The purifying power of the dream
Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt
“Forgetting is part of all action”, wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in 1874 in his critical essay Of the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life. Therefore man must, he continued, “have the power and use it from time to time to destroy and dissolve a past in order to be able to live. […] It is not justice that is sitting in judgement here and even less is it mercy that proclaims the verdict, but life alone, that dark, driving force insatiably desiring itself.”
What Nietzsche took exception to in the puffed-up historicism of the Gründerzeit (the period when many industrial firms were founded in Germany) reads like a secret motto for Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt, first performed in 1920. The composer himself wrote that he had wanted to mould his work around the “beautiful idea of the necessary suppression of grief for dearly loved dead persons by asserting the rights of life” – a subject that went straight to the hearts of many people shortly after the end of the First World War and was an essential contributory factor in making Die tote Stadt one of the most successful operas of its time. The novel Bruges-la-Morte (Dead Bruges), published in 1892, served Korngold as a literary model as well as the stage version created somewhat later entitled Le Mirage, (The Mirage), both written by the Belgian author Georges Rodenbach. The story is about a widower who cannot get over the death of his beloved wife and who leads a secluded life in Bruges because the “dead city” seems to him to be the stone image of the deceased. He meets a young woman who has a remarkably strong resemblance to his dead wife and, believing that he can resurrect the past, he embarks on an affair with her. However, the city of Bruges itself, its murky canals, gloomy church towers and half dilapidated monasteries seem to warn the widower that his dead wife has not been brought back to life but that he is merely becoming involved in a new passion under the pretext of alleged fidelity. Overwhelmed by feelings of guilt he kills his living beloved, presents her to the deceased – rather like an expiatory sacrifice – as he is incapable of escaping from the past that prevails over everything.
In the libretto of Die tote Stadt, written by Erich Wolfgang Korngold and his father Julius Korngold under the pseudonym “Paul Schott”, this story is given a decisive re-interpretation: the murder and the events leading up to it do not occur in reality but in the imagination of Paul, the leading male character. The subsequent “awakening” – as Julius Korngold writes – brings detachment and salvation through the purifying power of the dream”. Whereas Paul had previously cocooned himself totally in his memories and tried to suppress every flaring-up of secret longing for new love adventures because he felt he was betraying the dead woman, he now becomes aware that the “force of life insatiably desiring itself” cannot tolerate endless grief. With a heavy heart he resolves to leave Bruges, the “city of the dead”.
Even small details of the libretto and music of Korngold’s opera reflect essential findings from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical theory. The unrealistic part of the story in the dream sequence is especially to be understood as a coded projection of those emotional conflicts that go on in the sub-conscious of the person who is dreaming and, according to Freud’s terminology, ultimately arise from refusing to come to terms with grief. Yet it would be too simple to explain Paul’s purification at the end of the opera only in psychoanalytical terms because it is furthermore a manifestation of what Korngold originally planned to entitle his opera: Triumph of Life.
Arne Stollberg
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
DIE TOTE STADT
New production
Conductor Donald Runnicles • Stage director Willy Decker • Stage and costume design Wolfgang Gussmann • Choreography Athol Farmer • Lighting design Wolfgang Goebbel • Chorus master Rupert Huber • Dramaturge Klaus Bertisch
Paul Torsten Kerl • Marietta / Die Erscheinung Mariens Angela Denoke • Frank / Fritz Bo Skovhus • Brigitta Daniela Denschlag • Juliette Simina Ivan • Lucienne Stella Grigorian • Gaston Lukas Gaudernak • Victorin Eberhard Lorenz • Graf Albert Michael Roider
Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus
Vienna Philharmonic
Premiere 15 August, 7 p.m.
Further performances
18, 21, 24, 27 and 30 August, 7 p.m.
Kleines Festspielhaus
Telephone +43 (0) 662 8045-500
Telefax +43 (0) 662 8045-555
info@salzburgfestival.at