Switzerland Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Die tote Stadt: Soloists, Additional Chorus, SoprAlti of the Zurich Opera, Extras at the Zurich Opera House, Children’s choir, Philharmonia Zurich / Lorenzo Viotti (conductor). Zurich Opera, 21.4.2025. (MF)
Dmitri Tcherniakov’s approach to his new Die Tote Stadt transcends the original text’s boundaries by showing a protagonist obsessed with power and sadism. The effect is chilling.
The composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897 – 1957) was perceived as a wunderkind while growing up in Vienna. Aged eleven, he wrote the music to the pantomime ballet The Snowman which premiered at Vienna’s Hofoper in 1910. By 1920, Korngold’s fame was such that the opera Die tote Stadt, his third, had an enormously successful world premiere in both in Hamburg and Cologne on the same day. In the 1930s he emigrated to California where he became a celebrated film music composer, winning two Oscars. He returned to Europe in 1946, but his pre-war success was now a thing of the past. In the 1950s he went back to the United States, where he died a solitary man disappointed with life.
Die tote Stadt’s libretto was co-authored by Korngold himself, and his father Julius. It is based on the (long forgotten) novel Bruges-la-morte by Georges Rodenbach, a Belgian symbolist. Protagonist Paul, a young man, has lost his beloved wife Marie. He withdraws from the world, capitulating to grief until he meets Marietta. She so much reminds him of Marie that he starts a relationship with her. Having kept personal items of the late Marie – including a dress, a shawl and, bizarrely, her hair – Paul increasingly insists on Marietta becoming a new version of Marie. Paul is torn between the adulation for his dead wife and the ambivalent erotic attraction to Marietta. When he asks Marietta to start wearing Marie’s clothes, Marietta refuses, accusing Paul of hypocrisy and belittling him for his almost religious obsession with Marie’s relics. Fighting ensues and Paul kills Marietta. In the epilogue, Paul wakes up to realise it was all a dream. Paul’s friends, who have shown up throughout the opera, encourage him to leave the ‘dead city’ with them. The epilogue, not in the novel, was added by the Korngolds in order to end on a positive note after the recent disasters of World War I.
Director Tcherniakov deliberately goes beyond the original text. In his view, it is entirely implausible that Paul would start a relationship with Marietta because of her resemblance to his dead wife. Paul is not looking for love, quite to the contrary: he seeks dominance and power. The director’s focus is on fathoming Paul’s relationship with women, and in particular why Marie died.
Tcherniakov’s Die tote Stadt starts with a spoken prologue, from Dostoevsky’s A Gentle Creature, a story in which the 41-year-old narrator stands next to the corpse of his 16-year-old wife. In the middle of the night, he ponders the axiom, as he calls it, that ‘for a woman there is nothing else than to submit completely to the man.’ Marvelling at her pretty little shoes next to the bed, his biggest fear is of the moment when the body will be carried away.
Tcherniakov’s Paul is a recluse, looking to transfer his behaviour patterns onto any woman he happens to meet. Rather than accepting the happy end introduced by the Korngolds, namely that it was all a dream, Tcherniakov goes for a reversal: Paul drove Marie into suicide and then did a great deal to kill Marietta. The dream is his friends’ offer to join them as they leave the city. And so, Marietta looks nothing like her dead predecessor (who repeatedly appears, mostly silent and at times channelling Marietta’s voice in playback mode): she is a very different woman in each of the three acts.
An architect by training, Tcherniakov creates his own sets. Here, Paul is a captive in his flat located on the lowest floor of a hovering house structure that is otherwise uninhabited. In it, Paul keeps Marie’s body, her relics, and this is also where he will strangle Marietta. Underneath the house is an empty square where life happens. It is where Paul’s friends, Frank, Brigitta, Juliette, Lucienne and others, laugh, sing and dance. The setting remains unchanged throughout the evening. The house, square and costumes (Elena Zaytseva) are largely kept in blueish grey, black and white tones, with few exceptions for Marie’s dress (red), Marietta’s hair (green in Act I and red in Act III) and Paul’s disguise as a Bishop (purple pontifical insignia) when worshipping at Marie’s ‘Church of the bygones’ (Kirche des Gewesenen) he erected. This production’s Paul brings the so-called Incel-movement and devilishly influential figures such as Andrew Tate to mind.
It was 35-year-old Swiss conductor Lorenzo Viotti who suggested to Andreas Homoki to put this work on the schedule for the latter’s last season at Zurich Opera. Viotti and the Philharmonia Zurich, in an enormous orchestration encompassing an organ, a celesta, a piano and a mandolin, make all the influences Korngold processed audible. Wagner, Puccini and Richard Strauss are all there, and the music leaves no doubt why the composer later rose to fame for his film scores. As Viotti puts it, in the second act there are premonitions of later horror film soundtracks. As much as Korngold was interested in exploring the boundaries of tonality, though without crossing them, he did not shy away from crowd pleasers such as Marietta’s ‘Glück, das mir verblieb’ or Fritz’s ‘Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen’ – very Wagnerian indeed. Although occasionally dominating the singers, Viotti and the orchestra deliver a fantastically varied, detailed and precise performance.
The true heavy lifting, in terms of both singing and acting, rests with the two main characters and especially with Paul. His part is of Tristanesque dimensions. Eric Cutler’s debut as Paul is a triumphant success. He spans the vocal range from the heroic power to the delicate lyricism the role demands. The audience’s enthusiastic applause on opening night left Cutler visibly touched. Vida Miknevičiūtė is a congenial Marietta. She easily shifts between the light, playful and flirtatious tones on the one hand and intense, emotionally charged moments on the other. Cutler and Miknevičiūtė create an electrifying chemistry. They are complemented by an exceptionally strong supporting cast. Björn Bürger as Frank/Fritz the Pierrot and Evelyn Herlitzius as Brigitta were outstanding.
Although from a purely musical perspective, the piece will not become this reviewer’s favourite, the conductor’s and orchestra’s performance and in particular also Tcherniakov’s staging left a stirring impression. The director’s exploration of a strongman’s motivation to dominate the (seemingly) weak is uncomfortably timely.
Performances run until 1 June 2025.
Michael Fischer
Production:
Director and Set – Dmitri Tcherniakov
Costumes – Elena Zaytseva
Lighting – Gleb Filshtinsky
Video – Tieni Burkhalter
Chorus master – Ernst Raffelsberger
Dramaturgy – Beate Breidenbach
Cast:
Paul – Eric Cutler
Marie / Marietta – Vida Miknevičiūtė
Frank / Fritz the Pierrot – Björn Bürger
Brigitta – Evelyn Herlitzius
Juliette – Rebeca Olvera
Lucienne – Daria Proszek
Gaston – Raúl Gutiérrez
Victorin – Nathan Haller
Count Albert – Álvaro Diana Sanchez
Voice Prologue – Daniel Hajdu
Marie – Iryna Das