Opera News (2014) - Out of the Shadows
Details
- magazine article: Out of the Shadows
- author(s): Eric Myers
- journal: Opera News (01/Mar/2014)
- issue: volume 78, issue 9, page 20
- journal ISSN: 0030-3607
- publisher: Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc
- keywords: "Vertigo" - by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Academy Awards, Alfred Hitchcock, Bernard Herrmann, Composers, Criticism and interpretation, Daphne du Maurier, Edith Head, Filmmakers, James Stewart, Judith Anderson, Kim Novak, Motion picture directors & producers, Musicians & conductors, Nazi era, New York City, New York, Opera, Pierre Boileau, Rear Window (1954), Rebecca (1940), San Francisco, California, Singers, Thomas Narcejac, To Catch a Thief (1955), Vertigo (1958)
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Abstract
Two important revivals of Die Tote Stadt in the 1970s and '80s - Frank Corearos at New York City Opera and Götz Friedrich's for Berlin's Deutsche Oper - as well as its first complete recording, were instrumental in restoring the opera's luster. For me, the character of Paul is much deeper and more interesting. [...]I was thinking it would be good to bring in this feeling of Hitchcock to give a deeper, more complex atmosphere of a man in obsession.
Article
Out of the Shadows
Korngold's Tote Stadt, being staged this month at Dallas Opera. has finally come into its own on the international opera stage. ERIC MYERS ponders its resemblance to another long-misunderstood work, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo
On December 4, 1920, Erich Wolfgang Korngold's third opera, Die Tote Stadt, was accorded rare treatment in the world of lyric theater -- a simultaneous, double premiere, with separate performances taking place in Cologne and Hamburg. Rapturously received, it went on to be staged to international acclaim throughout the 1920s, particularly in the German-speaking world, until such Jewish "degenerate" music was stamped out by the Third Reich.
Nearly forty years later, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo was released. Audiences were not entirely sure what to make of it, and the critical reaction was mixed. "One of the most fascinating love stories ever filmed," proclaimed The Hollywood Reporter, while Time magazine dismissed it as "another Hitchcock-and-bull story." Though not a box-office flop, it came nowhere near matching the receipts of Hitchcock's earlier 1950s hits Rear Window and To Catch a Thief, and the only Oscar nominations Vertigo received that year were for Art Direction and Sound.
Both of these masterworks needed time to be properly evaluated. Two important revivals of Die Tote Stadt in the 1970s and '80s -- Frank Corsaro's at New York City Opera and Götz Friedrich's for Berlin's Deutsche Oper -- as well as its first complete recording, were instrumental in restoring the opera's luster. And Vertigo, long kept unavailable for re-release by Hitchcock, was returned to public view in 1983. It is now deemed one of Hitchcock's greatest and most personal films; it has earned a pl...
