THE NEWYORKER, AUGUST 19, 2019 67
formed in 1927, met an unhappier fate.
Although the initial response was strong,
the composer’s Art Nouveau aesthetic
came to seem dated amid the rapidly
moving trends of the twenties: twelve-
tone music, Stravinskyan neoclassicism,
the music theatre of Kurt Weill. Julius
Korngold, the composer’s father, did
not help matters by waging an obnox-
ious campaign against Ernst Krenek’s
jazz-inflected opera “Jonny Spielt Auf,”
which made the rounds in the same pe-
riod. Performances of “Das Wunder” in
Berlin aroused a savage press reaction.
Korngold completed only one more
opera—the entrancing but dramatically
weak “Die Kathrin,” from 1937.
Korngold was Jewish, and the Nazi
takeover of Austria forced him into exile.
He had begun establishing himself in
Hollywood as early as 1934, and there-
fore never faced the economic struggles
that other émigrés encountered. Still,
his vitality as a film composer, evident
in such Errol Flynn swashbucklers as
“The Adventures of Robin Hood” and
“The Sea Hawk,” damaged his reputa-
tion as a “serious” talent. After the Sec-
ond World War, when Korngold at-
tempted to resume his concert career,
he was deemed hopelessly retrograde
by the modernist standards of the day.
He died young, at the age of sixty, in
- Only in the nineteen-seventies
did interest in his work reawaken—in
part because John Williams paid hom-
age to him in the main-title theme of
“Star Wars,” a magnificently Korngold-
esque invention.
I
got to know “Das Wunder der He-
liane” through a 1993 recording on
the Decca label—part of an invaluable
series, called Entartete Musik, or De-
generate Music, honoring composers
who suffered under the Nazis. My ini-
tial sense was of a ravishing score that
had little chance of finding a place in
the modern repertory. The libretto, by
Hans Müller, is based on a 1917 play by
the Austrian dramatist Hans Kaltneker,
who specialized in Expressionist mys-
ticism. The Ruler, a harsh governor of
an unnamed realm, is confronted by the
charismatic, Christlike Stranger, who
enters into an ambiguous relationship
with the Ruler’s wife, Heliane. The mir-
acle of the title consists of Heliane bring-
ing about the resurrection of the Stranger,
who has killed himself in an effort to
save her from accusations of adultery.
Love wins out in the end, to put it briefly.
At Bard, the director Christian Räth
and the designer Esther Bialas dealt
with the overwrought libretto by trans-
planting the action to a vaguely futur-
istic, dystopian setting. Steel-gray tones
predominate; the judges of the Ruler’s
kingdom wear Inquisitorial scarlet robes,
and the Stranger is dressed in an or-
ange jumpsuit as he undergoes interro-
gation. Botstein, conducting the Amer-
ican Symphony, reined in the ecstatic
excesses of Korngold’s orchestration, es-
tablishing a more sober, clear-cut sound.
The result was a surprisingly stage-wor-
thy parable of totalitarian oppression
and spiritual resistance.
The Lithuanian soprano Aušrinė
Stundytė, a rising star in Europe, sang
the role of Heliane. Although she lacks
an ideal shining timbre, she is a pierc-
ingly expressive singer-actor who kept
the audience engaged in Heliane’s ob-
scure predicament. Daniel Brenna, as the
Stranger, struggled with the lyrical as-
pects of Korngold’s writing but deliv-
ered the part with vigor. Alfred Walker
brought a rugged Wagnerian sound to
the Ruler, suggesting that agony lay be-
hind the character’s imperious poses. The
young bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee
stood out in the smaller role of the Por-
ter, filling the auditorium with a hand-
some mahogany tone. On the 1993 re-
cording, this part was sung by the young
René Pape; a similarly starry future may
be in store for Brownlee.
The Bard festival, entitled “Korngold
and His World,” includes a semi-staged
rendition of “Die Tote Stadt,” a survey
of the composer’s chamber music, a sam-
pling of his film scores, and a performance
of his Symphony in F-Sharp, which he
completed in 1952. The symphony piv-
ots on an Adagio of almost shocking
tragic power—a funeral rite for the de-
stroyed world of the composer’s youth.
In that movement, Korngold quotes from
his scores for “The Private Lives of Eliz-
abeth and Essex,” “Captain Blood,” and
“Anthony Adverse,” but he alters the ma-
terial almost beyond recognition, as if to
demonstrate that the Hollywood stereo-
type cannot confine him. Out of the stuff
of film music, he fashions what may be
the last great symphony in the German
Romantic tradition.
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