Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Violanta (1916)

Here's a true rarity, rarely recorded and never until now on video. It's Korngold's second opera, written when he was seventeen, now on Operavision!

It's a short, one-act (hour and a half) opera, with a simple but very classically "operatic" plot: Violanta is bent on revenge against Alfonso, whose sister Nerina committed suicide after he seduced her. She's finally found him, and gets her husband Simone to reluctantly agree on a plan: she's anonymously invited Alfonso to their house, and at the right musical cue, Simone will come in and stab him. He arrives and Violanta reveals her identity, but he tells the sad story of his life and his longing for death and she realizes she's in love with him. They make out. Simone comes out and Violanta tells him that she's in love with Alfonso and he shouldn't kill him. He tries to anyway, but she throws herself in the way and is killed instead. That's that.

This is all very Wagnerian, of course. In particular, the dialectic of love and death and an inability to stop from embracing a fatal, perverse version of the former will remind you of Tristan und Isolde. And Korngold's music: also Wagnerian, as in Die tote Stadt and Das Wunder der Heliane: an endless river of melody without clearly-defined arias. I was a little bit skeptical about watching Korngold's juvenilia, but I needn't have worried: to my admittedly untrained ears, this is as musically and dramatically compelling as those later works. I am extremely impressed.

Korngold wasn't a prolific opera composer due to forces outside his control, but MAN he was good. We REALLY need recordings of his first opera, Der Ring des Polykrates, and most especially his last, Die Kathrin, which premiered as the piece-of-shit nazi regime was rampling up. A full-length opera written in Korngold's maturity! What a treasure! And yet, it's utterly unknown today. I can't even find any sort of plot synopsis on the internet; I have no idea what it's about. But damn, I want to see it.