◎ Yi II
On 24 February 2022, the Hong Kong Arts Festival, which celebrates its 50th anniversary, presented Erich Korngold's opera Die tote stadt, conducted by Petrenko at the Bavarian State Opera.
Because of the epidemic, the performance had to be changed to an online format, broadcasting on the official website of the Hong Kong Arts Festival from February 24 to March 3, and was not limited to the local network address in Hong Kong, giving the originally unfamiliar Korengold and his "Dead City" a chance to fall from the sky to the eyes.
Even among many so-called veteran lovers of opera, Korengold is rarely heard of, or even completely confused, and as for those who have listened carefully to his opera works, I am afraid that it is even rarer. Music professionals aside, among Chinese classical music lovers, there is not much understanding of modern and contemporary works, and even the famous Schoenberg, Webern, and Berger often stay at the entry stage, let alone Korengold?
Paul Henry Lang's magnum opus, Music in Western Civilization, is a word from beginning to end for Korngold, and Norton's Music of the Twentieth Century in Norton's Musical History completely ignores Korengold's existence. For nearly half a century, when Coengold moved to the United States in the 1930s, he disappeared as a serious composer into the hustle and bustle of the 20th century.
In fact, until the rise of performances and studies of Coengold's works in the 1990s, he existed as a successful film composer. Some film music enthusiasts know more about Korngold, after all, his film score has brought him a greater reputation than traditional classical music, such as "The Prince and the Poor Child", "The Adventures of Robin Hood", "Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex", etc. Coengold became a Hollywood composer and became part of Hollywood's golden age memory.
All this makes the "Dead City" of this Hong Kong Arts Festival particularly rare.
From the "center of the universe" of music in Vienna
The first feeling of "Dead City" is that it is rich and good, the style is rich to the extent of refutation, and the moving melody is constantly surging and unexpected, and even it is not too much to say that it is wasteful. The last master to splurge on melodies might have been Lao Chai, and further on that was Mozart. Korengold, who had a reputation as a prodigy since childhood, was indeed compared to Mozart by his contemporaries: all of them were precocious, and at a young age they achieved great success at the Viennese court, and even had an authoritarian and domineering father who never came out of his shadow all his life, such a father was both the leader of his son's musical genius, the controller of the rough life of a genius teenager and even a gravedigger.
It is difficult to summarize The musical style of Korengold, who is in the most dynamic center of European music, it is difficult to say whether it is the best Vienna, but it must be an incomparably rich Vienna, and the figures of countless predecessors are still among the streets and salons of Vienna, where the 20th-century Art Nouveau style is also showing its most lively creativity.
But the young Korengold clearly didn't like mavericks and novelty, and he seemed more than happy to pay homage to the great musical traditions in which he was immersed. In Dead City you can hear Verdi, you can hear Richard Strauss, you can hear Mahler, Puccini, and even Johann Strauss Jr. You could say he lacks an obvious personal style, says he's eclectic, says he's too diverse, but definitely can't deny his richness and good-sounding.
Korngold's music is like a kaleidoscope, throwing all the elements he thinks is beautiful, and then letting them flip and transform themselves, presenting a reasonable and unexpectedly beautiful appearance. All kinds of seemingly fragmented light and strangeness naturally present rules and order in the kaleidoscope.
Unlike its contemporaries, Dead City doesn't have a funky twelve-tone sequence, nor can it hear the big dynamics and discord of horror, and Korngold is clearly not interested in Stravinsky's deliberate offense to tradition. Dead City is melodious for most of the time, with all the melodies catchy, and many passages even almost slipping to the point of "slipping through the mouth". Even in the most tense parts of the dramatic tension and inner conflict, Brookner-style introspection and restraint are maintained. More than a decade later, Coengold was able to ride in Hollywood, probably because of this ability to be rich and delicate in the sweetness of a pastoral nocturne, just in line with the youthful Menglang of American society at that time and the social aesthetics that were never impatient and difficult.
Even the roses in the room were taken with them
But Coengold is by no means a vulgar sweet man who writes about fashion minor skewers, and Dead City has its own depth. Only then was the excavation and re-arrangement and performance of Coengold's works, which began to become a climate in the late last century, just as the people of the 20th century seemed to rediscover Mahler, and Mendelssohn re-presented Bach to the people of Leipzig.
The story of Dead City is not complicated. In the belgian town of Bruges, a middle-aged man Paul has been unable to get out of the pain of bereavement after the death of his wife Mary, and all the furnishings in the home have maintained the layout of his wife's lifetime. Paul kept the blond hair of his deceased wife almost reverently, a relic-like presence for Paul, holy, unique and unspeakable. The room where the hair is placed is the holy place of Paul's heart.
Such a dull and immutable life changed with the appearance of the dancer Marianta. The young Mariantha is enthusiastic and lively, full of curiosity and anticipation for the world, and is the focus of everyone's attention. Most importantly, her appearance resembles that of her deceased wife Mary, and even the name Marianta has a certain wonderful correspondence with Mary. Overjoyed, Paul almost resurrected Marianta as if she were a dead wife, and as Marianta entered Paul's life, everything seemed to return to the way Mary was when she was alive.
