Word: korngold
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Sound familiar? There are suggestions of Brunnhilde's dilemma here, and certainly Lohengrin's. These similarities would not much matter if the music had independent life. Instead, the score is a shameless pastiche, something that Erich Korngold, the peerless artificer of movie music, would have deeply appreciated. Wagner (including an outright steal of Tristan's theme for Roland), Meyerbeer, Offenbach, all emerge from the pit. The vocal music is lifted mostly from Berlioz, who wrote wonderfully sensuous love duets. The pity is that in Manon, Massenet created an ineffable erotic style...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...