ENO’s artistic director Annilese Miskimmon’s new production of The Dead City (Die Tote Stadt), conducted by Kirill Karabits, marks the first time Korngold’s opera has entered the company’s repertory. A study of loss, grief and renewal, the work struck deep chords in post-war Europe and the US after its simultaneous world premieres in Hamburg and Cologne in 1920, when its lionised wunderkind composer was only 23. Hearing it post-pandemic inevitably heightens our awareness of its beauty, trauma and sadness.
ENO has by and large done it proud, though Miskimmon doesn’t always ideally capture its twists and ambivalences. Based on Georges Rodenbach’s 1892 novel Bruges-la-Morte, which also preempts Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the opera depicts the widower Paul’s attempts to make over the sexually assertive Marietta in the image of his saintly wife Marie, to whose memory he has turned his house into a shrine. The narrative of murderous passion that follows is revealed to be an almost therapeutic figment of Paul’s imagination that enables him to move on from his grief. Miskimmon, however, makes us aware from the outset that what he is experiencing is a hallucination, and some of the tensions and ambiguities slip in the process.
