Classical review: Die Tote Stadt

Published on Wednesday 4 February 2009 19:15

DIE TOTE STADT ROYAL OPERA HOUSE, LONDON

IT'S a rare thing for the house band at Covent Garden to strike up with a totally new sound, but that's what happens when the overture begins to Die tote Stadt.

What we hear is vintage Hollywood: this is appropriate, since its composer Erich Korngold, as provider of the sound for a string of golden oldies starring Errol Flynn et al, was a founding father of film music. But if he was known in the 1920s as "the Viennese Puccini", two other composers are to be heard even more clearly as background presences here: the textures are as intricate and luxurious as those of Richard Strauss, and in the music for the leading role I so much Wagner that you feel the 23-year-old Korngold must have swallowed him whole.

Die tote Stadt – "The dead city" – was a smash-hit in 1920s Europe, but it has only now surfaced at Covent Garden, in a production by Willy Decker that does a signal honour to its Freudian plot.

Paul lives as a recluse in a trance-like state, surrounded by mementos of his dead wife Marie. Marietta, an actress uncannily resembling her, walks into this enclosed world, and induces him to hallucinate a resurrection, an erotic consummation, and a murder: pulling himself back from the brink of madness, Paul at last understands that life must go on.

The lighting and designs brilliantly evoke that madness, with nuns and Pierrots cavorting on a stage-within-a-stage; Gerald Finley (as Paul's confidant) and Nadja Michael (as Marietta) powerfully complement Stephen Gould's heroic performance as Paul himself.

And if much of the evening feels more like a "jeu" than a lived drama, the gorgeously-sung final scene both redeems and justifies the whole enterprise.