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Opera en abyme: The prodigious ritual of Korngold's Die tote Stadt
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2011
Abstract
This essay frames Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Die tote Stadt (1920) as a mise-en-abyme narrative containing four nested realms of diegesis: (1) the opera's ‘real’ world, (2) a prolonged dream sequence, (3) a dance troupe's rehearsal of an opera within that dream, and (4) an expressly requested baritone song performed by a ‘Pierrot’ character in the midst of that dreamt rehearsal. I conceptualise the opera's dense meta-theatrics as a reflexive celebration (and also a didactic warning against the escapist pleasures) of sung spectacle. Excerpts from my interviews with Inga Levant – director of the 2001 Strasbourg production of Die tote Stadt – are used to supplement my broader examination of the ways in which Korngold's reputation as a ‘problemless’ and ‘apolitical’ child prodigy has impacted critical, dramaturgical and hermeneutical orientations towards this opera since its earliest post-war performances.
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References
1 ‘Nachdem Richard Mayr – unvergeßlichster aller Wiener Sänger – das Pierrot-Lied gesungen hatte, brach im Publikum ein Orkan der Begeisterung los’ (Luzi Korngold, Erich Wolfgang Korngold [Vienna, 1967], 33). Translations in this paper are mine unless otherwise indicated.
2 Within three years of its premiere, Die tote Stadt received over fifty performances in Hamburg alone, and, in the words of Andreas Giger, ‘scored the only unquestionable success of any composer during the five-year reign [1919–1924] of Richard Strauss and Franz Schalk at the Vienna State Opera’ (‘A Matter of Principle: The Consequences for Korngold's Career’, The Journal of Musicology, 16 [1998], 545). For further details on the history of the opera's reception, see Korngold, Julius, Die Korngolds in Wien: Der Musikkritiker und das Wunderkind (Zurich, 1991), 254–268Google Scholar ; Carroll, Brendan G., The Last Prodigy: A Biography of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (Portland, 1997), 146Google Scholar ; and Duchen, Jessica, Erich Wolfgang Korngold (London, 1996), 90Google Scholar .
3 I use the term ‘diegesis’ in this paper with reference to the ‘narratively implied spatiotemporal world of the actions and characters’ in a story-telling medium (Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music [Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1987], 21) and the terms ‘meta-diegesis’ and ‘meta-theatrics’ to describe that which is ‘narrated or imagined by a character … [such as] dreams, visions, [and] fantasies’ (ibid., 22). These definitions – commonly deployed in film theory – are indebted to the narratological vocabulary of Gérard Genette, who popularised the labels ‘diegetic’ (also termed ‘intra-diegetic’), ‘meta-diegetic’ and ‘extra-diegetic’ (a narrative act ‘external’ to the primary narrative). See Genette, , Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Lewin, Jane E. (Ithaca, 1972), 228–237Google Scholar ; Genette, , Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Lewin, Jane E. (Ithaca, 1988), 84–95Google Scholar ; and Coste, Didier and Pier, John, ‘Narrative Levels’, in Handbook of Narratology, ed. Hühn, Peter, Pier, John, Schmid, Wolf and Schönert, Jörg (Berlin and New York, 2009), 295–308Google Scholar .
4 These designations appear respectively in Zoppelli, Luca, ‘“Stage Music” in Early Nineteenth- Century Italian Opera’, trans. Groos, Arthur and Parker, Roger, this journal, 2 (1990), 29–39Google Scholar ; Abbate, Carolyn, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Erik's Dream and Tannhäuser's Journey’, in Reading Opera, ed. Groos, Arthur and Parker, Roger (Princeton, 1988), 166Google Scholar ; van der Lek, Robbert, Diegetic Music in Opera and Film: A Similarity between Two Genres of Drama Analysed in Works by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957) (Amsterdam, 1991), 27–62Google Scholar ; and Hadlock, Heather, Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann (Princeton, 2000), 36Google Scholar . On the problematic division between ‘phenomenal’ and ‘noumenal’ music in opera, see, for example, Richard Taruskin, ‘She Do the Ring in Different Voices’, this journal, 4 (1992), 187–97 (esp. 194–6), and Tomlinson, Gary, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, 1999), 87–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
5 The father–son team initially published the libretto under the pseudonym ‘Paul Schott’ conceivably as a pre-emptive attempt to defuse the suspicions of critics who had previously accused Julius of having composed Erich's earlier works. The true identities of the librettists did not become public knowledge until the opera received its 1975 revival at the New York City Opera.
