Erich the Wunderkind

By William Bender

"I am and I always will be an opera composer." When Erich Wolfgang Korngold said that in 1942, the folks in Hollywood nodded sympathetically and went on enjoying his film music. After all, Korngold was a celebrated composer of movie scores who had won Academy Awards for Anthony Adverse (1936) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).

Actually, by the time the Vienna-bred Korngold landed in Hollywood in 1934, he had behind him an astounding career as a musical Wunderkind in Europe. When he was a teenager, his works were performed by Pianist Artur Schnabel and Conductor Bruno Walter. In 1921, when Korngold was 24, his third opera, Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City), was staged at New York's Metropolitan Opera. In the leading role of Marietta was Soprano Maria Jeritza, making her Met debut. The American public took to Jeritza but not to Korngold, and after a few years it forgot him as a serious composer.

Last week Die Tote Stadt was finally revived by the New York City Opera, with Jeritza, now a remarkably robust and handsome 87, sitting in the fourth row center. Even in the 1920s, Die Tote Stadt was an anachronism. Korngold was to Richard Strauss what Engelbert Humperdinck (Hansel und Gretel) was to Wagner--a brilliant but minor follower. The style of Die Tote Stadt is a lush, clamorous, occasionally schmaltzy orchestral sonorama that lies somewhere between Der Rosenkavalier and Elektra, with special added effects from Puccini, Debussy, Mahler and Rimsky-Korsakov. The best of its vocal moments, like the taunting Marietta's Lied, sound like pure Franz Lehar, the master of popular Viennese operetta.

Korngold took his plot from a popular romance by a minor Belgian writer named Georges Rodenbach. Korngold knew an unusual story when he saw it. The hero, Paul (Tenor John Alexander), lives sorrowfully in Bruges, with the memory of his dead wife Marie, her portrait and a long switch of her hair. Into his life comes Marietta, a saucy dancer who resembles Marie. In a long dream sequence, Paul woos Marietta. But when she teases him about the dead woman's hold on him, he strangles her with Marie's hair. He awakens cleansed of his obsession, free to leave the "dead city" of Bruges.

Sexily Luscious. Director Frank Corsaro has staged Die Tote Stadt as a brilliant, psychologically adroit multimedia show. Movie and slide projectors play on the front scrim. Four slide projectors illuminate a scrim in the rear. Corsaro and Cinematographer Ronald Chase spread a series of images that are at times dazzling in their three-dimensional effect--grotesque faces, Gothic walls and towers, eerie grottoes, flowers, woodlands. The production opens, for example, on the exterior of Paul's house. Then, through the masonry, the portrait of Marie begins to shine. The lights come up behind the scrim in Paul's living room, with the portrait now found hanging on the wall. It is a striking screen effect that Korngold the movie composer might have enjoyed.

Is Die Tote Stadt worth the effort?

Yes, if for no other reasons than to inspire the finest film and slide work ever done for an opera production in New York, and to observe Soprano Carol Neblett as Marietta. With a full, sexily luscious dramatic soprano and a figure to match, Neblett is fast becoming the Rita Hayworth of American opera singers. As for the music, the sad thing is that though Korngold was a master of the various orchestral styles prevalent around 1920, and often used them with ingenuity and some originality, he never grew beyond that point.

And one cannot be sure that Hollywood is to blame.

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