Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Die tote Stadt (1920)

Korngold was known as a child prodigy; he wrote this opera at the age of twenty-three. Like Franz Schreker, his life was disrupted by the nazis, but he was more fortunate than Schreker: he moved to the US in 1934 and reinvented himself as a composer of scores for Hollywood films, for which he won several Academy Awards. Good for him.

It's based on a symbolist novel called Bruges-la-Morte. It concerns Paul, who's just some guy except that his young wife Marie recently died, and he's set up a sort of shrine to her in his house, in spite of his friend pointing out that this might not be healthy. He gets another woman, Marietta, to dress up as Marie for him (shades of Vertigo?). He's sort of torn between his attachment to Marie and being in love/lust with this new woman, and to what extent are these two attachments different? He starts to go somewhat crazy. He imagines himself bringing Marietta back to his house and arguing with her because she wants to get rid of all the signs of his dead wife, until finally, he kills her. When he realizes how deranged this vision is, he resolves to try to move on with his life. The end.

I have to note that in the Operavision performance I saw--no longer online--it is not even a tiny bit clear that the bit with Marietta and her murder is supposed to only be in his head. The traditional-style staging is for the most part good, but boy. I think the problem is that in the last scene it leaves her corpse onstage. If they'd gotten rid of it, it would've been easier to realize that this was all a hallucination. "So what did you thinkwas actually happening?" Excellent question, for which I don't have an answer. I suppose I just thought it was kind of weird and inscrutable. Still, once you realize what's going on, it's certainly more psychologically subtle than most operas.

As for the music...well, it's easy to see why Korngold was able to find success in Hollywood. It's very lush, melodic stuff, that can be meltingly lovely and/or really tense and dramatic with none of the atonal quality of a Berg that you might expect. Here, listento Renée Fleming singing one of Marietta's arias. Kind of stunning. Korngold only wrote five operas; wikipedia says he was working on a new one at the time of his early-ish death in 1957. Am I an elitist for thinking that operas are just kind of...better than film scores, and wishing he'd written more of the former. Ah well. My horizons are expanded, at any rate.