Die tote Stadt

5 things to know about Die tote Stadt

1° A Young Composer

Erich Wolfgang Korngold already had a ballet and two one-act operas under his belt when at just 20 years old he composed his first full-length work, Die tote Stadt (‘The Dead City’). It is a late-romantic masterpiece that delves deep into the impenetrable confusion of the subconscious mind, and it took the operatic world by storm. Alongside Richard Strauss, Korngold was at one point the most frequently-performed composer on German stages, until the National Socialists brought his operatic career to a premature close. In 1934 he moved to the United States to write music for films, where his scores for The Informer, Anthony Adverse and The Adventures of Robin Hood each won him an Academy Award. ‘Music is music,’ he said, ‘whether it is for the stage, rostrum or cinema.’ His late-romantic compositions were no longer popular when he died in 1957 but in recent decades his works have finally been experiencing the revival they deserve.

2° Death and the City

Die tote Stadt is based on the Symbolist cult novel Bruges-la-Morte (‘Dead Bruges’) by the Belgian author Georges Rodenbach. Published in 1892, it is notable for being the first work of fiction illustrated with photographs. The novel tells the story of Hugues Viane, a grief-stricken widower who takes refuge in the silent, melancholic, lost-in-time city of Bruges. His morbid eroticism is wholly in keeping with the fin de siècle spirit as the fate of the medieval city becomes a metaphor for his own: ‘In this way the town, once beautiful and beloved too, embodied the loss he felt. Bruges was his dead wife. And his dead wife was Bruges. The two were united in a like destiny. It was Bruges-la-Morte, the dead town entombed in its stone quays, with the arteries of its canals cold once the great pulse of the sea had ceased beating in them.’

3° A Literary Movement

Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, published a quarter of a century before Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte, is regarded as the first work of Symbolist literature. Adopted by such writers as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine and Maurice Maeterlinck, the style slowly grew into a movement, and in 1886 the French newspaper Le Figaro published ‘The Symbolist Manifesto’. Written by the poet and essayist Jean Moréas, it describes Symbolist poetry as the ‘enemy of education, declamation, wrong feelings and objective description,’ stating that it instead ‘tries to dress the Idea in a sensitive form that, [...] while serving to express the Idea itself, would remain subjective. The Idea, in its turn, should not be deprived of the sumptuous lounge robes of extraneous analogies; because the essential character of symbolic art consists in never approaching the concentrated kernel of the Idea in itself.’

4° Symbolism in Music

Several French composers were influenced by Symbolist writers. Gabriel Fauré’s song cycle Cinq mélodies ‘de Venise’ is based on poems by Verlaine, and he wrote incidental music for Pelléas et Mélisande, a Symbolist play by Maeterlinck. Claude Debussy used poems from Les Fleurs du mal for his song cycle Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire; he looked to Mallarmé’s 'L'après-midi d'un faune' as the basis for his famous Prélude; and his own adaptation of Pelléas is now recognised as the archetypal Symbolist opera. As the movement spread across Europe, other composers and librettists experimented with the aesthetic. Today, operas considered to be Symbolist in style include Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Richard Strauss’ Salome and Elektra, Sergei Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel and Korngold’s Die tote Stadt.