KORNGOLD: Die Tote Stadt

Royal Swedish Opera Orchestra, Segerstam, Leif

8.660060-61

It was the writer Siegfried Trebitsch, German translator of the plays of George Bernard Shaw, who suggested to Erich Korngold the novel Bruges la marte by the Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach as a possible subject for operatic treatment. Julius and Erich Korngold worked on the libretto themselves, Julius assuming the name of Paul Schott, suggesting a link with the music-publisher and avoiding, as a powerful and well known critic himself, the hostility that his participation might have aroused. The principal change in the operatic adaptation was to make the hero's murder of Marietta part of a dream, from which he wakens, to leave behind the grim dead city of his nightmare. Korngold began the work during his period of war-time military service as music director of an infantry band and the nostalgia and contemporary appeal of the opera lay partly in the circumstances in which it was written, as the war concluded in defeat and the dynasty on which Austria and its territories had depended came to an end.
The composition was completed by August 1920, meeting the dead-line that Korngold had set himself, and first performed on 4th December that year in Hamburg and in Cologne. The composer was present at the former, where Maria Jeritza created the role of Marietta, with Aagard Oestvig as Paul and Richard Mayr as Fritz. The Hamburg performance was conducted by Egon Pollak, while that in Cologne was under the direction of Otto Klemperer, who had his own reservations about the work.
Performances followed elsewhere, with Richard Tauber as Paul in Dresden and Maria Jeritza continuing her success in the work at the New York Metropolitan Opera. It remains the most successful of Korngold's works for the theatre, remarkable, too, in that the composer was barely twenty when he began the task of composition.

CD

Naxos

5.05.1997

730099606028