“Die tote Stadt” (The Dead City)

By Erich Korngold, directed by Bruce Beresford for opera Australia,

At Sydney Opera House, until July 18. Sung in German with English surtitles. 

reviewed by Helen Musa

FIRST of all, make no mistake about it; this was a rare opportunity to see an opera by Eric Korngold, even if in so short a season. With principals Stefan Vinke and Cheryl Barker as the two protagonists and the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra augmented so that it had to be removed to the nearby Studio and transmitted through to the Opera Theatre, this was a night of dazzling music.

Vinke’s powerful and flexible tenor propelled the plot through an evening of nightmare and pessimism to his reluctant acceptance of life, while Barker, in a dream of a role, showed us the contrast between the living and the dead, running the gamut from the sternly dead wife to the vibrant and mischievous dancer, Mariette. Among the key musical moments were the lute song in Act I, reprised toward the end, and a mock-passion-filled aria by José Carbó as Fritz/Pierrot in Act II.

Having acknowledged the fine music, it was the worst production I have seen from Opera Australia in a long time. The responsibility for this must lie squarely with director Bruce Beresford who, opera lover though he undoubtedly is, must have forgotten that theatre is a different medium from film and that no end of elaborate film footage projected can substitute for live action.

We discover in the final scene that the nightmarish action of the plot was that dramaturgical cop-out, a nightmare, Seemingly unfamiliar with the principles of German/Belgian symbolist staging in which this opera is rooted, Beresford lacked a serious commitment to the nightmare mode.

What we got instead was a grab-bag of visual ideas — moving clouds, projected photographs of huge roses falling then inexplicably rising and later morphing awkwardly into three-dimensional roses that had to be cleaned up. Behind the action we saw projections backgrounding the morbidly-obsessed protagonist Paul and slide-scapes of Bruges, depicted by Korngold as stagnant, boring and dead.

Had Beresford never heard of theatrical upstaging? Not only is it impossible for live actors to compete with screen images, but upstaging means just that—attention is focused upstage on to the screen, not into the action of the opera.

The mise en scene downstage hardly fares better, with wardrobes from which the face of Paul’s dead wife stares and an interior staircase that turns into a canal bridge decorated with neon lights. Good idea, but tastelessly executed.

As if to suggest that it was all a dream (does dream equal tinsel?), the whitened tinsel costumes for the Act II revelers suggested less a sexually-charged eruption of life than Christmas decorations. Mariette’s scene in Meyerbeer’s “Robert Le Diable” was similarly tacky, like a pantomime version of the damnation scene from “Faust.”

As for the religious processional scene as the ancients of Flanders move right into the set, the bitsy costuming and staging related poorly to the music, to which they would normally form the background. Just because it’s symbolic, it doesn’t mean you can forsake credibility.

Beresford needed to pay serious attention to the question of style if he wanted to show us the inner working of an obsessed personality devoted to this wife’s memory.

In the end, unconvinced by the muttering I heard around me about the Freudian symbolism (sex and death) I was left with the feeling that the subject matter, so lightly treated, was unworthy of the magnificence of Korngold’s music.