‘I’ve been a bit obsessed with it for a long time,” says Annilese Miskimmon of the opera she’s rehearsing in the studio downstairs. Her words are appropriate: if there has ever been an opera about obsession, then Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City) is it. The opera, completed in 1920 and steeped in the communal sense of loss after the first world war, tells the story of a bereaved husband finally coming to terms with his wife’s death through a hallucinatory experience, after a chance encounter with her doppelganger. Or, as Miskimmon more punchily describes it, “a subconscious psychological thriller about a man who’s in a love triangle with a fantasy sex goddess and his dead wife”.
It’s quite a synopsis. Yet it’s the equally heady music that drew her to stage the work for her second production as artistic director of English National Opera – a welcome distraction, one imagines, from the current uncertainty over the company’s future, of which more later. Die Tote Stadt was an early hit for Korngold, completed when he was 23; the composer, who was Jewish, would later flee Vienna and find a home in the US, where his sumptuous film scores defined the sound of Hollywood movies for decades to come. The opera was banned by the Nazis yet has made its way back to the edge of the repertoire on mainland Europe and in the US. Still, it waited until 2009 for its first and so far only staging in the UK, at the Royal Opera. “I really wanted to hear our orchestra play it,” says Miskimmon. “It fills the Coliseum in such a way that we can really indulge the sound.”