6 Rodenbach also adapted Bruges-la-Morte into a four-act play entitled Le Mirage (1900). Both the novel and the play were translated into German by the Viennese playwright Siegfried Trebitsch and published respectively as Die Stille Stadt (1902) and Das Trugbild (1913).
7 This description appears in R. H. Elkin's 1921 English translation of Julius Korngold's German synopsis of the opera. The characters Paul, Marietta and Brigitta in Die tote Stadt are respectively named Hugues, Jane and Barbe in Bruges-la-Morte. The deceased wife of Hugues is never identified by name and is usually referred to as ‘la morte’ or ‘sa femme’. Frank and Fritz have no apparent analogues in the novel.
8 The significance of the plait of hair is explained towards the beginning of Bruges-la-Morte: ‘[La mort] ruine tout, mais laisse intactes les chevelures … Les cheveux ne se décolorent même pas. C’est en eux seuls qu'on se survit!' (Death ruins everything but leaves the hair intact … Hair does not even lose its color. It is in this alone that one lives on!) (Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, ed. Jean-Pierre Bertrand and Daniel Grojnowski [Paris, 1998], 54).
9 See Gide, André, Journal 1889–1939 (Paris, 1948), 41Google Scholar . The notion of mise-en-abyme originated in descriptions of heraldic aesthetics wherein an ‘image of a shield contains, at its centre, a miniaturised replica of itself’ (Dällenbach, Lucien, Le Récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme [Paris, 1977], 17)Google Scholar .
10 ‘Entretenant une relation de similitude avec l’oeuvre qui la contient' (Dällenbach, Le Récit spéculaire, 18).
11 ‘Convoque … les notions de profondeur, d’infini, de vertige et de chute' (ibid., 17n2, emphases in original).
12 Dällenbach, Lucien, ‘Mise-en-abyme and Mirror Effects in Claude Simon’, in Claude Simon, ed. Britton, Celia (London and New York, 1993), 150Google Scholar .
13 See Meyer-Minneman, Klaus and Schlickers, Sabine, ‘La Mise en abyme en narratologie’, in Narratologies contemporaines: Approches nouvelles pour la théorie et l'analyse du récit, ed. Pier, John and Berthelot, Francis (Paris, 2010), 91–108Google Scholar , and Füredy, Viveca, ‘A Structural Model of Phenomena with Embedding in Literature and Other Arts’, Poetics Today, 10 (1989), 745–769CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
14 Currie, Gregory, ‘Imagination and Simulation: Aesthetics Meets Cognitive Science’, in Mental Simulation: Evaluations and Applications, ed. Davies, Martin and Stone, Tony (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford, 1995), 161Google Scholar . Also see Nichols, Shaun, ‘Imagination and the Puzzles of Iteration’, Analysis, 63 (2003), 182–187CrossRefGoogle Scholar . In the last few years, film theorists have likewise increasingly begun to put pressure on facile distinctions between diegetic and non-diegetic music. See, for instance, Winters, Ben, ‘The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space’, Music & Letters, 91 (2010), 224–244CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Smith, Jeff, ‘Bridging the Gap: Reconsidering the Border between Diegetic and Nondiegetic Music’, Music & the Moving Image, 2 (Spring 2009), 1–25Google Scholar ; and Stilwell, Robynn, ‘The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic’, in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Goldmark, Daniel, Kramer, Lawrence and Leppert, Richard (Berkeley, 2007), 184–202Google Scholar .
15 On the ‘suturing’ effects of music in film, see Neumeyer, David, Flinn, Carol and Buhler, James, ‘Introduction’, Music and Cinema (Hanover, NH, 2000), 13–17Google Scholar . Regarding the ‘anaesthetic’ power of musical phantasmagoria in the ‘magic circle’ of the fin-de-siècle opera house, see Daub, Adrian, ‘Adorno's Schreker: Charting the Self-Dissolution of the Distant Sound’, this journal, 18 (2006), 247–271Google Scholar .
