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Korngold, Die Tote Stadt: Soloists and chorus of San Francisco Opera, Donald Runnicles, conductor. War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, 2.10.2008 (HS)

Cast:

Paul: Torsten Kerl
Marie/Marietta: Emily Magee
Fritz, Frank: Lucas Meachem
Brigitta: Katharine Tier
Juliette: Ji Young Yang
Lucienne: Daniela Mack
Victorin: Alek Shrader
Count Albert: Andrew Bidlack
Gaston: Bryan Ketron
Paul's Double: Ben Bongers

Conductor: Donald Runnicles
Original Director: Willy Decker
Revival Director: Meisje Hummel
Production Designer: Wolfgang Gussmann
Lighting Designer: Wolfgang Göbbel


No doubt most of the audience at San Francisco Opera's production of Die Tote Stadt had heard Erich Korngold's music in 1930s and '40s films such as "Captain Blood," "Of Human Bondage" or "Deception" rather than this opera. Written in 1920, it came long before he arrived in America to show Hollywood composers how movie music should be done, but the earmarks of the Hollywood film score genre, as he defined it, are already there.

It's the music that matters in Die Tote Stadt, with its sweeping climaxes, broad gestures and Wagnerian leitmotifs. It's lush, hyper-Romantic stuff, most reminiscent of Richard Strauss, and it is by the far the best thing about this evening. A mishmash of Freudian angst, sex, death and obsession, the story might keep an audience of psychiatrists enthralled without the music. But the rest of us? Probably not.

The production, which tries too hard to embellish the story with symbolism, at least serves the music well by placing the singers inside a stage within a stage. This smaller box inside the proscenium helps project the singers' sound, of particular benefit to tenor Torsten Kerl, whose wiry voice needed all the help it could get to cut through Korngold's thick orchestrations. But Willy Decker, who directed Wolfgang Gussmann's original production in Salzburg, slathered on an overwrought style that had some of the audience tittering in disbelief.

One of the missteps required soprano Emily Magee to sing the entire final scene in a bald wig, a serious miscalculation because she twice quite prominently refers to her hair. Besides, she is supposed to be seducing the tenor, which beggars believability if the singer looks like Sinead O'Connor in white face. Another oops involved several rotating soft-sculpture houses that seemed to have escaped from a children's television program. They traverse the back of the stage in Act II. The original stage directions call for a row of homes along a canal to provide the backdrop for a flashback scene. It's a stretch.

Magee deployed a potent soprano and a strong stage presence as Marietta, the woman who so reminds Paul of his late wife, Marie, that he believes it is she reincarnated. Still mourning her years after his death, he lives in a room in Bruges, Belgium, that he has turned into a shrine to her. He fondles a reliquary that holds her hair. It becomes clear that he is mentally unhinged.

In the first scene, having invited the mystery woman to his home, she sweeps into his life, a dancer full of the vitality that he has been missing. Repulsed by his morbidity, she is fascinated enough to want to use her charms on him. They sing Marietta's Lied, one of several gorgeous tunes that drip just enough Viennese schmaltz to make things interesting without going completely over the top. The scene ends with a second smaller copy of the room materializing upstage with Marie (also sung by Magee) singing to Paul's double that he should starting living again.

In Act II, Paul goes to visit Marietta and her commedia dell'arte troupe as they rehearse a scene from Meyerbeer's Robert Le Diable, but Marietta makes it into a parody of death (complete with a slow-motion religious procession upstage). As a diversion, Fritz, the Pierrot, sings the bittersweet Tanzlied, the most beautiful and famous piece in the opera. Baritone Lucas Meacham sang it (and the role of Frank) with supple tone and impressive delicacy. Inspired, Marie redoubles her efforts to seduce Paul, and she succeeds. In this production, however, she tears off her wig as she approached him, which makes the seduction ironic instead of sexy.

In Act III, the scene continues. Put off by Paul's obsession with Marie, Marietta taunts him by putting Marie's hair on her head. Enraged, Paul uses the hair to strangle her to death. But it all turns out to be Paul's dream, a figment of his imagination, which after all that has come before seems like a copout. In the end, he learns that he must move on. If your eyes roll at this, mine did too. Fortunately, such failings of the drama are not shared by the music. Under conductor Donald Runnicles, the orchestra heated up the score with lush, idiomatic playing.

The dramatic gallimaufry notwithstanding, what made the evening work well were the treasures in this score, so expressively wrought by Runnicles and the orchestra. The performances by all the principals except for Kerl (and he wasn't bad, just a bit pinched) also made the stage goings-on of less import. On balance, it made for a more rewarding evening than lesser performances of Verdi, Puccini or, yes, Strauss.

Harvey Steiman

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