One day, paul found Marianta dancing wildly in the house with her dead wife's blonde hair, and Paul rushed up to stop Marianta and, in surprise and anger, strangled Marianta to death on the bed with her blonde hair. Frightened and tired, Paul then fell into a deep sleep and woke up to find that the bed was empty, and Marianta, who was supposed to have died in bed, was gone. Just when Paul couldn't tell whether what had just happened was reality or a dream, Marianta walked in, which was just a dream of Paul. But Marianta has decided to leave Paul because she realizes that she is just a shadow, and Paul is still living in a dead city with his dead wife...
On the surface, Dead City tells a clichéd story: addiction, seduction, and redemption. But things are obviously not so simple, And the luck and misfortune of Coengold and Dead City lie in his origins and era. "Dead City" was first performed in 1920, when Korngold was 23 years old, but he was already an "old composer" on the European continent, a recognized prodigy in the European music industry, 10 years after the 13-year-old Korengold's work "Snowman" caused a sensation at the Vienna Court Opera, but just by the name of the prodigy, it is obvious that the grandeur of "Dead City" premiered in Hamburg and Cologne on the same day.
When "Dead City" first appeared, the world had just experienced the First World War, which was the first catastrophe-level collective madness and mutual slaughter of capitalist civilization in human history, and Europe, which prides itself on the center of civilization, has become an unprecedented slaughterhouse for the first time.
If Nietzsche's previous cry of "God is dead" was still seen as a mad demon in the bookstore, the sound of gunfire and dripping blood in reality taught Europeans a lesson: everything that could be trusted and relied on before was shattered in an instant, and where and how to establish a new trust and dependence was still completely directionless.
Although the history that followed gave Europeans a brief glimpse of sunshine, Europe between the two world wars did experience a dream-like prosperity that lasted until the outbreak of World War II, until the intensification of barbarism completely sank the Zweigs' Europe.
But Europe at the time of the premiere of "Dead City", even if it has not seen such a return to the light, has just experienced the Paris Peace Conference, and is still immersed in the boundless sadness and disillusionment after the war. Therefore, the motif of addiction, seduction and redemption, which has been told countless times since the Middle Ages, has a more complex meaning.
The first thing the audience sees is a man who can never get out of the shadow of his dead wife, so that a woman who loves her finally sees the truth and despairs. However, the deep love for the deceased wife cannot be touched at all, only to see how the shadow of the undead wanders in this world, everywhere and cannot be shaken off.
Further, in paul and Marianta's tugging, we see the repeated entanglements between human reason and even divinity and instinctive nature and ultimately the inability to be liberated. The life and desire of the young woman who overflowed the stage with Mariantta's body at one point almost became Paul's hope and her departure from the dead city, but the end result was that Marianta not only left Paul, but even the roses in the room were taken with her.
Mariantha and her troupe partners may represent the unfettered nature of art and humanity, while Paul and the choir that appears in act III, and the uniform crowd in the city of Bruges, may be the opposite of art and nature, the reason, the rules, and order. The conflict between the two is not tense, but from the first act, it has grown darkly, "like the fire of the earth running underground", and it has not been resolved until the end.
But such repeated questioning may just confirm the entanglement and wandering of Europe 100 years ago, and a great work must be able to withstand repetition and stripping away the cocoon.
It kicked off a hundred years ago
Describing "Dead City" as great may arouse some disdain, but the story itself alone can already see Coengold's precociousness and ambition. The story is based on a Belgian novel called Bruges in the City of the Dead, and the script is the pseudonymous masterpiece of Coengold's ubiquitous dad. Although Coengold was in the shadow of his father all his life, he had to admit that this was really a script that was very suitable for Korngold.
Like all Europeans, Coengold in 1920 experienced and witnessed the tearing of the European continent and European civilization. As a sensitive and precocious genius, he could even foresee the fleeting boom between World War I and World War II that followed, but he could better smell the unresolved collapse and uneasiness that followed. Just as Paul finally couldn't get rid of his dead wife's long hair, Marianta, who was redeemed and hopeful, was disillusioned.
Coengold, who left Europe, like Paul, who lost Mary, died five months after his 60th birthday, and the last photo of his life appeared old. His mother and wife went with him for the next year or two, reminding me of Zweig, who committed suicide in South America, to bid farewell to the fabled glory of yesteryear and the grace of an old man who could only become sad.
The 2019 edition of the Bavarian State Opera, performed at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, is considered the most successful "Dead City" of the new century. The portrayal of the male and female protagonists makes the opera not only listenable, but also watchable; the stage design and stage scheduling are also new, bringing a 100-year-old story naturally to the 21st century audience, Marianta's lute in the living room is replaced by karaoke, and around Mary's long hair, paul plasters a photo of Mary's Polaroid plastered throughout the room.
The "Dead City" performance on the official website of the Hong Kong Arts Festival has stopped broadcasting, but fortunately, more versions and more resources are not difficult to find. We live in an era when information is so developed and convenient, too many things are very worthwhile, because it is too easy to obtain and become suspicious and ambiguous, and the result is to waste more time on things that are not worth it.
Life is really fair, holding a sharp blade, and it is easier to cut yourself. It's a two-and-a-half-hour show worth focusing on; it's the prelude that Coengold kicked off 100 years ago for today. Photography by Wilfried Hosl