16 Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon have described Die tote Stadt's narrative as an ‘Orphic ritual of bereavement’ that inspires contemplatio mortis and nurtures the audience's ability to cope with personal tragedies. See Opera: The Art of Dying (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 116–122Google Scholar .
17 On debates surrounding the ‘crisis in opera’ during the Weimar Republic, see Cook, Susan C., Opera for a New Republic: The Zeitopern of Krenek, Weill, and Hindemith (Ann Arbor, 1988), 9–26Google Scholar . A discussion of opera and nihilism in the context of fascist politics can be found in Jeremy Tambling, Opera and the Culture of Fascism (Oxford, 1996), 216ff.
18 A clear example of such responsible deconstructionist rhetoric appears in a study of Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron by Joseph Auner, who points to the ‘inherent impossibility of this paradoxical work’ and suggests that the ‘power of the work is not that it gives us simple answers, but that it poses questions and problems admitting of no solution … [speaking] to us powerfully through its failure’ (‘Schoenberg as Moses and Aron’, The Opera Quarterly, 23 [2007], 382).
19 Woodward, Ashley, Nihilism in Postmodernity: Lyotard, Baudrillard, Vattimo (Aurora, CO, 2009), 245Google Scholar . Woodward makes extensive use of the phrase ‘abyssal nihilism’ to describe the ‘feeling of plunging into a bottomless pit … often associated with a delegitimation of traditional structures (both social and theoretical) that previously provided frameworks for meaning and value’ (ibid., 11–12). Also see Coe, David K., Angst and the Abyss: The Hermeneutics of Nothingness (Chico, CA, 1985)Google Scholar .
20 See Solomon, Maynard, Mozart: A Life (New York, 1995), 3–18Google Scholar .
21 See Pöllmann, Helmut, Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Aspekte seines Schaffens (Mainz and New York, 1998), 11–25Google Scholar , and Michaela Feuerstein-Prasser and Michael Haas, Die Korngolds: Klischee, Kritik und Komposition (Vienna, 2007), 33–64.
22 ‘War er kindlicher als seine Altersgenossen, unberührt von Problemen der Pubertät’ (Luzi Korngold, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, 22).
23 Carroll, The Last Prodigy, 177.
24 Regarding the ‘pejorative ring’ of ‘late Romanticism’, see Dahlhaus, Carl, ‘Schreker and Modernism: On the Dramaturgy of Der ferne Klang’, in Schoenberg and the New Music: Essays, trans. Puffett, Derrick and Clayton, Alfred (Cambridge, 1987), 193Google Scholar .
25 ‘Deprivata della carica radical e rivoluzionaria proprio di Schönberg o Berg, ed impiegata, invece, secondo una direttrice anche linguistica ancora pienamente tardo romantica’ (Mario Tedeschi Turco, Erich Wolfgang Korngold [Verona, 1997], 103).
26 Ashbrook, William, ‘Die tote Stadt’, Opera Quarterly, 7 (1990), 188–189CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Despite retaining various narrative elements of its Symbolist source material, Die tote Stadt is rarely described by writers as a ‘Symbolist opera’ – most likely, one might guess, because it was not French or Russian in language and national affiliation.
27 McKee, David, ‘Die tote Stadt: Erich Wolfgang Korngold’, The Opera Quarterly, 16 (2000), 151CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
28 Unidentified critic quoted in Brendan G. Carroll, ‘Die tote Stadt in California’, Newsletter of the Erich Wolfgang Korngold Society, 12 (January 1986), 3.
29 Schoell, William, The Opera of the Twentieth Century (London, 2006), 94Google Scholar .
30 Notable exceptions include Korngold's participation in the 1925 ISCM festival in Venice and the performance of Korngold's Violin Sonata, Op. 6 at a concert of Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances in 1919. See Giger, ‘A Matter of Principle’, 561–62, and Szmolyan, Walter, ‘Die Konzerte des Wiener Schönberg-Vereins’, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift, 36 (1981), 85CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
31 Quoted in Carroll, The Last Prodigy, 194, emphasis in original.
32 Carroll, 194.
33 Weissmann, Adolf, Die Musik in der Weltkrise (Berlin, 1922), 245Google Scholar .
34 Hoffmann, Rudolf Stefan, ‘Die tote Stadt’, Musikblätter des Anbruch, 3 (1921), 63Google Scholar , translated in Giger, ‘A Matter of Principle’, 548.
