VERTIGINOUS:

When Erich Wolfgang Korngold completed his third opera, Die tote Stadt, in August 1920, he'd barely turned 23. Yet such was his reputation that what followed was practically a Europe-wide bidding war for rights to the première. The young composer had his pick of companies and conductors (the Vienna State Opera tried and failed). In the end - almost unprecedentedly - Die tote Stadt was launched on the same night in two cities simultaneously. Audiences in Hamburg and Cologne both erupted into applause, but Korngold, who could be in only one place, had chosen Hamburg - where he was so dazed by the response that Richard Strauss, who was present in the audience, had to remind him to go up and take his bow.

With Die tote Stadt, big moments always seem to come in twos. The opera's story revolves around a double: the plot starts from the moment when a grieving young widower, Paul, encounters a woman who precisely resembles his dead wife, Marie. He finds a mirror of his pain in Bruges, the 'dead city' of the opera's title - not today's tourist honeypot, but the decaying port of the late 19th century, a bell-haunted ghost-city of empty streets and shimmering canals (think Don't Look Now). [...]

So the stars seem to be aligning for Die tote Stadt, though a puritanical few will probably continue to ask if it's really worth all this effort for an opera that's still occasionally dismissed as kitsch. The sheer spectacle - physical and sonic - of this one-time blockbuster can feel overwhelming. But in the end, that bejewelled sound is not what you take away from Die tote Stadt. Fundamentally, it's a tale of longing, loss and profound grief, expressed - by some miraculous paradox of art - through the surging, rapturous colours that came as naturally as breathing to a 22-year-old genius who sensed that he was writing his masterpiece. At the end of it, you've had every auditory faculty comprehensively ravished, and yet what lingers is an aching sadness. 'I think most of us have experienced a split-up from a past partner, and found it very difficult to leave them behind,' says Auty. 'There's an idea in the opera that someone who dies, dies twice. They die in reality; and then they start dying in your memory.'

How a comfortably off Viennese wunderkind like Korngold - even one who'd just lived through the first world war and the death of old Europe - had access to emotions that he could never possibly have experienced at first hand is still hard to explain in rational terms. But those emotions are certainly present in Die tote Stadt. 

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