Die tote Stadt (review)

How gripping is this production of Korngold's most popular opera? Sufficiently so that I stayed the course when it first appeared as an Internet transmission, afflicted with buffering congestion that ensured that picture and sound were never in synch (to say nothing of visual quality that would make Howdy Doody kinescopes look high-tech by comparison).

Thankfully, a DVD presentation soon followed, and we can scrutinize at length Inga Levant's decidedly harsh take on the dream-therapy scenario devised by composer Korngold and his father, Julius (who masked their collaboration under the nom de plume "Paul Schott"). As in Götz Friedrich's Deutsche Oper staging of nearly twenty years ago, also preserved on video, Levant rejects the outwardly optimistic ending—more so in the text than in the rather equivocal music—in favor of having the protagonist take his own life.¹

Both stagings also seize upon an ambiguous utterance by Paul over the dead Marietta ("Now she is just like the other . . . Marie!") as a hint that Paul has murdered his somewhat-too-beloved wife, Marie. After all, a man who keeps a shrine to his wife, complete with a braid of her hair, isn't playing on all eighty-eight keys, now is he? While Friedrich's staging was fairly conservative (aside from making the Pierrot figure, Fritz, an alter ego of Frank), Levant enters fully into the opera's mania. As envisioned by her, Paul is clearly insane, and the only release from his morbid conception of fidelity will be death itself. Oblivious to almost everything around him, he carries and fondles a doll as a surrogate for Marie—and it is the doll's hair that becomes the stand-in for the fatal braid (although Levant has Paul knife Marietta, as well as Frank and ultimately himself). During the Lute Song—here delivered as a recital piece, with a double of the young Korngold at the piano—Paul crouches with his doll, rocking back and forth as he sinks deeper into the reverie inspired by the song. He also fondles the corpse of Marie, which he keeps in a tomb under the floor of his study, the first of many indignities that this cadaver will be subjected to over the course of three acts.

The tidy dream-reality dichotomy devised by the Korngolds is not for Levant. The dead Marie does not reappear: Marietta impersonates her, luring Paul out into the nocturnal underside of the "dead city" and giving him a kaleidoscope that symbolizes potential escape. The external world is no less bizarre than the goings-on chez Paul. After-hours Bruges is inhabited by medieval burghers, nuns with seagull-like wimples (some of whom moonlight as boozy, cigarette-smoking harlots), and Marietta's theatrical confreres, who lounge around an all-night diner. While the production eschews maintaining any line between reality and hallucination, it retains the disjunctive logic and atmosphere of a dream. At the beginning of act 2 Paul imagines the bells of Bruges speaking to him—and, indeed, Brigitta appears from inside one to reproach him for breaking faith with the dead. Later Paul himself emerges from the bell, guardian of piety, to disrupt the blasphemous resurrection pantomime carried out by Marietta's troupe. At act's end, after their big duet, Paul and Marietta descend into Marie's tomb to "lay the ghost" (to employ an old euphemism for exorcism) in more ways than one...