35 David Allenby, ‘Don't Mention the War?’, The Musical Times, 137 (1996), 30, emphasis added. Korngold's ‘problemless’ image invites comparison to the ‘Mendelssohn Problem’ – namely, the alleged lack of ‘struggle’ that writers have historically observed in the compositions of Felix Mendelssohn. See, for instance, Botstein, Leon, ‘The Aesthetics of Assimilation and Affirmation: Reconstructing the Career of Felix Mendelssohn’, in Mendelssohn and his World, ed. Todd, R. Larry (Princeton, 1991), 5–42Google Scholar . On the so-called ‘apolitical’ operas of Richard Strauss and Giacomo Puccini, see Arblaster, Anthony, Viva la Libertà! Politics in Opera (London and New York, 1992), 245–261Google Scholar . Also see Potter, Pamela M., ‘Strauss and the National Socialists: The Debate and Its Relevance’, in Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and His Work, ed. Gilliam, Bryan (Durham, 1992), 93–113Google Scholar .
36 Duchen, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, 43.
37 Hoffmann, Rudolf Stefan, Erich Wolfgang Korngold (Vienna, 1922), 112Google Scholar .
38 Myers, Eric, ‘Review of Violanta at Santa Fe Opera’, Newsletter of The Erich Wolfgang Korngold Society, 7 (1985), 3Google Scholar . Ben Winters has suggested more optimistically that ‘Korngold had recognised the importance of his musical heritage and allowed a musical voice from the past to speak through his music. It was this willingness to act as a conduit through which other voices, including his own past voices, could speak that perhaps allowed him to slot so neatly into the collaborative realities of the Hollywood studio system’ (Erich Wolfgang Korngold's The Adventures of Robin Hood: A Film Score Guide [Lanham, MD, 2007], 17).
39 Van der Lek, Diegetic Music in Opera and Film, 4. On Korngold's respective attitudes towards film and art music, see Robbert van der Lek, ‘Concert Music as Reused Film Music: E. -W. Korngold's Self-Arrangements’, trans. Mick Swithinbank, Acta Musicologica, 66 (1994), 78–112.
40 In a review of the 1921 American premiere of Die tote Stadt at the New York Metropolitan Opera, Richard Aldrich declared: ‘That [Korngold] shows himself in this work to be a strong original force in music will hardly be maintained. Some may find in his work hints of such influences as Strauss, Wagner … or even Puccini’ (‘Die tote Stadt, Fantastic Opera’, The New York Times [20 November 1921]). The following year, Rudolf Stefan Hoffmann published a biography of Korngold that emphasised the significant extent to which the composer creatively reimagined the styles of his predecessors (see Erich Wolfgang Korngold, 105–15). Jessica Duchen's more recent biography of the composer likewise champions his originality by stressing that his musical language ‘comes from Korngold himself, partly synthesised out of those influences [of Richard Strauss, Giacomo Puccini, Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss and Alexander von Zemlinsky], partly reaching him alone from some rationally-inexplicable source of inspiration, and absorbed into his own idiosyncratic language’ (Erich Wolfgang Korngold, 91).
41 Carroll, The Last Prodigy, 371. Carroll retrospectively attempts to explain his biography's title in ‘Warum The Last Prodigy? Zur Bewertung von Erich Wolfgang Korngold als möglicherweise größtes komponierendes Wunderkind aller Zeiten’, trans. Verena Paul, in Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Wunderkind der Moderne oder letzter Romantiker? Bericht über das internationale Symposion Bern, ed. Arne Stollberg (Munich, 2008), 303–14.
42 Theodor Adorno has remarked upon the disconnect between the ‘technical perfection and spiritual immaturity’ (‘technischer Vollkommenheit und geistiger Unreife’) of child prodigies, who appeared to break ‘the basic categories of the here-and-now valid musical order: those of personality and development’ (‘die Grundkategorien der heute und hier gültigen musikalischen Ordnung: die von Persönlichkeit und Entwicklung’) (Gesammelte Schriften [Berlin, 2003], 42–3).
