About the production
After the death of his wife Marie, Paul has withdrawn into a petrified, destructive world of memories in Bruges, the "dead city".
In a "church of the past", he keeps everything that reminds him of the dead - and binds him. But the grief paralyzes, hollows out and keeps Paul away from the present and the future. Until he meets Marietta, the spitting image of the deceased. The femme fatale awakens erotic desires, but also the pull of memory - and brings him to the limits of his existence.
Die tote
Stadt
Storyline
For years, Paul has lived in Bruges only for the memory of his dead wife Marie. He keeps all the things that remind him of her, including a braid of the deceased's hair, in a room in his house, which has become a "church of the past" for him.
When his friend Frank visits him, Paul tells him about his encounter with a stranger who looks exactly like Marie. It is Marietta, who is a guest dancer in Bruges and has accepted Paul's invitation to visit him. She accepts his bouquet of roses and, accompanying herself on Marie's lute, sings the old song "Glück, das mir verblieb". For Paul, the images of the dead Marie merge more and more with those of Marietta. When he wants to embrace her, she slips away from him and leaves for the rehearsal, but not without encouraging him to come back to the theater.
Paul sinks into a deep dream in which Marie appears to him from her portrait and reminds him of his loyalty. Suddenly he finds himself on the quay in front of Marietta's house. Frank appears with the key to her room. Paul knocks him down and snatches the key. Marietta returns home from the theater with her comedy troupe and improvises the revival scene from Meyerbeer's opera Robert the Devil in the street in honor of Count Albert. Marietta plays Héléna, who has risen from the dead. Paul intervenes and accuses her of blasphemy. Marietta takes up the fight with her dead rival. After spending the night together, Paul is plagued by feelings of guilt. When a procession passes by his house, Marietta mocks him for his piety. Finally, she grabs Marie's braided hair. Paul tries to snatch it from her, throws Marietta down and strangles her.
Paul wakes up from his dream. Marietta appears to fetch the forgotten bouquet of roses. Frank also returns, and Paul decides to leave Bruges, the "City of Death", with him.
In his benchmark production, Willy Decker shines a light deep into the vast land of the soul, creates a gripping visual language and shows Die tote Stadt in a dangerous state of limbo between the inner and outer world, between dream and nightmare. It is a psychologically subtle directorial work that skillfully captures the symbolic plot elements and transforms them into memorable scenic settings.
Korngold's music, which speaks in expressive outbursts, in harmonically fascinating complexity as well as in bittersweet laments, is still able to fascinate and move more than a hundred years after its premiere. In deliberate contrast to the growing trends of twelve-tone technique and atonality at the time, Korngold (also under the dominant influence of his father, the famous critic Julius Korngold) chose a path that adhered to tonality - and wrote musical numbers that have eternal value even beyond the opera plot. "Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen", for example, or "Glück, das mir verblieb" are therefore an integral part of numerous opera galas and have the quality of a request concert - in the best sense of the word.
Korngold was considered a child prodigy from an early age, and colleagues such as Giacomo Puccini, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler also confirmed his great importance. "A genius!" was how the latter described him. Korngold's ballet pantomime The Snowman was successfully premiered at the Vienna Court Opera in 1910, and from then on his career was meteoric and his fame unparalleled. Until the Nazi terror forced the composer to emigrate and banned his works. Unfortunately, Korngold's oeuvre has never fully recovered from this brutal caesura in terms of public reception in this country. But at least Die tote Stadt, along with other works such as the Violin Concerto, is still one of the fixed stars in the repertoire today; a work that is held in high esteem by artists and audiences alike.
