoted only to mourning his dead love Marie, is assailed by a series of variously lurid incidents, which handily involve his encountering at close quarters a troupe of players, one of whom is a kind of male Zerbinetta; nuns in procession; Marietta, Marie’s double, a dancer and flirt, spending a wild night with the seduced Paul; and Paul’s subsequent revulsion and strangling of Marietta with Marie’s hair, which he has preserved as a sacred relic. These oneiric fantasies take well over an hour, before Paul wakes and finds that nothing has happened.
His friend Frank urges him away from ‘the dead city’ Bruges, which is somehow identified with Marie, and Paul hesitantly leaves, after reprising the Big Tune from Act I which Marietta had derided for its sentimentality, but which we the audience adored and can’t wait to hear again (please listen to Lotte Lehmann and Richard Tauber singing it, most easily found on a Naxos CD devoted to Tauber; it’s one of the most swoon-inducing records ever made).
All this, needless to say, requires a huge orchestra, lots of motifs, squelchy side-slipping harmonies, and some amazing tableaux. It also requires a singer who can dance convincingly (further shades of Salome) and others who can cope with the heavy orchestral textures. At Covent Garden it gets the lot, and anyone who felt unconvinced need make no further effort to appreciate it. Nadja Michael, who last year disappointed me as Salome, is electrifying, though a creamier voice would be ideal, and one that stayed in tune: but her dancing and her hysterics are utterly convincing. Stephen Gould, the tormented Paul, is vocally noisy and dramatically clumsy, but enough of the character’s anguish and vacillation come across. Gerald Finley as the cold Frank and the pierrot Fritz has, as always, an ideal stage presence. Wolfgang Gussman’s sets are wholly appropriate and eerily atmospheric, and Willy Decker’s production is ideal, ducking nothing and elucidating wherever possible. Guiding the whole heavy structure along with the surest of touches is Ingo Metzmacher, now surely the leading exponent of this kind of repertoire, as well as of St François, distant in idiom but fairly close in ambiance. I can easily understand anyone’s recoiling from this brew, and in some moods would myself. If it had led to greater things from Korngold, I think people would esteem it more highly. Anyway, this is a production to relish and revisit.
By sheer chance, three nights later we were given the opportunity to witness a supreme performance of perhaps the greatest of all operas of obsession: Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades at the Barbican, put on by the tireless Mariinsky Theatre during their brief, intense residency. The comparison with Korngold is cruel: with masterly economy Tchaikovsky presents a group of driven characters, with the tormented Herman transferring half his passion for Liza into one for winning, which leads him to terrify the Countess, a stupendous study in aged life-loathing, to death; while Liza, realising she has lost him, kills herself. Every scene-setting stroke of this magnificent score contributes to the manic action, and the Mariinsky could hardly have given a more inspired concert performance.
Indeed, I can’t imagine any performance whatever achieving more than the tension of the scene between Larissa Diadkova’s Countess and Vladimir Galouzine’s Herman. Diadkova is one of the most compelling presences on the operatic stage, and demonstrated that she needs no props, nothing more than the intensity generated by Valery Gergiev at his greatest. The sole weakness was Natalia Timchenko’s Liza, as committed as everyone else, but with too shallow and monochrome a voice to convey the complexity of this moving character; but it was not a seriously damaging shortcoming. It’s a long time since I have staggered out of a theatre so shattered by any operatic work, and with so enhanced an awareness of its greatness.
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