43 Quoted in Carroll, The Last Prodigy, 133, emphasis added.
44 Concerning the methods and pitfalls of ascertaining the impact of operas on their original audiences, see Bergeron, Katherine, ‘Verdi's Egyptian Spectacle: On the Colonial Subject of Aida’, this journal, 14 (2002), 149–159Google Scholar (esp. 150–1); Roger Parker, ‘“Insolite Forme”, or Basevi's Garden Path’, in Leonora's Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton, 1997), 42–60 (esp. 44–5); and Thomas Grey, ‘Bodies of Evidence’, this journal, 8 (1996), 185–97 (esp. 186–7 and 195–6).
45 The DVD of this production is commercially available from Arthaus Musik & Kinowelt Home Entertainment (Munich, 2001).
46 For more on Künstleroper, see Taylor-Jay, Claire, The Artist-Operas of Pfitzner, Krenek and Hindemith: Politics and Ideology of the Artist (Burlington, 2004)Google Scholar , and Bokina, John, Opera and Politics: From Monteverdi to Henze (New Haven, 1997), 128–166Google Scholar .
47 Inga Levant, interview with author (9 December 2007).
48 Korngold and Rodenbach shared similar reputations insofar as the latter was also popularly regarded as a social and intellectual hermit. This has expectedly contributed to readings of Bruges-la-Morte that – like readings of Die tote Stadt – tease out possible connections between the life and work of the artist. See Mosley, Philip, ‘The Soul's Interior Spectacle: Rodenbach and Bruges-la-Morte’, in Georges Rodenbach: Critical Essays, ed. Mosley, Philip (Madison, 1996), 17–40Google Scholar .
49 Benjamin, Walter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. Osborne, John (London and New York, 2009), 174–175Google Scholar .
50 ‘Die eigentümliche Brügge-Stimmung, der schwermütige Grundton, die beiden Hauptgestalten mit ihren fesselnden seelischen Konflikten, der Kampf der erotischen Macht der lebenden Frau gegen die nachwirkende seelische Macht der Toten, die tiefere Grundidee des Kampfes zwischen Leben und Tod überhaupt, insbesondere der schöne Gedanke notwendiger Eindämmung der Trauer um teure Tote durch die Rechte des Lebens, dabei überall eine Fülle musikalischer Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten – all das zog mich an’ (quoted in Hoffmann, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, 8). Julius Korngold and Luzi Korngold provide contradicting accounts of Erich's potential visit(s) to Bruges. Julius suggests that Erich spent time in Bruges as a young adult (see Die Korngolds in Wien, 252), whereas Luzi states that her husband travelled to the city for the first time only after his Hollywood career (see Erich Wolfgang Korngold, 99).
51 ‘Die Umgestaltung zu einer Traumhandlung … um den sketchartigen Schluß der Erdrosselung einer Frau zu mildern und einen versöhnenden elegischen Ausklang zu gewinnen’ (Julius Korngold, Die Korngolds in Wien, 250).
52 For a study of the structural and narrative contrasts between Die tote Stadt, Bruges-la-Morte and Le Mirage, see Claudon, Francis, ‘Die tote Stadt: Quelques questions comparatistes à propos d’un opéra', Revue de littérature comparée, 61 (1987), 377–387Google Scholar .
53 Götz Friedrich's famous 1983 Berlin staging, for example, concludes with Paul (James King) reflecting upon his potentially ‘real’ murder of Marietta (Karan Armstrong) – and seemingly contemplating suicide – while holding a gun near his own head.
54 Prawy, Marcel, The Vienna Opera (New York, 1970), 110–111Google Scholar .
55 See Lask, Thomas, ‘Frank Corsaro Is Projecting a Novel Image for Opera’, New York Times (1 May 1975)Google Scholar .
56 See Michael J. Vaughn, ‘A Wildly Surrealist Experience’, The Opera Critic (26 September 2008), http://theoperacritic.com/tocreviews2.php?review=mv/2008/sfotote0908.htm.
