Philip and Goerke soar in BSO’s triumphant “Die tote Stadt”

Christine Goerke and David Butt Philip performed in Korngold’s Die tote Stadt with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and conductor Andris Nelsons. Photo: Hilary Scott, courtesy of the BSO
There’s madness in love and, as Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt reminds, there’s madness in death, too. On Thursday night, the Boston Symphony Orchestra brought the composer’s operatic study of love, loss, and acceptance to town for just its second local presentation (Odyssey Opera gave the work its stirring regional premiere in 2014). Andris Nelsons presided over an expanded orchestra, multiple choruses, and a bevy of soloists that packed the stage and filled the corridors of Symphony Hall.
Based on Georges Rodenbach’s 1892 novel Bruges-la-morte, Korngold’s score sets a libretto by his father, the critic Julius Korngold (who was writing under the pseudonym Paul Schrott). Its plot follows a widower, Paul, and his fixation on his dead wife, Marie. When Marietta, a woman bearing a strong likeness to the deceased, enters Paul’s life, things go from bad to worse: at the climax of Act 3, Paul strangles Marietta with a braid of Marie’s hair, kept in a shrine to the latter’s memory.
Then follows a theatrical reveal that anticipates Korngold’s later career in Hollywood: Paul hasn’t actually murdered Marietta. Instead, Act 2 and the first half of Act 3 have been a nightmarish reverie. Marie is still dead, but Paul, having through the madness of the dream purged his demons, wakes up finally able to let go of the past, look to the future, and get on with living.
Premiered simultaneously in Hamburg and Cologne in 1920, Die tote Stadt certainly justified the lofty praise heaped on Korngold in childhood—Gustav Mahler christened him a genius at age 12; a year later, Richard Strauss offered that “compared with this child we are all impoverished.” At the same time, the effort proved timely, giving voice to the social and psychological anxieties of post-Great War European society.
Especially given the sumptuous, Technicolor wonders of the score, its popularity comes as no surprise. Though its huge orchestra and late-Romantic harmonic palette were light years removed from contemporaneous efforts by Stravinsky and Bartók, Korngold’s writing certainly grasped what Strauss and Giacomo Puccini had been up to over the first two decades of the 20th century.
Echoes of Madama Butterfly and Tosca, reminiscences of Salome and Der Rosenkavalier—not to mention Josephslegende, Eine Alpensinfonie, and Die Frau ohne Schatten—permeate the younger composer’s idiom. Yet the lilt of Die tote Stadt’s waltzes, the turns of its melodic phrases, the confidence of its command of musical space and gesture, as well as its diaphanous handling of the orchestra are entirely Korngold’s.
So, despite its Wagnerian demands, is the vocal writing.
The role of Paul, for instance, stands as one of the most challenging in the canon. However, on Thursday, tenor David Butt Philip made child’s play of its high-lying terrors. Filling in for the indisposed Brandon Jovanovich, Philip brought laser focus and a full-bodied sonority to the part.
At no point did he push or strain himself, instead floating his lines over the big orchestra with seeming effortlessness. In the process, Philip displayed a striking evenness of projection, tone, and strength across his range. So fit was his account, in fact, that, once the heartbreaking reprise of the aria, “Glück, das mir verblieb,” rolled around at the end of Act 3, the tenor sounded like he could go back to page one and sing the whole opera again.
So did Philip’s opposite number, soprano Christine Goerke. Making her role debut as Marietta (who also has a cameo as a vision of the doomed Marie in Act 1), the soprano brought warmth and power to the part, though it took a little while for her to settle into a groove. Nevertheless, Goerke’s scenes with Philip evinced real chemistry. Their furious reconciliation episode in Act 2 burned hot, as did the opera’s tragic denouement.
In other settings, Goerke was clearly the star, both in ensembles—she shined with Marietta’s theater troupe in Act 2—and alone. Despite the opera’s 150-minute duration, her character’s Act 3 confrontation with Marie’s portrait (“Dich such ich, Bild!”) made one wish that Korngold and his father had concocted a couple more numbers for the role, if only for Thursday night’s performance.
Meanwhile, mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill brought bronzy resonance to the part of Brigitta. Baritone Elliott Madore began strongly as Paul’s friend, Frank, though his voice showed wear as the evening proceeded. Even so, his brief appearance as the actor Fritz resulted in an elegant rendition of “Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen.”
Among the coterie that formed Marietta’s gang of bohemians, Joshua Sanders stood out for the Italianate warmth of his Victorin. Also, Neil Ferreira’s Gaston managed some nimble choreography in his Act 2 appearances.
A trio of choruses—the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Boston Lyric Opera Chorus, and Boys of the St. Paul’s Choir School—delivered their latter-act scenes with surety. The boys group, in particular, brought enchanting purity to their exposed spots during the Act 3 processional, which were sung from Symphony Hall’s first floor lobby.
Undergirding the whole shebang were Nelsons and the BSO, who were still clearly flying high from the triumphs of their recent Beethoven symphony cycle.
While the usual challenges of opera-in-concert popped up—balances with singers were sometimes touchy, the 100+ players onstage meant that the quietest moments weren’t always soft enough, and some degree of detail in Korngold’s ferociously involved scoring got lost in transmission—the night’s performance blazed with more than the usual degree of color, nuance, and character. Tempos flowed naturally. Waltz rhythms snapped. Lyrical moments sang. Though the second-act prelude was texturally blunt, the introduction to Act 3 positively swaggered.
Even more striking were the instrumental transitions between each of the opera’s scenes. Here, the sheer invention of Korngold’s writing—his manipulations of sonority, instrumentation, and motives—was captivating and suggested a certain connection between Die tote Stadt and that other big triumph of Weimar-era opera, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck.
That one, though, ends in grim despair. Die tote Stadt, slathered as it is in Freudian symbolism, offers the promise of hope and, perhaps, an antidote to D. H. Lawrence’s famous image of the dreaming world of men that’s gone mad in its sleep.
Nothing’s guaranteed: “I want to try” to move on, Paul says near the opera’s end. Still, on the merits of Thursday’s grand and glorious traversal, one could be forgiven for wanting to believe that our deranged world could, any morning, wake up and simply come to its senses. Such is the power of art—“magic delivered from the lie of being truth,” as Adorno put it—when it’s done right.
The program will be repeated 8 p.m. Saturday at Symphony Hall. bso.org
Posted in Performances
Posted Jan 31, 2025 at 7:00 pm by James R Berg
One can only hope that the Metropolitan Opera gets the message to produce and revive this fabulous Opera. Congratulations to the BSO for having the guts and also the artistic foresight to produce this magnificent KORNGOLD treasure.