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Korngold s Tote Stddt being staged this month at Dallas Opera, has finally come into its own on the international opera stage. ERIC MYERS ponders its resemblance to another long-misunderstood work, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.
On December 4, 1920, Erich Wolfgang Komgold's third opera, Die Tote Stadt, was accorded rare treatment in the world of lyric theater - a simultaneous, double premiere, with separate performances taking place in Cologne and Hamburg. Rapturously received, it went on to be staged to international acclaim throughout the 1920s, particularly in the German-speaking world, until such Jewish "degenerate" music was stamped out by the Third Reich.
Nearly forty years later, Alfred Hitchcocks Vertigo was released. Audiences were not entirely sure what to make of it, and the critical reaction was mixed. "One of the most fascinating love stories ever filmed," proclaimed The Hollywood Reporter, while Time magazine dismissed it as "another Hitchcock-and-bull story." Though not a box-office flop, it came nowhere near matching the receipts of Hitchcocks earlier 1950s hits Rear Window and To Catch a Thief, and the only Oscar nominations Vertigo received that year were for Art Direction and Sound.
Both of these masterworks needed time to be properly evaluated. Two important revivals of Die Tote Stadt in the 1970s and '80s - Frank Corearos at New York City Opera and Götz Friedrich's for Berlin's Deutsche Oper - as well as its first complete recording, were instrumental in restoring the opera's luster. And Vertigo, long kept unavailable for re-release by Hitchock, was returned to public view in 1983. It is now deemed one of Hitchcock's greatest and most personal films; it has earned a place on the National Film Registry and turns up on many critics' lists of the ten best films of all time.
Vertigo and Die Tote Stadt, though separated by many decades, treat the same theme: a man, mourning the death of the woman he loved, finds himself ensnared and ultimately obsessed by a new woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to the dead one. Both works were based on novels that are practically forgotten today; both required a genius to give them lasting life.
It all leads back to the Belgian Symbolist author and poet Georges Rodenbach and his novella Bruges-la-morte, which attracted...