57 In a literary analysis of Bruges-la-Morte, Joyce Lowrie casts the novel's narrative as a diptych, pointing to lexical, phrasal and imagistic redundancies between earlier and later chapters (along with various dyadic tropes embodied by the dead woman and the doppelgänger). See ‘Ophelia becomes Medusa: Reversals and Ambiguity in Bruges-la-Morte’, in Georges Rodenbach: Critical Essays, ed. Mosley, Philip (Madison, 1996), 41–62Google Scholar . Simon Morrison has noted similar elements of reflexivity and symmetry in Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko in ‘The Semiotics of Symmetry, or Rimsky-Korsakov's Operatic History Lesson’, this journal, 13 (2001), 261–93.
58 Lynne Pudles has suggested that the visual parallelisms in this frontispiece and other drawings by Khnopff demonstrate principles of Symbolist correspondance. See ‘Fernand Khnopff, Georges Rodenbach, and Bruges, the Dead City’, The Art Bulletin, 74 (1992), 637–54.
59 Arne Stollberg, Durch den Traum zum Leben: Erich Wolfgang Korngolds Oper ‘Die tote Stadt’ (Mainz, 2003), 103 and 306. Also see Hoffmann, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, 97.
60 Most recordings I have encountered tend to downplay (or – to my ears – disregard altogether) the intensification (whether in volume, tempo or articulation) prescribed by the expressive marking ‘etwas steigernd’ in bar 75, opting to preserve instead a steady pulse over the course of bars 74–5.
61 Lowrie, ‘Ophelia becomes Medusa’, 55. On mise-en-abyme's conceptual resonances with chiasmi and palindromes, see Nänny, Max, ‘Iconicity in Literature’, Word and Image, 2 (1986), 206–207CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
62 This translation by R. H. Elkin appears in the 1921 G. Ricordi & Co. English libretto. Foregoing a literal translation, Elkin aimed instead to preserve the metres and rhyme schemes of the original German text.
63 In the final seconds of Act II in the 2008 San Francisco staging of Die tote Stadt, Marietta's troupe members swarm around Paul and speedily dress him up in the Pierrot costume that Fritz had worn earlier in the opera. Concerning critical attitudes towards the ‘Pierrot’ figure in post-war Vienna, see Harald Haslmayr, ‘“…es träumt sich zurück…”: Die tote Stadt im Licht der österreichischen Nachkriegskrisen’, in Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Wunderkind der Moderne oder letzter Romantiker? Bericht über das internationale Symposion Bern, ed. Arne Stollberg (Munich, 2008), 173–86.
64 Regarding the Catholic symbolism and ‘neomedieval conceits’ in this scene, see Steinberg, Michael P., ‘The Politics and Aesthetics of Operatic Modernism’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 36 (2006), 641–643CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
65 See Hadlock, Mad Loves, 70–7.
66 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, 270.
67 A passage from Bruges-la-Morte can further illuminate the significance of this ‘double-death’: ‘La figure des morts, que la mémoire nous conserve un temps, s’y altère peu à peu, y dépérit, comme d'un pastel sans verre dont la poussière s'évapore. Et, dans nous, nos morts meurent une seconde fois!' (The faces of the dead, preserved in our memory for some time, change and deteriorate little by little, like the chalk of a pastel drawing that fades away because it is not kept under glass. Thus, within us, our dead die a second time!) (Rodenbach, Bruges-la- Morte, 74).
68 See Hoffmann, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, 96.
69 The utterance ‘Marie!’ appears, uniquely among all the music of Die tote Stadt, without any corresponding musical notation in the vocal staff. In other parts of the opera, Korngold employs three kinds of notation to represent spoken and spoken-sung utterances: an unheightened stem without note-head (used to indicate the rhythm of the singer's declamation); an ‘X’ note-head with heightened stem (almost always accompanied by the performance instructions ‘gesprochen’ and/or ‘tonlos’); and, lastly, a diamond note-head with heightened stem (reserved mostly for passages containing expressive, disjunct intervals). See Act III scene 3 (bars 113–32) and Act I scene 5 (bars 132–5) for examples of all three types of notation.
70 This account might bring to mind the story of how Manuel García once allegedly threatened to kill Maria Malibran on stage if her performance of Desdemona in Rossini's Otello did not satisfy him. See Fitzlyon, April, Maria Malibran: Diva of the Romantic Age (London, 1987), 38–41Google Scholar , and Catherine Clément, Opera, or, The Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis, 1988), 11.
71 The orchestral melody in bars 104–5 of Ex. 8 bears a striking resemblance to the ‘Renunciation (of Love)’ leitmotif from Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen (a work with which Korngold was certainly familiar). This melody also occurs during Marietta and Paul's earlier performance of the ‘Lautenlied’, but its potential significance seems to change between Act I and Act III. Whereas in the duet, the reference might signal Paul's deplorable renunciation of Marie for Marietta, its appearance in the final scene ostensibly connotes his renunciation of – that is, release from – his unhealthy fixation with his deceased wife.
72 The beguiling power of the ‘Lautenlied’ in Act I is described by Marietta herself, who, upon the conclusion of the duet, says to Paul: ‘Das dumme Lied, es hat Sie ganz verzaubert’ (This silly song, it has quite bewitched you).
73 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, 2003), 11.
74 Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004), 517Google Scholar .
75 Levin, David J., Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (Chicago and London, 2007), 207CrossRefGoogle Scholar , emphasis in original. A nuanced study of intersections between historical, political, aesthetic and philological factors in approaches to ‘informed’ operatic dramaturgy can be found in Gundula Kreuzer, ‘Voices from Beyond: Verdi's Don Carlos and the Modern Stage’, this journal, 18 (2006), 151–79.
76 Levin, Unsettling Opera, 206–7.
77 Abbate acknowledges that her portrayal of music as something that needs to be critically ‘freed’ invokes a discourse that seems to ‘anthropomorphise musical works, making them into living things toward which we must develop an ethical position’ (‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’, 517). She then disclaims: ‘They are not, of course, but the way we cope with them may reflect choices about how to cope with real human others or how not to’ (ibid.). For more on the ethics of musical hermeneutics, see Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton, 2001), vii–xvi. Richard Taruskin has likewise criticised the ‘fallacy of reification’ with regard to the ‘pseudo-ethics’ of historically informed performance practices, which are ‘born of a misplaced sense of obligation’ – that is, to ‘the ancient dead … an inanimate object or an abstract idea’ rather than to living human beings (Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance [New York, 1995], 24).
78 See Giger, Andreas, ‘Tradition in Post World-War-I Vienna: The Role of the Vienna State Opera from 1919–1924’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 28 (1997), 189–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar (esp. 197–8); Giger, ‘A Matter of Principle’, 547–9; and Marc A. Weiner, Undertones of Insurrection: Music, Politics & the Social Sphere in the Modern German Narrative (Lincoln, NB, 1993), 191 and 237ff.
79 At the beginning of Act II in this production, Paul ends up killing Frank (an action not prescribed by the libretto) instead of simply arguing with him. Levant explains that Paul does so because ‘Frank is the person who tries to open Paul's eyes to see the reality which Paul doesn't want to see’ (interview with author [9 December 2007]).
80 Levant, interview with author (9 December 2007).
81 Levant.
82 Biographer Jessica Duchen makes a similar interpretive move in describing the ‘heartfelt nostalgia’ of the ‘Pierrot Lied’ as ‘only too close to Korngold's own developing sentiments’ and speculating as to how Korngold could be ‘prey to nostalgia at the age of barely twenty’ (Erich Wolfgang Korngold, 76). Duchen goes on to suggest that Korngold was ‘mourning, with his contemporaries, the passing of an era … [or longing] for the comparative ease of his childhood’ (ibid.).
83 Along similar lines, Maynard Solomon has pointed to aspects of Mozart's Wunderkind image that implied ‘a channel between childhood and creativity that early Romantic aestheticians found irresistible … Other purveyors of the Mozart-as-child myth viewed him not only as a child but as a simpleton or, to put it more kindly, a divine vessel’ (Mozart: A Life, 14).
84 For reflexive notes on the politics of reading opera politically, see Winkler, Amanda Eubanks, ‘“O ravishing delight”: The Politics of Pleasure in The Judgment of Paris’, this journal, 15 (2003), 15–31Google Scholar (esp. 15–6), and Hume, Robert D., ‘The Politics of Opera in Late Seventeenth-Century London’, this journal, 10 (1998), 15–43Google Scholar (esp. 28–35).